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Honoring Our Heritage

Truth in Love 500

A refection on the early years of ACBC and journey to where we are today.

Jan 20, 2025

Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast. I have with me, Dr. Howard Eyrich. He’s a retired Pastor of counseling at Briarwood Presbyterian Church. He currently serves as director of DMin in biblical counseling at Birmingham Theological Seminary, and he’s a professor for Masters University of Divinity. He’s also an ACBC fellow and an Academy Member. He has education from Bob Jones; He received his BA there at Bob Jones. He has an ED from Faith Theological Seminary, at THM from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a DMin from Western Theological Seminary. He’s done PhD studies at California Coast University, and he’s done post-doctoral studies in gerontology at the University of Georgia. Howard, it is so good to have you here on this 500th edition of Truth and Love. And today, we’re celebrating and honoring our heritage, and I thought you’d be a great person to help us to do that. Well brother, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here with us all.

Howard Eyrich: Thank you, Dale. It’s good to be here.

Dale Johnson: Man, it’s encouraging to me, Howard, how you are continuing to study all of these formal pieces of education. I want to talk to you at some point about the gerontology studies. That’s really interesting to me, but that’s not our task today. What I want to talk about today is looking back and honoring our heritage with ACBC, the history, as we began in 1976 with NANC. I want to get this started with just a personal reflection, Howard. One of the most exciting and fun things that I get to do is sit down with people, just like you, who were there in the early days. And I love just to ask questions to hear some of the stories from early on. Today, we’re going to let our listeners in on some of those personal conversations that we’ve had in the past. The first question I want to ask, Howard, is just to give a reflection. You were trained directly by Jay. You were in the room very early on. What was that training? Maybe you can give us a favorite story of your training with Jay. I think that would be a good way to start in honoring today.

Howard Eyrich: I enjoyed doing that at the training program at CCEF, which is where Jay was working at that point in Ministry. It consisted of 10 weeks and when I took it, you didn’t have a class. You came in at noon and the secretary would take your dinner order. Then she would assign you to two cases to observe in that day. And so, at one o’clock, we’d start counseling and maybe two observers were in each counseling session; Jay was counseling, George Scipione was counseling, and that was about it at that point, sometimes, John Bettler (sometimes, but not very often John). So, I drew two of Jay’s cases. I was sitting there with Jay and these two cases, and about halfway through one of those cases—which was a marital case—the couple was late arriving. And I often tell this story to my classes: I said, I don’t know where I got the nerve to do this, but I turned to Jay and I said, “Jay, if I come back and take this seminar a second time would you let me sit in that seat and counsel. And you sit over there and observe and coach me.” Right from the very beginning, I was to call him Jay, with a very casual relationship. And I picked up on some unique things pretty quickly. I’m an observer of people. So, I picked up very quickly that if Jay was going to say yes to something, he had little quirky grin that would come on his face. And so, I knew before he said, “yes”, he was going to say, “yes.” He turned to me, and he said, “Yes, Howard, I will do that for you.” And so, I came back and took the seminar a second time and drew a counseling case with a married couple. Jay is sitting there in my elbow, and about the third or fourth session in with that couple Jay said, “Howard, could I say something.” And I said, “Of course, sir.” Picture the “Y diagram,” and me going down the right side of the Y, with that couple. Jay backed it up to the junction and turned it down the left side of the Y and restarted that direction, and just turned it over to me, and never said another word—He just turned it back to me. And then, when we got to the supper seminar that afternoon from 4:00 to 6:00, which was the next sequence in the counseling day, Jay never offered a critique. The other observer reported what had happened, and I just went with that counseling case, going down that Y. And I’ve often told my students, “The man was a master teacher and joy to work with, he really was.” But we would have counseling from 1:00 to 4:00, and then at 4:00, the secretary would bring in the separate orders, and we would sit around that table. If I were the counselor and you were my observer, you reported what the case was and what I did. Then, I had to defend it. And I’ll tell you, Dale, I still think that was one of the best learning modules I’ve ever participated in. And after I did that, I was later hired by CCEF one day a week, to start with and then full-time. I became regular counseling staff and did that for five or six years with CCEF. And then they moved me south, which we’ll talk about later. And I continued to do that training program in the same manner. Then I moved to Miami, and I did the same thing. Then I wanted to move to St. Louis, I did the same thing. So, for about 20 or 25 years, I did that kind of training Monday after Monday after Monday. So that’s one of my favorite stories from those early days. That was 1971 or 1972 (I always have to stop and calculate which year it was).

Dale Johnson: Howard, that’s an incredible story. And it’s really interesting to me, as I hear you describe, that it’s really life-on-life discipleship. As you experienced that with learning directly from Jay, and even the other counselors, you know, Skip was in the room. Apparently, you listen to him several times, and just hearing that is just really exciting. It wasn’t you know “mass production.” It’s, “how do we disciple the next person to do this effectively?” You’re doing the counseling; He’s in there observing. You’re reflecting on it a little bit later that afternoon. And just think about the wealth of information that you glean over week after week after week, as you mentioned, even year after year after year. It’s pretty incredible, pretty exciting to think about. Now, I want to leave something open-ended, and just let you sort of run with it here, Howard, as you think about the early days of NANC. You mentioned CCEF, which started as the Christian Counseling Educational Foundation, in 1968. What you described was a story in the early 1970s. NANC started in 1976. Just talk about some of those early days in the movement as biblical counseling was getting going. It was quite a slow process. We certainly didn’t have what we have now as far as digital communication, and things moving at the speed of the internet today. So, talk about some of those early days. I think it’d be good to hear some of your reflections here.

Howard Eyrich: Well as you said, Jay founded NANC in 1976, in conjunction with John Bettler and the rest of the staff at that point in time. And as far as I can remember, there were about 200 attendees at the first conference we did. I don’t remember how we gathered them, except that they were a lot of folks that came who had been through the training program in the previous few years. But Dr. Bettler insisted that NANC had to be separate organization from CCEF to be a viable certifying body. At that meeting, Dr. Bob Smith, a medical doctor, was the volunteer leader that took over until 1981. At that point there was a termination considered for the organization because it was just kind of floundering at that point, and nobody had the time to invest in it. I argued that we should not terminate it; that in our culture stayed in our culture we needed a peer-review body with the best practice standards, in order to have any kind of viable acceptance in the culture in which we live. And as a result, a stipend was established to pay an executive director part-time, and the body appointed me to that role. So, from 1981 to 1987—I’m working for memory, Dale, on dates, but I think that’s pretty close. I became the executive director. By 1987, as department chair of biblical counseling at Covenant Theological Seminar: I was teaching 10 hours a semester. In addition, along with five other pastors, I founded a Biblical Counseling Center in St. Louis. I just no longer had the bandwidth for the role of NANC. At that point, Bill Good was appointed to that role. He had his churches full cooperation and administrative staff. With that support, Bill could take the organization to the next level. I don’t know what word to use, except to say, it was fun to watch it grow at that point. Bill had quite an influence with the regular Baptists. And so, he began to recruit heavily among the regular Baptists; what started out at the Presbyterian organization, pretty soon, became heavily populated by Baptists.  In my opinion, that was really good. Rather than becoming just representing one group, it began to spread and have a broader influence. And then, there was the nature of things along the way of that era, my wife was very much involved. She helped me with administrative work and she and I, basically, were the conference directors in those days. We had one conference in Chicago, and Henry Brandt was lined up to be the keynote speaker at 6:00 that evening. At 10:00 in the morning, Pam and I were in Chicago, going over details, making sure that the hotel had things set up the way we wanted it set up. And I looked up and I said, “Have you heard anything from Henry about when he’s getting in?” And she said, “no.” I said, “You better go call him.” Well, she called Henry, and he answered sending his office back in Florida. Pam said, “Dr. Brandt, you’re supposed to be here in Chicago today to be our keynote speaker tonight. And Henry said, “Oh my, that got past me. I’ll be there.” And I found out later, he kept a go-bag sitting in his office. He grabbed that go-bag and got to the airport. My wife picked him up and got him to the hotel just in time to get him on the platform that night.

Dale Johnson: Oh my goodness. As somebody who runs the conference now, that would be a huge nightmare. You’ve prepared all this, you know, in advance. And then your speaker, who supposed to speak that night, is not showing up. Oh, man that all resonates with me. It’s interesting to think about that, Howard, your responsibility back in those days. And even now in your reflection, as you come to an annual conference to see what the Lord has done. That’s what I want to ask you about some of your observations in terms of growth, because as we reflect, we can see you have to begin somewhere, and then to see now where the Lord has brought us. I mean it’s incredible. And you know people who are now laboring in the modern era… I think we need to appreciate what the Lord has done. That gives us a sense of growing, even today. That kind of stuff just doesn’t happen, right? And that’s not because of us as individuals. It’s because of what the Lord has done over long periods of time and now we get to pick some of the fruit that you guys have labored over for so long. And so, just to hear some of your reflection even on your observations, perspectives that you’ve seen the way biblical counseling grow, the movement itself grow, NANC, or now ACBC in particular grow. Give us some of those reflections, Howard.

Howard Eyrich: Well, like most organizations NANC had challenges. Nonetheless, we experienced slow and steady growth. Churches were increasingly interested in establishing counseling as a particularized Ministry. However, there were not enough trained people to fill the request. I remember one year, I think it was either 1987 or 1988, 6 people or churches inquired me about whether I would consider applying for the role of counseling pastor.  I tend to say conferences continued to grow during that period of time. Then a businessman in Atlanta contacted me (I had family ties in Atlanta at that point) about opening a free-standing center near in Atlanta. At that time Jay Adams had moved to Macon, Georgia and attended First Presbyterian Church. So, during the 1976 and 1977 school year, this businessman paid for one day a week of my salary and paid for a weekly round trip plane fare for me to commute from Philadelphia to Atlanta. So, I would teach our training class on Monday. Back in the second year I was at CCEF, they asked me to develop a training class in the mornings. I would teach a class from 10:00 to 12:00, which eventually Wayne Mack took over, when I moved South. So, I taught the class from 10:00 to 12:00 Monday and Thursday, and then from 1:00pm to 4:00pm, we engage in the supper seminar from 4:00 to 6:00. We’d counsel on Monday nights until 9:00pm. And on Thursdays, I head to the airport instead of counseling and head for Atlanta. My father-in-law would pick me up at the airport when I get in and take me home. And then the next, he’d take me to the office there. And so that’s how we started the ministry in Atlanta and Macon. In Macon, that was an interesting experience because those first years in Macon, I’d work up to a 10-hour day teaching and training, and then try to catch a flight home. The first year, I was doing it from the south. So, you just kind of stressed yourself to get things going, so to speak. Then they moved me south. I had a contract between Macon and Atlanta, which was all under CCEF’s offices for those three years. I built a house between Macon and Atlanta and commuted to both of them. Then, a young man named Andy Boswell approached me and asked me about doing an internship. So, he came on staff with us, and we made enough money out of funds from the counseling ministry to pay Andy.  Andy would travel to Macon with me as well and counsel with me. So, he would do a day’s worth of counseling and then on the drive home that night somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00, we’d do a download of his cases, and I’d do my supervision with him while he drove home. I often look back on those days and think, “How in the world did we pull all that off?” So, by 1980 the center at Macon Church had grown sufficiently to become a full-time operation. Jim Beard, the pastor, took a call to Miami at Granada Presbyterian Church. He asked me to join him on his staff and develop a counseling ministry in Miami. So, the church in Macon called Dr. John Grawley, who moved from Philadelphia and had finished his doctoral work. And I remember he served eight years with the church in Macon, while we went on to Miami.

The ongoing challenge to maintain purity became evident at Macon, because the director who followed Dr. Grawley, he led the ministry into integration. The ministry began to dissipate. By 1981, I had moved Miami and within 90 days the counseling schedule was full. And during the next four years, it continued that way. We had that during those years in Macon and in Miami. I continued that same training program we had done in CCEF in Philadelphia. we replicated it week after week, the only difference was that the program was limited to six people per week instead of 12. I just didn’t have the time for a bigger group. Lay people joined the pastors and missionaries for teaching and training. Each participated, observing cases of them as I had mentioned earlier. This training program was frequently popular with Hispanic pastors. So, we began to move biblical counseling into that community. The Spanish-speaking were frequent counselees, as well as Granada. And within this past year, one of those counselees from those days in Grenada, inquired if I would be their supervisor for ACBC third phase supervision. In addition to Granada, I began teaching a lay counseling classes in Sunday School curriculum, and regularly recruited our elders, and our deacons to participate in those training sessions that we did. Then I continued that when I moved to Briarwood and taught a lay training class every year for my entire career from there on, until I “retired” at 78. The Atlanta Biblical Counseling Center was maintained by Pastor Howard Dial. When I moved to Macon, we kind of closed the office, but Dr. Dial continued to use the counseling center as an extension of his church. Then I was offered a sabbatical in the 1985-86 school year and went to Athens, Georgia to go the University of Georgia. And a young man named a Lou Priolo contacted me and asked about engaging in an internship. So, we worked out a kind of arrangement. I raised half the funds to supporting to begin with, and I raised a handful of money for operational expenses. Dr. Dial provided office space in his church and Lou Priolo moved to Atlanta and took over the Atlanta Biblical Counseling Center, which he then ran for the next 10 years. And I served as his board chairman during those 10 years. So, I maintained contact with Lou. During that time, Lou developed a mentoring relationship with Jay, who by that time who was living in South Carolina. Others like Ron Allchin in Chicago were developing biblical counseling, in areas throughout various parts of the country through innovative options, established into Nouthetic Counseling Ministries, and building NANC. I don’t honestly remember the numbers of NANC, all I know is we continued to see a growing presence.

Then in 1998, another unusual opportunity occurred: Trinity Theological Seminary, the old online school, recruited me to teach biblical counseling. I was hesitant about the school’s uniqueness as that at that point distance education was kind of an anomaly. But nonetheless, as executive director of NANC, I had an unbelievable number of calls from people: “How do I get training in Nouthetic counseling?” So, I saw the Trinity program as an opportunity to do as a delivery system. You wouldn’t believe it unless you went back in cabinet numbers, but over that period of time, 20 years or so, we had more than 3,000 people go through those various training programs and degrees through the old Trinity. Then when Heath Lambert proposed the name change, I was actually an early supporter of that. I personally had a strong affinity for Nouthetic, but the word did not have a reference point to the general populace. Like behaviorism has a reference point to population. Nouthetic didn’t have any reference point. So, once it is explained to people, the uniqueness of the approach would make sense. But for the average pew-dweller, the word was enigmatic. Biblical counseling, while not as definitive, was nonetheless more broadly understood. This contributed to the rapid growth under Heath’s leadership and beyond. One current example of growth and influence is a recent, ACBC supervisee here, in Alabama, through being a volunteer with the HR to run some small groups for them and as being a certified biblical counselor, they have now begun to refer their counseling cases to her. It is quite interesting to reach into that community, as a biblical counselor, because she had already laid the groundwork by being a volunteer. And when she gets certified, they just recognized and valued her. So, they began to use her, and I still have the opportunity to coach her, even though she’s finished her ACBC training. Every once in a while, she’ll send me a case and say, “Help me with this one, would you please?” So, yeah.

Dale Johnson: That’s really neat to see. You know, I like that final piece where you’re showing that there has become some level of respectability. I have a story like that from when I was when I was leading Ministry in Florida. We had a Circuit Judge who came to our church and wanted to, you know, use us so that he could court order people to come to our counseling ministry. And we were sitting eating barbecue one day; It was the Circuit Judge, me, and my pastor and I was telling him, “Judge, you know, we’re not licensed by the state.” And he said, “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m the authority. And wherever I tell them to go, that’s where they have to go. How long do you want them?” And we were dealing with domestic violence offenders, and we were dealing with those who’ve been caught in what was called drug court at the time. And so, yeah, I mean, you’re starting to see a level of respectability because his response was, “I see what we’re doing in the in the governmental system and it’s not working. We have a revolving door in the jail system, and I see what you guys are doing and you’re making some impact in the community. And so, I want to send them there.” And we actually saw several people come to Faith through that ministry as well, which is really fun. So, it’s exciting to see that level of growth. You know, that that’s happening with the respectability.

Howard Eyrich: So, I’ll add one more story there that reinforces that. Birmingham Theological Seminary has developed a ministerial degree program that we teach inside the prison system in Alabama. I get to teach three counseling classes in it. I teach intro, marriage and family, and advance counseling in that program. In fact, if you’ll check Faith magazine, in the next issue of Faith magazine, there’s going to be a story in there about the program. It’s actually been transforming the particular prison in which the program is. Now we’re not the only ones, there are others in there doing work, but our guys are counseling. They’re learning and they’re going in and their counseling their peers in prison, and the difference it’s making is amazing.

Dale Johnson: I mean, that’s incredible. Yeah, and I’ve heard similar stories in places like Louisiana and in Texas. Man, it is just neat to see how the Lord just uses His Word faithfully and effectively in all kinds of scenarios. And that it is sufficient to handle this work. It’s so fun, Howard, honestly, to listen to you just in a very humble way talk through the process of things that you lived. And the Lord has privileged you to see a lot of this growth that’s happening. I do want to ask maybe one final question, and I don’t want people to take this negative. I know that you don’t mean this negative, but I think it’s good for us to evaluate areas of growth. And as we think about areas that not just celebrate ways in which we’d grown–we’re human beings, we’re not perfect, that’s for sure. There are areas where we still need to grow; our knowledge is limited. There are still areas where we need to grow, as we wrestle with Scripture. As we see problems that people are facing, how do we give biblically sufficient answers to these particular things? So I just want to get your perspective as somebody who’s lived and walked during a time, where you’ve watched the concept of biblical counseling grow in a honestly in a very hostile environment, where secular psychology is really overtaken the public narrative. Talk about areas where you can still see, you know, what these are ways that we need to grow, as we wrestle with Scripture and as we deal with problems, that people are facing in life.

Howard Eyrich: Well, thank you. I’m glad speak to that. In 1988, I co-authored a book entitled, Totally Sufficient with Dr. Hindson. The reason for that book was the then-current the thinking regarding sufficiency. Heath and others have produced other volumes on this matter in recent years. However, the necessity for creating a website, with a declaration of sufficiency of Scripture, and gathering leadership signatures will leave little doubt that there is yet lot of work to do to clarify how sufficiency interacts with culture. I hope the current debate will become more about iron sharpening iron, resulting in clarity for the next generation. My recent Research indicates that a large body of folks, who identify the biblical counseling, are confused about this issue. Since you, Dale, have led us towards engaging the mental health culture and because of anxiety and depression are the number one and number two issues in contemporary culture, the following should be considered: I think one, while the movement has been doing a good job of counseling those suffering with anxiety, there needs to be a comprehensive biblical theology of anxiety published. I began working on that couple of years ago and then in 2023, the man who had taken my place when I retired decided to retire, and the pastor asked me to return and work full-time. So that project got put on the back burner and I haven’t been able to return to it, but I really think it needs to be done. I would also think it’d be a worthwhile project to produce, a Biblical Theology of depression. We’ve got lots of different articles, but I don’t think there’s a book that’s really comprehensively looking at it through the lens of biblical theology. And then I’d say, thirdly, I think how we biblically understand and deal with schizophrenia. I think that there needs to be a lot of depth of work on that one as well. For lots of reasons, I personally am prone to think there is a physiological component to that one. But that it makes it all the more important that we figure out how we enter relate with it. And then you, Dale, and your staff have led the way in determining an appropriate response to the culture. It appears there is work to be done here in the area that BCers do not have a consensus on how we ought to do this. The movement has done an outstanding job of producing practical volumes Journal articles and blogs works like the recent publication of Dr. Chen, Biblical Counseling and Mental Disorder Diagnosis, Ernie Baker’s edited serious on Critical Issues in Biblical Counseling, and my forthcoming book A Layman’s Guide to Secular Counseling Theories are good examples of the type of apologetic work the movement must continue to produce. On a practical level of the: has it reached a formidable constituency? It may be time to consider negotiating with Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Company or another company to create a pathway for biblical counselors to gain liability insurance. Or a survey for current members to understand how they navigate this matter might be helpful. And then finally, out of that create document recommending how biblical counselors, even lay counselors, can qualify for some sort of liability insurance. It is a litigious world we work in, as you well know. Regardless of who you are, it can be a difficult thing. At Briarwood, we have been blessed to have a methodology by which all our counselors are covered under a church policy. Smaller churches aren’t going to have that, so I think this is an area where our organization can do some work and come up with some helpful methodologies to do that. So those would be areas where I think that come to my mind off the top of my head, almost that we need to continue to address.

Dale Johnson: This is great. And I think it’s really helpful that we can have an honest assessment of, you know, these types of issues where we need to continue to grow and areas of focus. Your right man, we live in a litigious society, and these are ways to be helpful to our people trying to serve different locations. Even some of the practical works that you mentioned, refining that, bringing some of the valuable works together from our history, and then putting that together, rooted in more of a Biblical theological and more broad perspective of issues. Man, I think that’s so helpful. It just shows that we need to continue to grow. And the apologetic piece that you mentioned, I think is important and that we continually be something we have to do from generation to generation. Reproducing things like you’re Totally Sufficient book, which I love. And I asked you the other day if it was still in print because it’s something that I use consistently. And when a book goes out of print, some of our academic institutions won’t allow us to use it anymore. So yeah, I would recommend that book as being, even still, very appropriate and very helpful because we’re not innovating something new, Howard, right? What we’re doing is bringing the Scripture to life in every generation. The goal is not to become innovative in the sense that we’re creating something new. If that’s the case, we’re stepping away from Scripture. But in, how do we take the Scripture in its timely truths and appropriate it in a specific time for a specific issue. Thanks for helping us think through this. Listen, this has been a fun way for me to celebrate. I can’t even believe I’m saying this that we’ve done 500 episodes of Truth and Love, and it’s been fun to spend it with you, Howard, somebody who’s meant so much to the movement, so much to CCEF and also to NANC and ACBC. We appreciate you, brother. And thanks for reflecting on these stories and giving us some insight into what those early days were like, so thanks for your time today.

Howard Eyrich: Well, I enjoyed it, I’m glad to do it and it’s for me, it’s almost fun, holy funds, to reminisce and look how God has moved along the way. And given this rural farmer boy an opportunity to be part of the part of the journey and ride the way the way, so to speak.

Dale Johnson: It’s been fun, and we appreciate your service and your work. And as you continue to serve the Lord in these ways, we appreciate you, brother.

Howard Eyrich: Thank you, appreciate it.


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