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 hold that Scripture speaks to every area of life, so I never built a system for handing people off. When someone was already under a psychologist’s care, I worked alongside that provider for the person’s good. More often, people came to me after secular counseling, or even other Christian counseling, hadn’t gotten them anywhere.
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, deception, faithfulness, grief, anger, identity — instead of addressing each 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.
Someone I counseledEQUIP 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 would 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 I do not publish counseling details, and I won’t discuss specific cases.