Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast I have with me Jeremy Pray. He is the pastor of biblical counseling at North Creek Church in Walnut Creek, California. He’s an ACBC certified counselor, he is also almost finished with his ACBC fellow candidacy and I’m looking forward to him serving as a fellow. In addition to overseeing North Creek in their robust counseling ministry, he also oversees various other adult ministries. He spent 15 years in the construction industry as a project manager, but in 2017, he transitioned from the marketplace to vocational ministry. He has a Master of Divinity from the Master’s Seminary, he’s the author of the ACBC booklet Infertility and Miscarriage. And he has been married to his lovely wife, Haley since 2005, and they have four children. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast. So grateful for you brother and the work that’s happening up at North Creek. Good to see you today.
Jeremy Pray: Thank you, Dale. Thanks for having me.
Dale Johnson: Listen, today I want to talk about training centers. I’ll give a quick and brief background. Some people wonder: What does this mean if you’re not sort of on the inside of ACBC? People wonder, what does it mean that you’re a training center? We have really three different types of training centers. Training centers that are institutions, like the place where I teach at Midwestern or where you went to school at Masters. And then we also have standalone counseling centers that have oversight from an ecclesiastical body, but they operate sort of as a standalone parachurch ministry. And then the majority of our training centers are tightly woven into local church, and that’s the type of training center that you all have there. You guys obviously do things like counseling and training those who do counseling. You’re responsible for helping people get through Phase 1, 2 and 3 in terms of our fundamentals and our certification track. So, we’re really grateful for the work that you do. I want to dive in a little bit today and talk specifically about where you lead at North Creek. Just tell us some of the experiences that you guys have had. We have a lot of people who are always interested to know like, “How do we become a training center?” and I think some of the things that you’re going to describe today, just talking about how you guys became an ACBC training center, and some of the things that you do would be helpful to people. So, let me just start here, tell us a little bit about how North Creek there in Walnut Creek, California which if people don’t know, it’s right there outside of San Francisco, just to the east there, maybe slightly northeast I’m not super great at geography, but it’s somewhere right there. And tell us how you guys became a training center with ACBC.
Jeremy Pray: Yeah, near San Francisco. There actually are believers in this area. To answer that question, I think it’s probably most helpful to rewind back to the mid 90’s, our church at that time was called Evie Free of Walnut Creek, now North Creek. But in the mid-90’s, we hired a new senior pastor named John McNuff, with him coming to our church he brought really strong leadership, clear Biblical teaching from the pulpit on the doctrines of grace, inerrancy of and the authority of Scripture. But most significantly for our conversation here, he was strong on the doctrine of sufficiency of Scripture. Now, the church before John arrived, it wasn’t heretical but I do think it’s fair to say that it was unstable or some people have described it as just immature in matters of doctrine and practice, I was only in junior high at the time, so I can really only go off of what other people have described to me about the church then. But John shows up to this church that’s immature. Then let’s say about a year after shows up a man named Steve Mawhorter, who later became pastor and a mentor of mine, he went through John though at that time and he discussed the idea of developing a biblical counseling ministry. So, rather than just immediately joining with ACBC, he just said, “Hey, I just want to care for people here.” Now this request of his or the desire of his, came to a church that provided integrated counseling. So Evie Free Walnut Creek, provided integrated counseling and it was led by one of the elders wives. And so, this was a difficult thing to navigate and it moved slowly. But about three years after that particular conversation between John and Steve, John introduced a class that he called Shepherdology. After starting the class, he turned it over to Steve to continue to train the church to apply the Word of God to their own lives. So, it wasn’t a Biblical counseling class per se in the sense of helping other people; It was just primarily, how do you counsel yourself? The class has morphed over the years a little bit, but really not all that much. So, 25 years later now, we’re still training our people through this class and now I’m the one teaching it and it’s a blessing to do so. We call it cornerstone. We probably had in those 25 years period probably about three thousand people that have gone through it and to describe what the class is like, in a nutshell for the people listening, it’s basically the fundamentals track on steroids. It’s just there’s a ton of hours, there are way more than 30. And so, if you think about it from the church’s perspective, outside the faithful pulpit ministry, that Cornerstone class still remains to this day as one of the most impactful ministry efforts. It’s made our church who we are today. And so out of that class has not only developed a robust counseling ministry, but it has also equipped hundreds and hundreds of people who aren’t formally counseling through our biblical counseling ministry. They’re just deployed in other areas in the church like small groups, women’s ministries, children’s ministries, local outreach, and then obviously not to mention the community around us. So, it’s not just something that has affected our own church, but even our relationship with the community around us and it’s all been done through that one class. And it’s been a blessing to be a part of and the Lord sent far more with it than we could ever imagine.
Dale Johnson: Now, I want to highlight several things you said; they’re so significant. First, I think it’s really important that we understand what you just described in terms of the long game. I love that because you just described in 25 years there have been three thousand or so people who have gone through this process. And the goal is not to have a bunch of professionalized people who are, you know, necessarily doing this formally. If they do that, that’s you know, that’s great. It is a wonderful ministry to the community ministry to your own body, but this is building a culture of people at your church in the way in which they do every aspect of ministry in a very organic way. It’s a very natural view of soul care flowing out of the Scriptures in the way in which we care for one another in this fellowship. I love that mentality. The second thing that you mentioned that I think is really cool is how much the teaching at the church has expanded to influence the region. I’ve been out there teaching at North Creek and man, I’ve seen in the room where we’re teaching fundamentals and there will be you know 60, 70, or more churches represented in the area and part of that is just the culture that you guys have built. There’s a hunger for churches to have that type of culture, you know, at your church in the way in which you think about soul care. Man, I’m so appreciative of you guys continuing that work and it wasn’t something that had to be labeled a “biblical counseling class.” We’re just thinking about how do we take theology that we’re learning and apply it to our own life. And then, man we’re going to learn to apply that to others. It’s being discipled and then learning to make disciples. I think that’s a brilliant way. But I have to zoom in a little bit, and talk about the class itself, how its structured, some of the things that you guys do in the class, that might be intriguing. For some of the ones listening, you mentioned something about fundamentals on steroids. Some people may not know what fundamentals are, so even just talk about the structure and some of the key components that you guys teach through that that you really want your members to be saturated with there at North Creek.
Jeremy Pray: The class itself is on Wednesday nights; it’s been that way for a long time. I mean sometimes we’ve done it on Sundays to try to capture the different demographic, but for the most part it’s on Wednesday nights. The class runs the school year, so it’s nine months long. It ends up being about 30 to 32 lessons on those Wednesday nights and we go for an hour and a half maybe a little bit less, with no breaks. People love sitting through it and that’s a lot of material to cover. We start with the gospel and how someone is saved. We talk about how salvation is necessary for lasting biblical change, then we get into the resources for change, the sufficiency of Scripture, the Holy Spirit and so forth. Then we get into the heart: Why we do what we do? We spend multiple weeks on that, and then that just kind of bleeds throughout the rest of the lessons, but the other lessons get into practical theology: anger, forgiveness, reconciliation, depression, marriage and parenting, and on and on. But the genius of it all, and you mentioned this, is we didn’t really have a grand vision for this. It wasn’t all mapped out ahead of time, but it just started. We just wanted to be faithful to disciple our own people and so it’s neat how the Lord has used the class. So, a couple things I would say about the class in this regard then, the class as we present it to everyone, as we promote it, if you say that way, is for anyone and everyone. It’s not advertised as a class that is for people that want to become biblical counselors because if you asked, and I’ve talked to other churches that do this, if you say, “hey we’re going to do a biblical counseling training class, who wants to become a biblical counselor?” you might end up with several people, but then in the end, some of those people are just so intimidated by it. They just kind of slip out the back door of the train. But if you were to go to your church and say, “hey, we’re going to have a class, it’s for anyone who wants to change and grow themselves. We want to know who wants to learn to apply the Word of God to their own life.” Then we will have a little bit of an eye towards helping other people, but that’s our primary focus, just working on applying the Word of God to your own life. When churches do that, and when we did that, there’s so many more people that come in. Which then leads to the next point, and this is just something we fell into, again no grand plan, but with the same class there’s three different levels of engagement with the class. So, the same lesson is being taught, but you have three different levels. The first level is basically just auditing the class. The people come to the class on Wednesday night, they do nothing else. The second level involves a little bit of homework throughout the week. There’s a little bit of reading, they read Scripture passages, they’re memorizing some verses, and they’re doing different worksheets applying the Word of God to their life, but it’s light. The third level is a ton of homework, and this is what we use for someone who wants to become a counselor here at our church formerly. They end up spending about 14 to 15 hours per week, all with their nose in the Word of God, applying it to their own life. We just say counseling themselves.
By the way, the resource that we use and really lean on is John Broger’s Self-Confrontation Manual. People often wonder that the teaching is our own, but we use that manual kind of like a college course would use a textbook. But those that do this highest level of homework, we call level 3, are the ones that we then invite, after the nine months is over to attend a second class, which is a much smaller group. That second class is called fundamentals of biblical counseling, and it’s what those in the biblical counseling world know as the classic covers, the key principles of biblical counseling, like gathering data, establishing relationship, getting hope and that kind of thing. So, to put it plainly the class is structured so that anyone who wants to become a formal biblical counselor on our team, they spend nine months confronting themselves, or counseling themselves, before then discussing how to counsel other people. That has proved to be the hallmark of our training, and so after 25 years of doing that we now have about 50 to 60 active counselors doing formal counseling. But there are so many more than just the 50 to 60 that are out in our church doing other ministries. These people say like, “I don’t want to become a formal biblical counselor.” We’re like, “That’s fine, go serve in some other area of the church.” But my point is that the Lord has grown our biblical counseling ministry, just incrementally over time. And like you mentioned earlier, just changing the culture of our church because it’s just creating a body of believers that care for one another. Some end up doing it more formally, but the vast majority just end up in the rest of the church. And that has proved to be such a blessing to our church, and yeah, just a blessing to be a part of and neat to see the Lord continue to use that, even today.
Dale Johnson: Jeremy if I were texting you, right? This moment I would put in capital letters, L-O-V-E. I love that so much. As I think about how you guys are approaching it, you’re describing this in such a way that this is just basic in how we walk with the Lord. And what I find, and even teach my students here at Midwestern Seminary, is when you teach someone how the Word applies to them and they see it become effective in their life, and they see the work of the Spirit producing things in them that they can’t produce themselves, and they see themselves overcoming issues of sin in their life. They’re conformed to the image of Christ and that changes then not just how they live at peace, but it changes the way that they see other people. And that stuff starts happening normally like where I don’t have to, you know, set aside a formal time to come and counsel. You’re seeing that happen organically throughout the week with one another. I love that because this is this is really a healthy perspective on what it means to fulfill the one anothers. You’re fostering that within your church and you’re giving people opportunity to go further, if they want to hone some skills and do something more formally. I love that. We talk about training centers, what you’re doing is you’re seeing this not just, “I’m going to impart information and then you know, think that they can apply it.” We’re going to help them walk through this, and we’re going to actually disciple them and then see that they can in turn do that with someone else. I love that. I want to get to a little bit more technical piece. We think about what the Lord is doing there at North Creek and what He’s been doing for quite some time. I want to ask how do you become a training center? And there are specific things that we do here at ACBC, but I want you to just talk a little bit about how you guys became a training center. You mentioned earlier that this was not something that Steve Mawhorter set out to do necessarily. He just saw his vision of teaching and training and that what you guys were doing there at the church aligned with some of the things that ACBC was doing. That relationship continued to grow. So, talk about how you guys became a training center.
Jeremy Pray: I mentioned John and Steve. John was the senior pastor; Steve became the pastor of biblical counseling. As you’re just mentioning, the class is going well, you said you loved it. Our people loved it. Everyone was growing. And Steve went back to John and said, like, “hey, this is this is taking off. It’s really, really great and I want to go do this at other churches. I want to bring this to them. In other words, I want to go do a cornerstone class and offer it to some other churches.” John probably said this just on a whim. So, it turned out to be very wise. He said, “Well, why don’t you just have him come here? And that’s when we started a conference; we called the NCT conference—North Creek Counseling training discipleship conference, right? It is the same three weekend format that probably a lot of people that are listening would be familiar with. We just call this CDT, right? So, I’ll spare you the long explanation on how that grew. But the way that we started is we had to team up with someone else that knew how to put on conferences like that. We teamed up with Faith Church in Lafayette for several years. Then we just started putting the conference on by ourselves, getting our own speakers, and running it. It started out small. I think maybe we had 100 people or so at the very first one? It’s morphed through the years, but now, I mean just last year, we had 750 people coming. I think there was over a hundred churches represented. Anyways, about 3 years in, we kind of started to really become established in knowing what we’re doing in putting on a conference. And then right at that time, we said, “hey, let’s partner with ACBC.” We became a training center with ACBC in 2013. Honestly, I don’t really know what that process was, like, because I came into my role as a pastor biblical counseling after that point. I really can’t speak to that personally. But I will say that it’s the conference that allowed us to extend our reach into a larger portion of Northern California, and then especially partnering with ACBC in the help and the encouragement and the structure that came from there has really allowed us to reach into the community and to be what it is today. So, I like to say that we’re just riding the wave right now. There’s a lot of movement in Northern California and we will keep going as long as the Lord would want us to. I also think that it’s really neat to just think back. In the introduction, we talked about being near San Francisco. It’s just amazing that we’re so near the Cesspool of San Francisco and Oakland, but it’s just brimming with men and women who love the Lord, who love the Word, and want to help people. And what’s so cool about the conference over and above other Says in this is just my own opinion. Sometimes you come back from some other conferences, and it’s almost can be seen as like a serving contest. I’m not trying to diminish those, I have personally come back refreshed from those, but I think with the counseling conferences what we’ve seen in our particular area is that when people go as a group to a conference to learn how to help other people, they go back to their churches with momentum and excitement and then there’s of movement within those other churches. And that is so exciting for me in putting on the conference, because it is a ton of work, but to see that people go back to their churches and start to build momentum. They just simply are ministering the Word of God privately to people within their own context. That is so sweet to see. And so yeah, we just kind of morphed into becoming a training center and it’s been monumental, I think, in our area in Northern California and just getting biblical counseling going in these local churches.
Dale Johnson: I want you to talk a little bit more about that influence with some local churches. I’ve seen it firsthand being there, the influence that the Lord is kindly given you. And man, I’m just so grateful to the Lord for that. And, you know, Jeremy, as I look around on our website and I see the map, I see different places where you know the Lord has been kind of gracious to grow biblical counseling. But there are a lot of places on the map where there’s very little biblical counseling happening, very few churches that endorse ideas of biblical counseling or are trying to promote it in the ways that you’ve described. I want people to hear from you, on what the Lord has done over a period of 25 years and how saturated. Now in some of these areas, in the relationships you build with other churches who are pushing these ideas and helping their people to walk faithfully with the Lord. And that can happen at some of the other places that we would see might be empty right now. Because 25 years ago, we would have looked in this area on our map and there would have been very little that was up there. And now we see, man, the Lord has just utilized your fellowship to bless them and others, and that can happen at other places. So, I want you to talk a little bit about how you found yourself relating to, or relating with, or partnering with other churches are in the area.
Jeremy Pray: By God’s design, not ours, we have found ourselves to be ahead of other churches, more experienced than other churches. I don’t mean more faithful; that’s not what I mean, but I just mean we have more resources. We have more trained counselors and we’ve just been doing it for longer. We probably have some more experience with hard cases than others, just generally Speaking, of course. We are more established in the realm of formal counseling, and so, you can imagine then with other churches that are just getting going that have not been doing it for 25 years. They see us sort of as like, “a big brother” in Northern California. The one that kind of goes ahead of them. That’s a privilege and a responsibility on our part. It’s not a role or position that we take lightly. I was thinking about this earlier, it’s kind like the oldest child in the family. I mean, the other kids are watching and learning what to mimic, learning what not to make. So, there’s plenty of things that people would not want to do that we’re doing at our church, but we just find ourselves ahead of these other churches. And so, I’m then told that we’re a blessing to these other churches. But I also want to say, in terms of the partnership, it’s just as much of a blessing for us to be with these other churches. In fact, that life and that excitement and wanting to engage with other people in their church, that actually breathes life back into us. I would even go further to say that these partnerships are not just something that we can do because we have the resources. I would actually say it’s a need of ours—we need to be connected to other churches. We don’t just want to be siloed and doing it our way and not care what anyone else is doing. We need to be connected to other local churches, partnering with them in kingdom work. People will come to us and ask questions about how and why we do things the way we do. But I mean, I love hearing why they’re doing things the way they’re doing them. And I also don’t just mean to partner with them just in biblical counseling, but to partner with them and all other matters. Now, my particular role as the pastor biblical counseling means that my hub or my starting point is biblical counseling, but and we want to partner with these churches in other matters like expository preaching training, seminary education, missions work, and church planning. and so, we’re putting efforts into these. We certainly have not arrived. We haven’t exhausted our partnerships, that’s for sure, but we want to remain connected these churches. We want to strengthen those relationships. That’s actually, from being honest, an area of growth that we see for us. That’s part of my role as well. So, I just want to emphasize it, I do believe that we’ve been a blessing to other churches in our area, but it’s just as much the other way around. We not only find it a blessing, but actually see it as a need of ours to remain connected to other local churches in the area.
Dale Johnson: Amen, brother. It has been really great to be with you today and to hear the faithfulness of our God. And, as we celebrate that today, we also find ourselves praying for you guys and for what the Lord will continue to do there. We’re praying that this happens in other places. And I’m so grateful for your encouragement and for so many others, who would be listening that they can have that vision of what their region could look like in 2025 Years. Thank you, brother.
Jeremy Pray: Thanks Dale. Thanks for having me.
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