Why is the church a last resort on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Dale Johnson and you're listening to Truth in Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified

Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems

that people face.

This week on the podcast, I want us to address a topic that has been quite a burden of mine

for a while.

And as I think about the church, oftentimes what we see is that the church, for some reason, has become the last resort

that people go to in order to find help and hope for their problems, when in reality what

we should see in the Scriptures is that the church ought to be one of the primary places that

people go to whenever their lives, they experience brokenness

of some sort. And that burden is a huge burden of mine as I think about the culture at large.

I can remember being on staff at a local church, and my primary duty was to lead family ministry

and then also counseling ministry.

And along with that, I can recall on many, many occasions in the office that we as the pastors

were sometimes the last to know of problems that were going on in the lives of some of our

people.

And I was often, maybe at first as a pastor, a little bit hurt by that, that

there was not trust there between us, wondering what in the world was going on with the person

who was very faithful to our church and was coming consistently, but wondering, you know,

what's the aversion? Why do they not want to talk to us? Why did they not want to let us

know what was going on? And there could be a myriad of reasons is why something like that may be true.

But I also began to realize part of the reason, and maybe this is a primary reason, is the church in

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