ACBC certified since 2016. Crisis, grief, marriages, and the intake system that keeps a church of 550–650 from losing people in the gaps.
Care work often fails quietly. Nobody announces that a request got missed; the person simply stops coming, and a year later nobody can say when. Ten years of counseling taught me how to sit with someone. Twenty years of operations taught me how to build the system that makes sure someone does.
The situation I inherited, what I built, and what changed. Written the way I’d brief a board.
Care requests were arriving faster than one pastor could hold them. I designed the intake, tracking, and confidentiality protocol, and set the escalation thresholds so that urgency was triaged by criteria, not by whoever happened to answer the phone.
I believe Scripture speaks to every area of life. Many people came to me after other counseling had stalled, and what they needed was a pastor who would stay with them. When a situation went beyond a pastor’s scope, I worked alongside the person’s other providers instead of handing them off.
The same handful of subjects came up in counseling over and over. So I wrote EQUIP and taught them church-wide: 12 topics in all, including anxiety, bitterness, fear, forgiveness, grief, and self-image. That reached the whole church instead of one person at a time.
I haven’t seen your church, so these are questions, not proposed changes. They’re the ones I’d want answered before proposing anything.
He was the first person who did not flinch, and the first one who followed up.
EQUIP came out of the counseling room: 12 topics, taken from the same subjects people brought to me all week, taught to a room instead of one at a time. If you want to know how I’d handle care from the front of a room, start there.
References with names and titles, the full care resume, and my long-form doctrinal answers are one email away. I don’t publish counseling details, and I won’t discuss specific cases.
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