The Church as a Culture of Care

I agree with the core tenants of the sufficiency of Scripture and the church’s responsibility / ability to care for people’s souls. I even share the concern that Jay Adams and many others have outlined - that the church gave up too much ground to psychology in the first half of the twentieth century. However, I have become increasingly concerned with the biblical counseling movement’s view which claims that the secular has nothing good to offer. This book interweaves this perspective from the biblical counseling movement, and thus it was troubling to me. Clearly there are parts to the secular that are useless to the Christian, but there are also aspects of it that are very helpful as well. Although the minutiae of what part of secular is helpful and what part isn’t is a difficult conversation, the troubling part to this book is that it overwhelmingly and perhaps exclusively values the insights of the biblical counseling movement. This orients people in God’s church against any data / studies that the secular might have to offer.

Also, I was shocked at the brevity of the “case study” at the beginning of chapter one. It was one paragraph. Then, I was shocked again at the swift application of Johnson’s premise to the case study in paragraph two. No effort was put into probing the complexities of the human brokenness of the people in the case study.

I don’t want to be this negative on this book, but it is just where I am at. It has plenty of good content, but the concerns I shared above really overrode it’s good aspects.