Religious Liberty in the counseling room on this edition of Truth and Love.

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

where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people

face. We are getting very close to our annual conference, and with that annual conference,

where we will talk about destroying strongholds, we are also doing a pre-conference,

where this year we have chosen to focus on the topic of legal issues and biblical counseling.

I never dreamed when we set out to talk about this issue at our pre-conference that we would be in the scenario that we were in.

I mean, we plan these conferences 18 months minimum in advance, And never would I have foreseen where we are

now in our country dealing with the issues of the pandemic and questions, so many questions

that pastors have about obeying public officials and what we should do relative to governing

authorities and the questions that arise.

But it is a very relevant issue. And as we approach pastors dealing with how do we handle

government officials? I mean, what is the prudent thing for us to do? What we want to do at the

annual conference is to narrow that a bit bit to talk about dealing with legal issues,

dealing with the government, dealing with ruling authorities from a biblical perspective.

And then also think in relation to that responsibility, under God, what have we been called to do in relation to governing authorities?

Now, this question arose to me several years ago

as I began to think about pastors and how pastors are dealing with the issue of soul care in the

church. It seemed to me that there was this place of confusion, a place of a rift, of difficulty

in some ways. I remember being at one of my former positions,

and I was tasked to call several local pastors to just survey them, to ask them questions about

beginning a biblical counseling ministry. And in this list, we called hundreds and hundreds of pastors.

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