Dale Johnson: This week, our Journeys to Biblical Counseling is featuring brother Tim Pasma. He’s ministered at LaRue Baptist Church in LaRue, Ohio since the spring of 1985. He’s married to Rebecca and God has blessed them with three sons, three daughters, three daughters-in-law, a son-in-law, and 14 quite active grandchildren. Pastor Tim earned his B.A. from Cedarville University in 1977 and his MDiv from Grace Theological Seminary. He serves as an ACBC fellow and he’s on the board of ACBC as well. He lectures frequently on counseling issues and at counseling conferences for a number of Christian organizations. I’ve been delighted to get to know Tim, as he is a board member, and we enjoy lots of good fellowship together. Tim, I’m so grateful that you’re here and I’m really looking forward to our time together today and hearing the Lord’s story in your life.
Tim Pasma: Great. I’m excited about this. My journey to biblical counseling is something that has been life-transforming for me.
Dale Johnson: We need to capture those things and I’m so grateful that we’re doing that now and getting to hear from guys like you, Tim, and the way the Lord used you very early on in the movement with NANC, which is now ACBC. I want you to give us a little bit of a background, if you can, on your story. I’ve gotten to hear some of these stories just as I probe and ask you questions, which is always intriguing. Tell us a little bit about your background so we can understand a little bit more about Tim Pasma.
Tim Pasma: All right, well, I grew up in a Christian home. In fact, my dad was a pastor. If you would have talked about counseling back then, which would have been in the 60s and 70s, it was just not heard of. Pastors would talk to people, and I know my dad would, but I don’t think he ever did any “counseling.” He was part of that generation, the fundamentalist generation, that tended not to think in those terms, I guess you might say. I might have seen some books by Henry Brandt on his shelf, but counseling never really connected with me nor did I connect it to ministry. As everyone says, I wasn’t intending to go into pastoral ministry, but God changed my course in college. I was really interested in history and politics and so forth, and that’s where I was going, but God changed my direction and I went to Grace Theological Seminary.
Now look, I went to a school, Cedarville College, that was not a friend to biblical counseling, and in my freshman year, 1973, Jay Adams came to Cedarville to do the Staley Lectureships. Now, I’m just a kid out of high school, and I remember Jay speaking in Chapel every day and I’m sitting in Chapel just going “Ah, this is just so boring. When are we going to get out of here?” I had no interest in, nor could conceive of anything to do with counseling. I thought, “It’s just sad, that’s something else, I’m just not interested in that.” Jay, of course, because of what he said, stirred the waters. Cedarville, at that time, had an integrationist approach to counseling, so I came out of school thinking of Jay: “What a nut, who possibly could believe that the Bible has answers for these questions?” So that’s where I was after college.
I went to Seminary, and of course, Seminary was good, I learned a lot and learned the languages, but we only had one class in pastoral theology in which we did things like going to the funeral home and seeing what those guys do and talking about baptism. The only time we talked about counseling was just for a matter of a day or so and It really wasn’t anything but maybe a quick survey of the different schools. So, when it came to counseling, there really wasn’t anything there. That was in 1981 when I graduated from seminary. In 1985 I went to LaRue, which is where I am still. I came out of Seminary with what I would say is a typical view of ministry, which is: you disappear in your office, you do your exegesis for 40-plus hours a week, you come out, you preach sermons, the church is happy, the church grows. And that’s the model we got in seminary because, frankly, in Seminary Chapel you don’t get some guy who’s pastoring a church to 75 people to speak. You get the big-name guys, and what do they do? Well, they have staff to do all the other stuff and they study and preach. That’s the model we came out with. Well, within a year, I was just dying because people were coming to me with problems and I didn’t have any idea what to say to them.
Dale Johnson: That’s what I want to dive into because there are a lot of young pastors who are listening out there who have graduated from Seminary and, often, seminaries don’t teach counseling. They rather do a pastoral counseling approach where they may talk about some of the pastoral ministry responsibilities that you mentioned. They may give a lecture or two on pastoral care. The typical method is “defer and refer” because there’s somebody else to do that. That’s what you’re describing. I want people to hear how you, as a minister in LaRue, started to see this unwind and unfold and how you were challenged with things that you maybe didn’t feel prepared for. I want you to describe that because a lot of guys who are listening to this are going to resonate with what I’ve heard about your story.
Tim Pasma: Now look, I wouldn’t trade my seminary education for anything. I think we need to know the languages. We need to know Systematic Theology. We need to know those things, but it’s very academic. Here’s a way of thinking about it: the Bible is a book of problems, solve the problems and you’re ready to minister. Right? What did this text mean to the original audience? And again, what you end up doing is just giving these lectures on Paul and the Corinthians rather than taking one more step, which is, what did God intend this text to do with the present audience? So there’s this idea of the Bible, not as a book of answers, but a book of problems. Solve the problems and you’re ready to minister. Ministry is typically preaching and teaching.
And somehow, now looking back, I wonder, how is it that we don’t talk about people? How is it that we’re not talking about what I’ve got to learn so I can minister to people? People are the ministry. I came out thinking that teaching and preaching were the ministry, not people. So with that kind of paradigm, you’re not equipped to handle the problems that people are coming to you with, and so you’re lost. For example, Philippians 2, the kenosis passage. What are we supposed to do? We scratch our heads and say, “How can Jesus empty himself and still be God?” Well, that passage is essentially saying, “be like Jesus.” Yes, we have to answer questions such as the kenosis theory, and we have to deal with that, but the primary thrust is, “You, be like Jesus.” But we’re not taught to approach the Scripture that way. So, you’re not doing it in your preaching, and you’re certainly not doing it in your ministering to people because you’re thinking, “I just need to minister the word of God publicly.” Is that making sense? I hope I’m answering the question.
Dale Johnson: Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Now I want you to take us sort of into your ministry in LaRue and help us to see where in the way I’ve heard you describe it before, people started coming to you with some of these issues and you thought, “Man, I’m much more comfortable behind the pulpit that I am behind my desk.” So take us there, to that place, because I want us to get a sense of what life was like for you before you came to biblical counseling and understanding pastoral ministry a little bit better. Take us to that place.
Tim Pasma: To summarize it quickly, it was miserable. Within about a year, I was about ready to throw in the towel because I thought, “How can I help these people? I didn’t know how.” It was so frustrating, and I didn’t have the mindset of people being the ministry. They were just there interfering with mystery, and that was my mindset if you can believe it. So, I was frustrated. I didn’t know what to say. I was about ready to quit. I was thinking, “I am preaching the word of God. I am studying. Why isn’t this helping them? Why aren’t we growing? I must be doing something wrong.”
Years later, a dear friend, Randy Patten, a familiar name to all of us, once said to me at the turning point in the ministry for me, “Tim, you have to understand that a successful ministry is not a ministry without problems. It’s a ministry that solves problems God’s way.” That was like a turning point for me later. So, it was a miserable existence. I would just rather avoid people because I didn’t know what to say, and frankly, one of the idols of my own heart is that I don’t want to look stupid. I thought, “I can’t help, what am I going to do?” So it was very very difficult.
So I got a pamphlet from a friend of mine, and I had gone to College and Seminary with Russ. Russ then sends me this pamphlet. He’d gone to Faith Baptist Church in Lafayette, Indiana and took their counseling course, so he sends me this pamphlet. And I’m desperate. I am desperate. So I’m looking at it and reading it thinking, “Oh, yeah. That looks good. Oh, yeah,” flip the page, “that looks good. Yeah, that’s what I need. Wow, that’s good.” I turned the pamphlet over, and on the very back of the page was a picture of Jay Adams endorsing that program, and I thought, “Oh, no, no, not the nut.” Well, and this is me and my arrogance and I fully confess this; I said “Well nut or not, they’ve probably got something I can learn.” Little did I know that what I learned would transform my family, my marriage, and my relationship with my children; our whole church started down the road of real, what I would call real biblical ministry: real ministry. Like I said, I would have thrown in the towel, but that fundamentals course fundamentally changed me, our family, and our church.
Dale Johnson: Now, I want you to talk about some of those moments, because there’s a lot to the story in the way God providentially brought you to this particular place. This pamphlet is in your lap, you heard Jay Adams speak before, and there were some other people even around your area who encouraged you to go with them to Faith. Talk about some of those moments in how you began to learn biblical counseling and how you began to see it capture your heart and your mind and even change your pastoral ministry. Describe some of those meetings in the early days at Faith.
Tim Pasma: This would have been a four-hour trip for me. I would leave on Sunday night, and I would stay overnight with some retired missionaries, and then the next day go to the training program and then go home at night. It was a big investment on my part. It would be three hours of lecture, 9:00-12:00, and then during lunch, we had a case study book. We had two cases assigned and we would do those and discuss that. Then from 2:00 until 9:00 we were scheduled to observe the counseling, and so that was really, really, really helpful in terms of learning. It wasn’t that Pastor Good, Randy Patten, Kim Turner, or Dr. Bob Smith were teaching us anything radical, they just said, “Here, let’s open the Bible and see what it says.” It just blew me away. Because first being taught it and then seeing it in practice; how the Bible addresses the deepest problems.
Some of the cases we’d observe were just the wildest, like “Boy, if that would have come into my office, I don’t know what I would have done.” It was amazing to see that there was nothing radical. It was just, “Let’s look at the book again,” and looking at the book in the way it was intended. I’ve become convinced that we have to approach the Bible with a pastoral hermeneutic because the Bible was written to particular situations for particular people. Even the Psalms were written for particular situations. So I got a different view of the Bible that was just mind-blowing. The point of my conversion to biblical counseling was this: in a lecture, Dr. Bob Smith, dear man, said, “If you’re going to say that psychology is necessary for helping people, then you have to admit that Jesus Christ left the church ill-equipped for 1900 years until a God-hater by the name of Sigmund Freud came along and taught us how people really operate.” To me, that was incredibly profound. I could not argue with that. From that moment on, I was convinced of it and knew that the Bible is sufficient. It is sufficient. Why have I not seen this?
Dale Johnson: Now talk a little bit more about how biblical counseling has impacted your life. You went through this massive transition, and I dare to ask what Becca was seeing. Becca is your wife. What was she seeing as Tim learned all this and how it transformed your ministry? Talk about how it impacted your life.
Tim Pasma: Becca and I often say this, we were married for nine years; we’d been married nine years when I went to Lafayette in 1986. We’d been married nine years and we didn’t know what the purpose of marriage was. So I came away saying, “One flesh. It’s about companionship.” And you do the exegesis of Genesis 2 and walk away saying, “Oh that’s what marriage is about. It’s about companionship.” So, I come home and said, “Honey, we’ve got to change around here. The kids can’t be the center. We have to get them to bed at a certain time so that we can have time together.” It affected the way we chose to do our kids’ sports. To all three of the boys at that time, “We can’t get you in everything because that’s going to take away time for us.” Becca loved it. She absolutely loved it because there was now purpose. I mean, there was purpose in raising our children, but I was so utterly frustrated, thinking, “What do I do with these kids?” And then I came home and I’m saying, “You know what? I’ve learned from the Bible that we ought to have a goal.” So here’s the one I memorized: we ought to have a goal; we need to produce independent godly disciples who love God and love others and who can handle life by handling God’s Word. That mantra became part of a goal. Now we had a purpose in raising our kids, and so we started communicating. I learned, well, I can’t climb up any more of our problems. I’ve got to talk about them, which, I was a climb-upper and all that kind of stuff, so all of that transformed our relationship with one another and with our kids.
Now, it’s saying to our church, “Hey, the Bible has answers for our problems, not just individually but congregationally, and it gives us directions —what to do when problems arise in the congregation. What does the Bible tell us to do about it? So we learned together. Look, if the Bible says that someone is stubborn in their sin, we have to go after them. If they remain stubborn after much pleading and working, well, then, discipline has to be a part of it, it has to be loving. For example, Ephesians 4:26 says, “Hey, if two of you are angry, don’t let the sun go down on your anger and give the Devil a foothold.” Okay, well look, I would say to the congregation things like, “You know what it takes to split a church? Two of you going to bed angry overnight, and Satan will get a foothold, and he can split this church wide open. So, we have to deal with our personal problems between one another and we have to do it quickly. And, of course, we taught people how to handle problems.
Here’s how it revolutionized the ministry: we’re not just there to hear sermons. We have come and we are joined together in this body to help one another grow and change. Our goal is to produce people, is to make disciples. What are disciples? Disciples are people who translate truth into life. That’s what it’s about. So it’s all about changing, and so my sermons are about that, and our whole body’s about that. Again, we’ve got to love one another. What does love look like? All these things just utterly transformed us.
Can I tell you a story? Just this last summer, a vibrant young woman in our congregation spent half of her childhood in my house. She’s married. She has a toddler. She was six months pregnant and married for three years. She dies. Just dies suddenly. That was hard. That was hard on all of us. But man, the church just sprung into action without sign-up sheets, without saying, “Okay, we got to take care of the toddler until Cam, her husband, comes home from drill and we’ve got to take care of her and we’ve got to be ready to talk and offer comfort to Cam. And guys Cam’s age now surround him to help him. The night Cam comes home, we’re waiting for him and one of the young guys in our congregation, Joe, comes along and says, “Pastor, should I stay overnight with Cam and Gwen, their little toddler?” and I said, “Joe that would be great.” So Cam comes home, and we’re talking to him and trying to minister comfort to him in the midst of it, and at one point, Joe says, “Well, look, I brought my Bible and my hymn book, and I’m going to stay overnight unless you tell me not to.” Now, I think, that has grown out of Joe growing up in a congregation that knows, hey, we’re not just here to hear sermons. We have to minister to one another. So, just things like that happen because I think of what biblical counseling has done.
Dale Johnson: It’s always fun to me to talk about story time and one of my favorite things to do, honestly, is to sit and hear the works of God among His people, and I love hearing your testimony and describing how this training really transformed your home life, and how it transformed your pastoral ministry. You’re still very involved in the biblical counseling movement today. You serve on our board of trustees, you’re out teaching on many weekends about the Scriptures, what the Scriptures say, and what the Scriptures call us to. Talk a little bit about why it is that you’re still involved. Why you’re still convinced that biblical counseling is a good, healthy direction, and why is it really healthy for our churches and for us personally?
Tim Pasma: Let’s see if I can get it all in a little bit here… I think number one, biblical counseling is nothing more and nothing less than soul care. The reason why I am so committed to teaching, and I would teach more if I had more opportunities, is that I say, “Pastors, look, this is what pastoring is all about. It’s about taking care of the sheep. It’s not just about feeding them. It’s binding up their wounds. It’s helping them. It’s getting them back so that they can function in the way the Lord Jesus wants them.” So I’m really committed to this because I think of pastors, and I hope some of you pastors are out there. I learned how to shepherd the flock. That’s what it is.
And here’s another reason: biblical counseling is all about fulfilling the Great Commission. What did Jesus say? “Go out and make disciples,” teaching them what? “To obey,” and that’s what counseling is. It’s part of the whole church ministry. It’s an intensive way of teaching people how to obey the Lord Jesus in the crises of their life, and then the rest of the church ministry is also about teaching you to obey Jesus. That’s why I’m so committed to it. It’s what the church is all about. We could talk about the history, but the church, over the last couple of generations, has lost a central part of biblical church life, and biblical counseling captures that and says, “We got to get back into that.”
Dale Johnson: Tim, this is really helpful. I know it’s an encouragement to my heart to hear your story, how the Lord brought you from places that you were, good training, good teaching, and then now to see the fruit of your ministry in LaRue, Ohio, and extend so much beyond that. What an encouragement. I hope for some young ministers out there, they can hear your story, be encouraged, and see the scriptures the way you’ve described. Not just in the preaching, which is so important, and you’re not pulling away from the centrality of the preaching of it, but it is about the Word; ministering the Word so that people can be transformed into the image of the Lord Jesus and display that glory across the earth like the waters cover the sea. This has been really, really fun for me, Tim. I’m really grateful, and I’m glad that now other people are going to hear your story that so encourages me.
Tim Pasma: I appreciate that, Dale. I’m fired up about this topic. I really am. I love talking about it, and I love teaching it because I think it’s so necessary.
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