Therapy and psychoanalytic forms of counseling are a billion dollar industry in the United States. There are millions of Christians every year who are looking for help with their emotional and behavioral problems from non-Christian counselors. These are people who have no biblical interest or spiritual insight and are in fact in many cases hostile to our faith. Even Christian counselors are often not biblical in their approach, and and sometimes encourage their counselees to deconstruct their faith and train them and teach them to deflect their issues back onto the church - the church that maybe has loved them and cared for them over the years but somehow has become a problem. There are many Christian counselors who practice in this manner.

Counseling as an industry itself is intended to self-perpetuate by keeping people locked into normalizing their problems so that there is no way of having absolute victory over reckoning things in their life and finding the solution they need.

Today, we want to ask the questions, "what if the church reclaimed its responsibility to counsel the hurting people within their churches?" and, "what if the local church was trained and prepared to receive the hurting, and no longer had to refer hurting congregants outside of the church to find help.” We've invited professional counselor and faculty professor of biblical counseling at Living Faith Bible Institute, Jonathan Kindler, to sit down with us and to have a conversation about what it looks like for the church to take back the role of counselor. Specifically, we discuss both the need for the church to counsel its own members together with a Bible principle guided framework for doing so.

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In every church in America, there are members who have opinions about how the church ought to be managed. Many times, members find themselves disagreeing with leadership. All too often, it is associate pastors who find themselves at the sharpest of odds with their head pastors. The effects of disjointed relationships in leadership can be devastating. Today we sit down with pastor Kenny Morgan, Chair of the Foundations Department at Living Faith Bible Institute and author of The Cupbearer: A Guide for Associate Pastors and Church Leaders. Pastor Kenny shares his story of how he gained a burden that resulted in the writing of his new release (by Living Faith Books). We discuss how church leaders and associate pastors can biblically support their leaders, parsing out the difference between the "yes-man" attitude and genuine Spirit-led support of the head pastor.

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We sit down with Pastor Mitch Dobson, Professor of Bible Survey at Living Faith Bible Institute to discuss biblical principled efficiency in ministry in the areas of authority structures and healthy flow of communication. Mitch begins with his testimony, background in compliance within the realm of business and his current role on the pastoral team at Midtown Baptist Temple. In this episode we define the spiritual gift of "governments" (1 Cor. 12:28) and examine ways of identifying people within a body who function supernaturally in this way. Lastly, we examine the difference between principle and policy, how they differ and how they are important considerations for the local church as well as its individual ministries.

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In this episode Jeff Bartell, the missions pastor of First Baptist Church in New Philadelphia, OH and host of the podcast Theology Roundtable shares his missions experience in post-communist Albania. In 1992 Jeff found himself amidst a people who had never heard the gospel. He learned the language, preached the gospel and made disciples. Now that same Albanian local church God used Jeff to plant is biblically envisioned and actively reproducing local churches in other parts of the world. We discuss missions and specifically how the local church described throughout the New Testament fits God’s plan for evangelizing the lost and making disciples of Jesus Christ.

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Visit https://www.lffellowship.com/focus for sermons and additional materials from the Living Faith Fellowship’s 2022-23 Mission Focus Conference.

We interview student and soon-to-be graduate of Living Faith Bible Institute Connor Muolo, the wife of David Muolo who we interviewed last time on The Postscript Shorts (Short #9) Connor shares her testimony of growth in the contexts of discipleship, ministry and how her and David are serving in their local church today.

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Pastor Jay Schug of Community Fellowship Baptist Church in Huntsville, Alabama walks us through a biblical template for teaching the seven stages of spiritual growth in the disciple of Christ within the context of a local church. We begin with Jay's testimony of salvation and first steps of faith. He then shares how God called him to the pastorate and gave him a vision for biblical discipleship.

The seven stages of spiritual growth for the disciple of Christ covered in this episode are:

1. Repentance,

2. Enlightenment/Illumination,

3. Ministry Training,

4. Leadership Development,

5. Reevaluation and Separation,

6. Leadership Participation,

7. Consecration and World Vision

In this episode, we talk to James Fyffe, LFBI professor of missiology regarding modern missions. We discuss the lives of missionaries who pioneered gospel ministry in foreign lands amidst great adversity. We also speak about the responsibility of the local church to support the missionary abroad.

We continue with Pastor Joe McKaig of Decatur Baptist Church regarding a philosophy of ministry of a healthy church focussed on the right mission.

In this first episode of three with Pastor Sam Miles of Midtown Baptist Temple, we discuss what is required of the pastor in terms of leadership. We look at the necessities of casting a clear vision, prioritizing the pulpit ministry & leading the congregation to prayer. A great episode to inspire pastors and those who desire the office.

In this second interview with Jonathan Kindler, instructor of Biblical Counseling in Living Faith Bible Institute, we discuss the differences between a secular counseling and biblical counseling. He shares how the Bible, the Holy Spirit and the local church have a way of providing holistic and divine transformation that is unequivocal and unattainable in the secular therapeutic setting.