Gospel Centered Family Counseling

Pastors and counselors regularly minister to people whose marriages or families are in crisis. Tempers run high and feelings are brought low when a marriage is hurting or a family is in disarray. Pastors and counselors need practical, biblical help in order to connect their theological training to the reality of modern messy relationships. These how-to training manuals provide relevant, user-friendly equipping for pastors, counselors, lay leaders, educators, and students, enabling them to competently and compassionately relate God's Word to marriage and family life.

Pastors and counselors regularly minister to people whose marriages or families are in crisis. Tempers run high and feelings are brought low when a marriage is hurting or a family is in disarray. Pastors and counselors need practical, biblical help in order to connect their theological training to the reality of modern messy relationships. These how-to training manuals provide relevant, user-friendly equipping for pastors, counselors, lay leaders, educators, and students, enabling them to competently and compassionately relate God's Word to marriage and family life.

Everyone talks about the personal ministry of the Word, but how do we make one-another ministry truly biblical? Gospel-Centered Counseling equips readers to change lives with Christ’s changeless truth. It does so by examining life’s seven ultimate questions and then guiding readers on a journey that explores the biblical, gospel-centered narrative of: The Word: “What is truth?” “Where can I find answers?” The Trinity: “Who is God?” “Can I know Him personally?” Creation: “Who am I?” “What makes people tick?” Fall: “What went wrong?” “Why do we do the things we do?” Redemption: “Can I change?” “How do people change?” Glorification: “Where am I headed?” “How does our future destiny impact our present reality?” Sanctification: “How can I help?” “How can I change lives?" Bob Kellemen builds on the foundation of the written Word and provides a gospel-centered resource for understanding people, diagnosing problems, and prescribing biblically-based solutions. Gospel-Centered Counseling is the first volume in The Equipping Christian Counselors Series, a comprehensive relational training curriculum for the local church that provides a model for equipping God’s people to change lives with Christ’s changeless truth. This two-volume series weaves together comprehensive biblical insight with compassionate Christian engagement.

Help your clients gain access to the transformative grace of God through Christ! All too often, psychology and spirituality are kept in separate boxes, lessening the power of each to work effective changes. Christ-Centered Therapy: Empowering the Self brings together Christian faith with the Internal Family System (IFS) model. This widely accepted paradigm facilitates psychological healing by showing how the self can become the change agent for the dysfunctional internal system. Christ-centered IFS (CCIFS) combines the power of internal system therapy with the healing power of God for lasting change. Therapists with Christian clients, faith-based clients, or clients who need foundational grounding will benefit from the psychological and spiritual dimensions of Christ-Centered Therapy: Empowering the Self. This powerful therapeutic model posits a self surrounded by subpersonalities who carry anger, fear, distrust, and other negative responses. When the client’s self takes the leadership role, the self becomes the channel for Christ’s grace for all the subpersonalities. One by one they become empowered, center around self and God, and contribute their resources to the functioning of the whole personality. Christ-Centered Therapy: Empowering the Self provides exercises and visual aids to help both client and counselor, including: four tools to teach the self to lead effectively worksheets to serve as a structural and visual guide to understanding, developing, and using each tool a parts map for client and counselor to use collaboratively cartoons, structural diagrams, and dialogues to illustrate new concepts and procedures Each chapter of Christ-Centered Therapy: Empowering the Self provides specific help for the counselor, including: case studies showing step-by-step clinical interventions a content summary a clinical outline listing the interventions in sequence an exercise to help counselors discover their own inner and spiritual dynamics Christ-Centered Therapy: Empowering the Self brings together the diagnostic and restorative power of IFS with the transforming power of Christian spirituality. It is essential for Christian counselors and for non-Christian counselors who are seeking more effective ways to treat Christian clients.

How the gospel shapes the practical realities of everyday married life. Most of what the Bible has to say about marriage does not come flagged up under a heading of “marriage”. It’s not just the famous “marriage passages” that should shape a marriage, but the whole Bible-story of God’s good creation, humanity’s wicked rebellion and God’s gracious redemption. To understand why marriages struggle-as they all do-we need to understand the nature of our sin. To make marriages work, we need to understand how to apply the truth about God and his salvation. This study guide on Christian marriage focuses on how the gospel shapes the practical realities of everyday life. Author Tim Chester lifts the lid on many of the common pressure points that modern couples face, and shows how a proper understanding of the gospel can shape a response.

Where Is God? There are never quick fixes or easy answers when it comes to suffering. But even when we can't immediately see God's hand—when the struggle is hard and painful—he is working. Weaving together Scripture, personal stories, and the words of the classic hymn "How Firm a Foundation," David Powlison brings an experienced counselor's touch to exploring how God enters into our sufferings, helping us see God working in our own particular struggles—and discover how God's grace goes deeper than we could ever imagine.

Coming alongside struggling children can feel like an uphill battle. Counselors and parents mistakenly believe children somehow need different answers to life’s problems than adults need—but Christ is always the way. Children struggle with the same desires adults struggle with, are lured by the same lies adults fall prey to, and can find hope in the same source adults can find hope—in our Lord and Savior. In this manual for biblical counselors, men and women will learn how to help struggling children with the hope found in our Redeemer as presented in the Word of God. Caring for the Souls of Children equips counselors, parents, pastors, and anyone else who wants to love children with the hope of Jesus to boldly trust in the sufficiency of Scripture. Rather than relying on different methods to reach children, this manual helps counselors share the truth of Christ—the way, the truth, and the life—all while tailoring interactions and teachings to the understanding of children. Edited by counseling professional and author Amy Baker, this in-depth resource offers the biblical wisdom and practical insights of contributing authors who are experienced in biblical counseling for children.

It’s Time to Stop Trying to Be the Perfect Mom You long to be the mom your kids need, but often you’re convinced you come up short. The label “not enough” seems to be stamped across everything you do—and yet parenting is the one thing you want most to get right. What if the solution is simply to embrace the truth that you are not enough—but God is? In Gospel-Centered Mom Brooke McGlothlin reveals how our entire approach to motherhood shifts when we stop chasing our vision of a perfect family and start full-out pursuing God. With refreshing candor, Brooke examines the daunting task of raising children in the light of God’s Word and challenges you to: · embrace your moment-by-moment need for Jesus · release the stress of believing everything is your responsibility · learn to fight for rather than against your child · believe that the story God is writing with your life is worth the sacrifice · practice the daily disciplines that lead to Gospel-centered parenting As you learn to anchor your life in the Gospel, you’ll find increased freedom, purpose, and joy in motherhood. And you’ll discover that Jesus is more than capable of meeting every need, for your children and for you.

Marriages are in trouble today. That is clear. Effective mothods of combating this trend are less evident. Counselors, pastors and social workers need more than mere theories or mere moralizing. They need a practical and comprehensive model for understanding couples and their problems. They need a throughly Christian perspective that is biblical, compassionate and human. Everett Worthington provides this in an integrated, biblically based theory of marriage and marriage therapy with analysis at three levels: the individual, the couple and the family. The model he has constructed, with techniques drawn from the major psychological schools, is standard enough to guide counselors in actual interventions and powerful enough to produce change. A thoroughgoing overview of the assessment process includes practical, workable guidelines for: creating realistic, mutually-agreeable goals for counselor and clients; estimating the number of sessions needed to reach those goals; and planning the actual assessment, intervention and termination sessions. Next Worthington offers specific techniques for enhancing cooperative change, intimacy, communication, conflict resolution and forgiveness within the marriage. But keeping couples from slipping back into old patterns is one of the counselor's most difficult tasks. So Worthington concludes with suggestions for solidifying change and effectively concluding the counseling relationship. Here is a text that will be a standard for counselors, pastors and mental health professionals in the years to come.

Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling is a comprehensive guide that will equip God’s people to use biblical truth to change lives. More than that, this book will increase people’s confidence in the sufficiency and relevancy of God’s Word to address real-life issues in a multitude of counseling situations. Readers of this book will: Understand clearly why they should embrace biblical counseling Be encouraged to trust God’s Word to provide rich insight for living in the midst of even the most difficult challenges Enjoy the relevant, pastoral, and theological teaching they have come to appreciate from such noted authors as James MacDonald, John Piper, Mark Dever, and Elyse Fitzpatrick The 28 chapters blend theological wisdom and practical expertise. The first half of the book emphasizes a practical theology of biblical counseling; the second half highlights a practical methodology of biblical counseling. Though accessible to all Christians, the book will especially appeal to pastors and church leaders, counseling practitioners, students, and educators.