Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have one of our board members that I’m always delighted to be around, Pastor Brad Brandt.
Pastor Brad loves teaching the Word of God so that people will love and live for Jesus Christ. He received biblical training from Cedarville University, Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary, and also Grace Seminary. He received a Doctor of Ministry there. He’s a fellow and a board member with ACBC. He enjoys woodworking and riding his Gold Wing with his wife, Sherry. He has two married daughters. He loves playing in Narnia with his four grandchildren and has served as a pastor at Wheelersburg Baptist Church in Ohio since 1987. Brad, it’s always good to have you on the podcast. Welcome back, brother.
Brad Brandt: Thanks, Dale. It’s a joy to spend this time together with you.
Dale Johnson: It’s always different when we’re normally talking about a passage of Scripture, we’re talking about a counseling issue, or we’re talking about some other issue related to counseling. I think it’s important that we capture the stories of the Lord’s grace in people’s lives, and I want to do that with you today, if we can, just to hear about how you came into the biblical counseling world and you came to serve even as a board member and so on. But first, I want you to start just a little bit even from your bio, your wife, Sherry, a little bit about your family. Tell us a little bit about the man, Brad Brandt and things that you enjoy.
Brad Brandt: It’s always easier to talk about the Word than yourself as biblical counselors, we get that, but I understand our lives are like a window through which we could look to see truth, and that’s true of all of us.
In my life, I grew up in a family. My parents were very moral. They were both schoolteachers. My father was actually a high school guidance counselor, so I was exposed to counseling in the home. I mean, we were always talking about problems and issues and conversations around the dinner table and so forth. Also, we were part of a liberal church the first 10 years of my life. It was a church that taught basically that if you lived a good life, you live like Jesus, you go to heaven. Jesus was an example, but not a Savior. I didn’t even really have a concept of salvation. In God’s kindness my dad had to go back to get additional education, which meant we had to move. And my parents picked the church in the city we landed in because my mom liked the steeple. They were not thinking spiritually, but in God’s providence, it was a church that taught the gospel and committed to expository preaching and so forth. God regenerated me as a young boy and instantly gave me a love for His Word. My wife, eventually, Sherry, came into that same community. We were sweethearts in high school, and God saved her and gave us a family eventually with our kids.
But it went back in terms of my exposure to biblical counseling. It started by seeing the power of the word in a church that really embraced the gospel and a pastor that really modeled what biblical ministry looks like. This may be jumping ahead a little bit in the story, I decided to go off to college at Cedarville. I was planning to be a medical doctor, but my pastor, before I left for college, said, I think you should be a pastor. And I said, that’s just not what God has in store for me. And there were some things that happened shortly after that that really captured my attention. One, I started taking cell biology and calculus and all that, which was fine, but I realized I don’t really like the sight of blood very well. Got a real problem going on if I’m going to be a medical doctor. And so, then I had to humble myself and go back to my pastor and say, you know, I think you’re right. I think God is preparing me for a life of ministering His Word, and that’s sort of jumping ahead to the rest of the story. Eventually, I became a pastor, and we can talk about that. Sherry and I, we’ve been in Wheelersburg, Ohio, since 1987, ministering in Appalachia has interesting dynamics to it that we can talk about, perhaps, but that’s a little bit of my background.
Dale Johnson: That’s always interesting for the record, I think you would have made a wonderful medical doctor, and done that job very well, but the Lord had plans to make you a doctor of another sort of physician of the soul. And I’m grateful for your work in the ministry there as well. I want you to talk a little bit about, you know, your life as a man. Maybe you were married, I’m not really sure, at that point, before you understood biblical counseling and started to pursue concepts of biblical soul care that you know are so common to us now. What was life like before that?
Brad Brandt: Yeah, I was firmly convinced of the power of the Word of God because I saw, coming out of a liberal church background, the difference that the Bible made. I was convinced going off to college that the word of God was powerful, authoritative, and inerrant. I wanted to invest my life in it. I love the Word of God. I love working with people. But I was exposed to, as I mentioned, my father’s background. I was exposed to what I didn’t know, the label but the integrational type of counseling pretty early on. When I was in seminary to prepare to be a pastor, I was involved in student affairs work, and a lot of the things that we learned were from an integrational perspective, and then really Dale, on the top of that the thing that really got me was I knew the statistics. I knew how many men were falling out of the ministry because of moral failure, and often in the context of counseling. So, I was really opposed to counseling. As a pastor, I determined when I became a pastor I just wasn’t going to counsel. Expository preaching, discipling people, or working with men, but not counseling. And that didn’t work well. It didn’t work well because after about six years of pastoring, the church was growing, the building program, and people were coming. I was just overwhelmed with problems, and I didn’t know what to do about them, and frankly, I didn’t want to get involved in dealing with them. And by my own bent, I’m a peace-faker rather than a peacemaker, so I hoped the problems would go away, and they didn’t, and there was a crisis brewing in the church and in my own life. Am I going to really see that the Bible has answers for the problems in my life and am I willing to go get the training necessary to really begin to be what I like to think of as an Acts 20:20 type of Minister where I minister the word, not just publicly, but house to house, one on one. And that led to seeking biblical counseling training in about year seven as a pastor is when I went off and from an ACBC, then NANC Training Center, Clear Creek Chapel in Ohio. And it just transformed so many things, personally, family, church and so forth. But that’s really when it began to happen.
Dale Johnson: I want to boil down, if I can, a little bit on that part of the story because this is a common thing that I hear, particularly with pastors. They get out very excited. They believe solid doctrinally. They preach the Word very solidly, but then they start to realize a lot of their ministry is a one-on-one ministry with people, and they’re not really sure where to go, how to think about that was coming to a boiling point for you. And I want you to sort of describe in detail, when those things were happening, how were you introduced to Clear Creek? How were you introduced to some of those concepts? What was, you know, convincing? Okay, yeah, I need to go get some help in these particular areas.
Yeah, it’s certainly the sovereign God in our relationship with Him, which means we are now in a relationship with His people. He used His people in my life. He used my pastor that I grew up under. He was a pastor for 25 years in the same church where God called him to train pastors internationally. I saw what needed to happen. I just didn’t want to be a part of that initially. So, it was through him. It was through relationships with peers of his, John Street was at that time pastoring in Ohio Training Center at Clear Creek Chapel, Tim Pasma was a part of the training center there. Tim and I still chuckle to this day when I was going through the training under those men, I just was very skeptical, because, again, I had been exposed to more of an integration approach. And I’m like, yes, but I know that the Bible has answers, but… what about chemical imbalance? What about all these other issues? And they smiled and just gently said let’s work through those issues. I began as a skeptic and came out as an apologist just for biblical counseling on the other side of the training because I really saw the answers.
It was through relationships with those key people and seeing the difference that it made. I should throw into this into the equation. I love the church, Sherry, and I’ve been at Wheelersburg Baptist again for 36 years, but it was just on the other side of the training that we went through a really nasty split. We lost a third of our congregation. I remember sitting down with John Street during that season just talking about what was going on in the church. Again, for me, problems were something to avoid prior to biblical counseling training. Now I’m beginning to see problems or opportunities to see God work, and it was those relationships where I began to ask, how did it work in your situation when you went through difficult church challenges, and that’s sort of an unexpected blessing. It was not just content and biblical counseling training but relationships with people then that become peers, friends, fellow servants with whom you can work on issues when they come up in life and ministry.
Dale Johnson: I love hearing the details of this, that story, and the particular ways in which the Lord’s providence was worked out in your own life. As I think about the impact of biblical counseling, even in my life, it’s tremendous. And that’s always hard to summarize, but I’m going to ask you to do that, Brad. How has biblical counseling and some of these concepts impactful to your life on a personal level and a pastoral level? And what have you seen as far as its impact on your church?
Brad Brandt: Well, we all minister in a context, so I’m ministering in Appalachia. Southern Ohio is culturally similar to Kentucky, West Virginia, and people think differently in that part of the country than they would, you know, we’re recording this out in California. I remember some of the obstacles that I faced. I remember asking a young man when I became the pastor there; he became an intern, and I said, help me to understand how people think in southern Ohio and Appalachian. He said, “Let me tell you a story so on when on Friday nights before football games, we would always play a song, ‘Thank God I’m a Redneck.’ Redneck is not a derogatory term for us around here.” That really helped me to begin to see I’m not in Kansas or I’m not in western Ohio, or West Central Ohio, where I’d grown up, was very different from Appalachia. The preacher-boy mentality was really strong when I walked down the street in Wheelersburg, a small community, “Hey, Preacher Brad.” Now, I wasn’t opposed to that, preaching as a part of what I did, but I grew up under a pastor, a pastor who ministered the Word, who loved his people and so forth. And I began to realize, in the context where I’m serving preacher means more than I’m realized at first, what they expected of me was to get up in front on Sunday and talk and not go too long, but don’t be talking to me about my marriage on Tuesday. You’re the preacher. You’re not the pastor, certainly not a counselor.
The other thing in our context was the whole revival system; twice a year, a lot of the churches have signs out front that say “revival in progress.” And I would get pressured: when are we going to have revival meetings again? We’ve always had revival meetings. I came into an established church. It was established in 1878 so it was 109 years old when I came. We’ve always had revivals. And, of course, the revival system is built on this idea that in churches for fire and brimstone, preaching evangelistic Sunday morning messages, people come to know Christ. Next week, another fire and brimstone message. How are we going to grow these people? Twice a year, we bring in someone to revive the saints by preaching messages that will help them grow. Well, as I looked at the Scriptures and this is the foundation for biblical counseling. Our mission is to make disciples, not get decisions. And we get disciples and make disciples by teaching them everything the Lord has given to us. So that was an oil and water don’t mix difference. Are we going to be a biblical church, or are we going to be a subcultural Baptist Church in Appalachia, where we just do the system? And all of that contributed to how I began to think about biblical counseling.
Biblical counseling is not a slice of the pie. It’s not we have men’s ministries, women’s ministries, music ministries, youth, and then we have biblical counseling, it’s a mindset for how we do everything we do. And so, I came out of the training realizing that this is what ministry is supposed to look like. The church is the context where God changes people through His Word and relationships with one another. It was so liberating, Dale, to see that I don’t have to have the latest program to figure out how to do church. I have the word of God, and I have His Spirit living in me, and the body has the gifts that are necessary. So, let’s begin to just be that kind of a church in Appalachia. It was exciting to watch how God worked and began to change me, my family, the church, and eventually in the communities we became a training center and so forth.
Dale Johnson: It’s so good to hear the story of God’s faithfulness and how biblical counseling this concept has sort of impacted you. You’ve become so convinced of it that all these years later, you’re still very, very heavily involved, and you’re convinced that this concept works when we think about the Bible, implementing the Bible in the lives of people, seeing the hope that’s truly provided. You serve on our board, as I mentioned before, very faithfully. You’ve written several booklets. You teach at many of our training centers and the CDTs that are offered by ACBC. Why is it that you’re still convinced, and even after all these years of pastoring that biblical counseling in its concept, using the Scriptures, that it actually works?
Brad Brandt: You know, when a counselee, I first meet with a counselee, they’ll often say, I really feel so badly that you have to hear what I’m about to tell you about my life. And I always will stop them at that point and say, listen, don’t take this wrong. But I’m really not here about you. I have the privilege to be meeting with you now because of God. I get the privilege to see what God is going to do in the situation that you’re facing right now. And I’m just the middleman. I get the privilege to partner with Him, to be a tool in His hands, to minister in this situation in which you find yourself. Well, that’s the same; I really don’t know what I’m doing as a pastor; after 36 years, I still feel like I don’t even really know what I’m doing. I had no 10-year plan to become a biblical counselor or to establish a training center, or to start writing or traveling internationally or doing any of this. I just have the privilege of watching God work.
I love Colossians 1, “Whom we preach, warning every man and teaching every man with all wisdom that we may present everyone complete in Christ, under which we labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily. ” So, I do biblical counseling just because of God. God is at work in people’s lives, and He privileges me to be a small part of that and to mobilize a local church. And on a maybe a side note to that, is just what a privilege to see a joyful church develop as the word of God is seen as sufficient and priority in the way we live and function, there’s incredible joy in the congregation. Again, contrast what church looked like before, lots of people coming three decades ago, lots of things happening, and I was churning on the inside. I remember making a list of 58 things I needed to do that week about people I needed to see and problems to address. I had no idea what to do, whereas now still 58 things that need to happen this week, but just trying to be faithful with what God’s up to in and through His church. And so, it’s not a cliche. Why do I do biblical counseling? It’s really about God. I just I love Him and what He’s done for me, and want to be keeping in step, as Galatians said, with His Spirit and the work that He’s accomplishing in my little part of His vineyard.
Dale Johnson: I love that description, even as you described it. It is really is an opportunity for us to have a front-row seat to watch God work in the lives of people. And I’m just telling you, there’s nothing more satisfying to me, personally, than when I sit in the room with somebody, and you watch as the word does its work in their heart. They come back from that week working in the Word, and they see their life changed. And now you see a twinkle of hope in their eye that they’ve not experienced in a long time, and they continue to grow. And then you hear stories of that faithfulness in their growth. I mean, there’s nothing in the world like that. You get a front-row seat where you get to see God with His Word, by His Spirit, get to work in the lives of individuals who are once broken, and God brings beauty out of ashes. And that’s just what our God does. He’s done it with our lives, and He’s doing it with so many.
Brad, this has been really, really fun. I’ve enjoyed going down memory lane, talking about the providence of the Lord in your life. And I rejoice in that, in the way in which your life has been a letter proclaiming, as Paul says, the glorious riches of Christ So brother, thank you for your time. Thanks for sharing the story.
Brad Brandt: You’re very welcome. Thanks for the privilege.
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