What is an ACBC training center 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 to the problems that people face.

And this week on the podcast I have with me, Jeremy Prey. He is the pastor of biblical counseling

at North Creek Church in Walnut Creek, California. He's an ACBC certified counselor. He's also

almost finished with his ACBC fellow candidacy, and I'm looking forward to him serving as a fellow.

In addition to overseeing North Creek, their robust counseling ministry, he also oversees various other adult ministries.

He spent 15 years in the construction industry as a project manager, but in 2017, he transitioned

from the marketplace to vocational ministry. He is a master of divinity from the master's seminary.

He's the author

of the ACBC booklet Infertility and Miscarriage. And he has been married to his lovely wife, Haley, since 2005, and they have four children. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. So grateful for you brother and the work that's happening up at North Creek. Good to see you today. You too, Dale. Thanks for having me.

Listen, today I want to talk about training centers, and I'll give a quick and brief background. Some people wonder, what does this mean? If you're not sort of on the inside of ACBC, people wonder, what does it mean that you're a training center? We have really three different types of training centers, training centers that are institutions, like the place where I teach at Midwestern or where you went to school at Masters. And then we also

have standalone counseling centers that have oversight from an ecclesiastical body, but they

operate sort of as a standalone parochurch ministry. And then we have, the majority of our training

centers are tightly woven

into local church. And that's the type of training center that you all have there. And you guys do

things like counseling, obviously, and training those who do counseling. You're responsible for

helping people get through phase one, two, and three in terms of our fundamentals and our

certification track. So I'm really grateful for the work that you do. I want to dive in a little bit today and talk specifically about where you lead at North Creek and just tell us some of the experiences that you guys have had. We have a lot of people who are always interested to know like how do we become a training center. And I think some of the things that you're going to describe today, just talking about how you guys became an ACBC training center and some of the things that you do would be helpful to people. So let me just start here. Tell us a little bit about how North Creek there in Walnut Creek, California, which is, if people don't know, it's right there outside of San Francisco, just to the east there, maybe slightly northeast. I'm not super great at geography,

but somewhere right there. And tell us how you guys became a training center with ACBC.

Yeah, near San Francisco, there actually are believers in this area.

Shocker, yes. To answer that question, I think it's probably most helpful to rewind back to

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