Every Christian is a counselor—whether we realize it or not. The question is: what worldview do we draw from when we give advice? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Jason Winslade, discuss the folly of secular psychology—which assumes that man is basically good—and even some Christian counseling, which baptizes Freudian psychology with a few Bible verses. What’s needed, instead, is people who think biblically and reject dangerous worldly philosophies (Col. 2:8-10), drawing from God’s all-sufficient Word to restore sinners and support the suffering in their time of need (Gal. 6:1-2). Relying on the sure foundation of Scripture, every Christian can learn, with God’s help, to wisely counsel others. 

Thank you for joining the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we're going to talk to Jason Winslade, who's actually teaching his congregation to think biblically about the counsel that they give one another. Hope you enjoy the conversation. So Jason, we've got Jason Winslay from Redemption Church in Christ Church, New Zealand. I was just there a few months ago, had a delightful time with them.

And Jason is training his people to think biblically about the counsel that they give to one another. You know, we are one body, the body builds itself up in love. And so we want to talk about biblical counseling. I think it's much too broadly held that counseling is a category just for the professionals. But as Christians, a normal part of Christianity should be to know our Bibles and to help each other bring the Word of God to bear on the challenges and circumstances of life.

And so anyway, that's what we want to talk about. You know, around 40 years ago, actually a great tidal wave of blessing broke on the church. And you know, you had various advocates advocating that we pitch aside psychology and the language of the psychological movement and just actually stick to the Bible. And that's where Jason Winslet comes in because he's doing it in Christ Church New Zealand. So Jason, welcome.

We're so glad to have you. Thanks, Scott. It's wonderful to be joining you guys. Yeah. So how, how was it that you started encouraging your people to counsel with the Bible using some of the principles of the biblical counseling movement?

Yeah, well, I think it really comes back to just doing what I do week in, week out, really. I think that biblical counseling is really founded upon expository preaching. I think that when we're preaching expository and systematically through books of the Bible, I think we're teaching the people in our churches just how the Word of God is so valid, it's so applicable, it's so sufficient for every need. And so I think if I strip it right back, I think expository preaching and showing people and opening up the Word of God just in the ordinary course of week-to-week church life, that's probably where it started. I think that from there, there began to be a hunger in people.

They think to themselves, hey, I might not be able to be the guy behind the pulpit, but you know, I wanna be able to help people better with the word of God as well. And just sensing a growing desire amongst the people to do that. And I think sometimes as pastors and sometimes as elders, we can sometimes just go, well, that's great. Try to find some way of doing that, which is a place in there. But at the same time, if we have opportunity to be able to direct that and be a little bit more intentional about that, I think we want to take those opportunities.

And for us, that's where biblical counseling really came into it. I began probably about six years ago, seven years ago now, looking for resource to be able to help train people in our church in the area of basically using the Word of God to help other people. And that's what really led me to the organization ACBC. And we started offering some initial training to our members with some of the initial training that they provided via video. So this morning I watched a message that you've been given that is online entitled Every Christian as a Counselor.

So if you're watching this podcast and you want to get there, and I think people should go directly to it and hear you there, how you could just Google Jason Winslade, Every Christian is a Counselor, I'm sure it'll pop up number one on the list. But you based it on Galatians chapter six, verses one and two. So I'd like to read Galatians six, one and two, and then just give you to give us the breakdown of that text, because I just found that really helpful. Galatians 6, 1 and 2, brethren, if a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, considering yourself lest you also be tempted. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ." Yeah.

I mean, it's such a critical passage because what the passage is doing, it's calling upon everyday believers to help one another. And I think this is so important when it comes to counseling. I mean, I don't know what it's like over in your side of the world, but I know in New Zealand, counseling can sometimes be a bit of a taboo type of word to use. Counseling is something that happens once the wheels have fallen off the wagon. Counseling is the thing that only the people with really serious problems need.

And if there's serious problems, you must then go to a professional to be able to meet those needs. But that's not what we see in the scriptures here. We see in Galatians 6, we see Paul calling upon everyday believers to help with the needs of God's people. And I think we see it, he breaks it down, doesn't it? He breaks it down into kind of two main broad areas.

You know, he talks firstly about restoring the sinner. And then secondly, he talks about supporting the sufferer. And I think those are, if you could kind of broadly condense all of the counseling issues that one might have in a Christian's life, they're probably gonna go fall into one or two of those categories there. You're restoring sinners, people crippled by blind spots, sin that's overtaking them, and you're coming alongside them to be able to help them out. Supporting the sufferer, It talks about being able to restore, restoring such a one, then it talks about bearing burdens.

And so just people burdened by circumstances. And I'd say that supporting the sufferer, there's certain circumstances that You can't just say, stop sinning. There might be certain circumstances that you're going through and it takes a period of time to be able to work through those. And so you're journeying alongside that person, pointing them to Jesus Christ. And so this is the call for everyday Christians.

It doesn't say church leaders there. It doesn't say elders in the church. It's saying brethren. And I think that's a very important thing to note there. Jason, talk to us about how this doctrine of this efficiency of scripture impinges on this whole subject?

Well, it really comes down to a matter of authority, I think, Scott. And I think we would agree that, you know, where is the authority in which we're going to be, you know, giving counsel to one another? And I think if we take a step back, we have to understand that we actually all give counsel. We're actually giving counsel all the time, regardless of whether we recognize it or not. And I say, and a lot of times I say, if you're a parent, you're giving counsel constantly.

You're telling your children, don't do this. You should be doing that. I mean, we were all giving advice or guidance and so forth. And we have to understand that whatever counsel that we're giving, that counsel, it actually grows out of the worldview that we hold. And so the council, we're all given council, but the question is, well, what worldview are we actually holding?

What is the source of the council which we are actually giving? And that's where it comes back to the Scriptures. That's where it comes back to God's Word. For us as Christians, we have the Word of God. I mean, it's self-attesting to the fact that it is sufficient for every single need that we're going to have in our lives as believers.

And so, we want to keep on pointing back to the authority. It's God using His means, His counsel, to bring about change in the life of the believer. And I think that's, Sufficiency of scripture is so critical. I think when it comes to biblical counseling, that's where the battle needs to really be fought. And that's what makes biblical counseling so much different than let's say Christian counseling, which I would say Christian counseling is more like secular counseling, but sometimes it's sprinkling Jesus on the top.

You know, it's incorporating secular ideas, but then adding a bit of Jesus and a bit of prayer into that. And so that differs from what we would call biblical counseling, because you've got biblical counseling, our authority and our guide is the Word of God, the means of change is the Spirit of God, the counselors themselves are the people of God, And then the whole chief goal, the whole purpose of us counseling in the first place is the glory of God. And so it has to come back to the sufficiency of Scripture. It has to come back to how it is that the wisdom that God has given to us to be able to help God's people. I mean, here's a question, Scott.

Where else are we going to go? I mean, where are we going to go to direct God's people for the help that they need? Freud, Carl Rogers, Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, whoever, you know, Go to some, go to some, the podcaster is, is the new counselor. Yeah. And that's often the case.

So you sort of touched on this, but I wonder if you develop it further. And that message that you gave that I referenced earlier, you talk about the three approaches to counseling. So you touched on it just now, but you did develop it a little further. Sure. Yeah.

There's three broad approaches to counseling. So there are three worldviews, in other words, three worldviews in which people will adopt when it comes to the counsel that they're gonna be able to give to other people. I mean, the first one we would call secular counseling or psychological counseling. And we have to understand that a lot of times in the biblical counseling world, we use the word psychology, and it's almost like synonymous with the devil. I don't think we have to be scared of that word psychology.

I mean, the word literally means the study of the soul. And when we think about it, and this should tell us, this should tell us the nature of counseling right from the very beginning. Where should the believer go to find out about the soul? Where should he go to be able to find out about matters of the soul? Of course, he should be going to the one who created the soul in the first place.

But is that what we refer to today when we talk about psychological counseling? Well, no, we don't. When we hear of psychological counseling or when we hear about secular counseling today, we're talking about paid professionals, we're talking about people who would hold a certain set of beliefs. And although those beliefs may differ from place to place, it could be summarized in this, in this kind of way. It would say essentially that human nature is basically good.

That would be a presumption there. It says that people have the answers to their own problems inside of them. It says that the key to understanding and correcting a person's attitude and actions, you have to go back into that person's past somewhere. It would say that the problems that people face are the result of what someone else has done to them. So it's not really taking on that personal responsibility, but what someone else has done to them.

It talks about human problems or understands human problems from a purely psychological nature, unrelated to anything spiritual or any kind of physical conditions. It does very much hold to the fact that deep-seated rooted problems that in a person's life, they can really only be solved by professional counselors and it can really only be solved using secular therapies. And certainly, secular counseling would be, look, the scripture, prayer, Holy Spirit, these things are inadequate, all the simplistic resources that really can't deal with the main problems that people have today. So that would be number one. That would be secular psychological counseling.

You didn't get to Christian counseling or Christian psychology. And I kind of mentioned that before. Again, good-hearted people, people that want to help others. And this is what we have to understand here. We don't want to be poking our fingers at others and going, hey, you know, your motives are wrong.

Many times the motives are right. I mean, we all wanna help people. We wanna see people get better. We don't wanna see people suffering. And what the approach of Christian counseling would do, it would basically take the worldview of psychological counseling or secular counseling.

So it's taking Freud, it's taking many secular types of theories, there are hundreds of them by the way, it takes those and it tries to sanctify those. And so what it does is it's taking those things and it's adding prayer into that, it's adding scripture into that, it's adding Jesus into that, which, you know, in and of themselves, prayer, the word Jesus, great things, but really, it's the foundation upon which that counsel has been given. Is it biblical counseling? Is it really dealing with matters of the heart? Is it dealing with matters in a biblical way?

Or is it just taking secular ideas and, you know, I kind of see it in a way that sprinkling Jesus on it, you know, or is Christ the foundation to that? So that's what I'd categorize as Christian counseling or secular, you know, or sorry, Christian psychology, that would be number two. And then biblical counseling would be the third category. And I kind of mentioned the main characteristics of that. You know, the ultimate authority is the Word of God, the counselors are the people of God, the means of change in biblical counseling is entirely the Spirit of God, and the chief end to biblical counseling is the glory of God.

I tell people that when I'm counseling them, I say, look, The main reason I'm counseling right now, I want to see you get better. I want to see you get helped. But even more than that, I want to see God glorified more in your life. And I know the way that he's going to be glorified more is when you become and when your life comes more into line with the Word of God and in line with Jesus Christ. And so that's ultimately why I'm helping you right now.

So in that message, there was a second text of Scripture that you brought to bear. It was Colossians 2 verses 8 through 10. So I'll read that. And if you want, just when I'm done reading it, take it and run with it. But I found this very helpful.

Colossians two, eight through 10, Paul writes, I beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. For in Him, in Christ dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete in Him who is the head of all principality and power. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's right. I mean, I think, you know, the question has to be asked, doesn't it?

You know, what does the Bible say about mixing the world's ideas with God's ideas? You know, especially when it comes to the matter of the heart, when it comes to the matter of the mind, when it comes to the matter of the soul. And this is probably, this is, I guess, pointed at those who would want to take, you know, a secular foundation, or, and then try to add Jesus, or add prayer, or add the Bible to this. And so this is one that's wanting to mix methodologies here. And this is where I would say this refers to more like the Christian counselor or the Christian psychologist.

I think that passage there in Colossians chapter two, verses eight and nine, I think what we're seeing there is that in the mind of the apostle Paul, human philosophy, you know, or that which has a human origin, that's not to take the place of the truth of Christ in a believer's thinking. You know, it really, really isn't. You know, When it comes to matters of the soul, we as believers, we should never think that we're deficient without having the ideas and without having the theories of the unbelieving world. But instead, for us, we need to understand that if we are in Christ, if we are His, we already have all that we actually need when it comes to working through the matters of the heart, the mind, and the soul. And so we needn't feel deficient.

And I can say that the counselling has become so professionalized that sometimes the biblical counselor or the elder or the pastor, we can be made to feel deficient sometimes because we think that someone else has some superior kind of almost gnostic type of knowledge when it comes to dealing with the matters of the heart, mind, and soul. And I'm saying, no, the Word of God is very clear. I mean, I think in the mind of the apostle Paul, if you, you know, we went back a couple of thousand years and we asked him the question, you know, hey, Paul, how do you think we should help people with the struggles of the life, especially for the believer. Should we be mixing in the world's ideas with God's ideas, I think would be unthinkable in his mind. And I think we know that because of that passage there in Colossians chapter two.

So the argument is, if you were to push back on that, or the push back on that would be, well, Paul didn't know what we know now. And the real question is, what do you think the Bible is? If you think the Bible actually has a single author, who used many authors through the ages, but that the actual author of the Bible is the all-knowing God, then the fact that we know things now that Paul might not have known then really can't rule the day because the God who knows everything in every age is the one who's actually given us this all-sufficient word. So the real core question is, what do you think the Bible is? Right.

So Jason, I know that's the foundation of everything you're doing. How does it look in your church? What are you doing? What's your strategy? How are you helping your people to give good counsel?

And this actually is a huge problem in churches where you have people that don't know the Word of God, they're giving counsel to their friends, it's well-meaning and sometimes it's wrong and sometimes it's really not helpful at all. And, but you're trying to mitigate that in your local church, which is really wonderful. So how are you doing it? Well, by letting people know that they are counselors, by letting every Christian know and in that message you might have listened to, Jason, letting them know that every Christian is a counselor. And that doesn't mean that it's just a license to go and, you know, hey, great, I'm going to be a counselor to the world and speak whatever I want to speak.

But instead, hopefully, there should be an element of becoming sober about that and thinking, what counsel am I actually giving? It's not whether or not I'm giving counsel, but what kind of counsel am I giving? Is it lining up with the Word of God? So for us as a church, what we've been doing is, you know, as I mentioned, as it was a growing hunger for people to want to be able to help people with the Word of God, we put before people the foundations training that an organization, ACBC, offers. And we just did that once a year.

We said, who wants to watch the videos? You go through 30 hours of videos, which took really good foundation on various aspects of counseling. And so they'd watch that, but then it doesn't have to stop there either. It can continue on. It can go on to, there's exams that can take place, which are moderated and marked by ACBC.

You can then go on to become a supervised counselor. This is working towards certification. And so what we did is that we really helped the members of the church know, look, here's a pathway for you. Now, if you want to start off just with some foundations training, just understanding the differences between Christian psychology and biblical counseling and, you know, understanding matters of the heart and the work of the Spirit and these kinds of things. Here are some things that you can go through.

Here are some things that you can upskill on. And I think for every Christian, it would be a very good thing to do. But then if you wanna go further than that, and this is putting the pathway before people, if you wanna go further than that, if you want to become almost more, even more helpful, there is a means, there's training that can be done as well. That doesn't mean that everyone has to go down there in order to be helpful. We're certainly not saying that.

Nor are we saying that those who become certified are anyway going to replace the elders or the pastor. Not at all. If anything, the more the extension of the shepherding within the church is not a replacement at all. And so we keep on putting that before, before our people. And really what we started to see Scott and Jason is that people have got a desire for that.

You know, they wanted to grow in that. And as they start to see other members, you know, becoming more and more skilled and being able to use the Word of God to help people, they get excited about it and they want to do it too. And at this present time, we have several people in, several certified counselors at the moment through ACBC. We have some that are in a supervision stage. We have about a dozen that are actually going through the process at the moment.

And so we're putting it before the people, we're helping them to let them know. We've done things like we've bought all of the required reading of ACBC's required reading for their counselors. So we have that in our church library. So we say, look, you don't have to become certified. You can just go in and out.

You can help yourself with that. We have all of the little booklets that they provide that are called help booklets. And there's a lot of them. There's lots and lots of little books that deal with little topics, very easy to read, but give really solid counsel. And so we say, look, counsel yourself with these.

Go and read these little books, counsel yourself. Or if you know other people that are in need, go grab one of these books, sit with them, open them up and just read through it together. So at each level along the way, we're wanting to encourage people just to say, get involved in the mission of the church. This is it. We are the pillar and the ground of truth, you know, and the truth of God's Word, and we are God's people.

So let's go and do it. Let's get active and let's start helping people. Let's start being salt and light to the world. That's fantastic. What a blessing it is in a local church when you have people that think biblically about problems and the problems that are shared with them, that you know as a pastor that if a problem is presented, the Bible is opened.

So I praise the Lord for what you're doing there, Jason. Okay, I guess we got it. That's the whole, that's the story. I know there's so much else to say here, but man, Jason, thank you for joining us. Thank you for what you're doing out there in New Zealand.

Love the time with you. Can't wait to do it again sometime. So I appreciate you. You too guys. Yeah, appreciate what you're doing.

Thanks. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. I hope you can be with us next time. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.