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Questions about the ACBC Conference on Abuse

Heath Lambert: This week on the podcast, we are doing what we promised to do last week when we made an announcement about moving our Annual Conference, and that is, to take your questions about that move and about our conference on abuse that’s going to happen in Fort Worth this year. So, we have received many of your questions and we want to tackle some of those on the podcast this week. As we do that, I want to give you a little bit of good news and make an announcement that our Operations Director Sean Peron, who would ordinarily be helping me on the podcast this week and who would be posing the questions to me that you’ve sent in, he is not here. That is because, and we are thrilled, he and his wife Jenny welcomed the birth of their first-born son just this week, and so he is out of the office at the hospital with his wife and his baby, and all of us at ACBC are thrilled for the Perron family. Even as we’re thrilled for them, I’m going to be tackling your questions just by myself this week and trying to interact with you as best I can as we evaluate the questions that we received from you. 

I want to break it down into a couple of categories, and the first set of categories has to do with just moving the conference in general. Let me just explain for those of you who are not aware, over a year ago, we made an agreement with Southwestern Seminary that they would host our Annual Conference on biblical counseling. One of the defining characteristics of the ACBC Annual Conference on biblical counseling is that we move around each year from location to location. We spread it out over different parts of the country and in different kinds of institutions, and we decided that our 2018 Annual Conference would be held at Southwestern Seminary. And we decided, actually as a separate decision from that, that it would be focusing on the theme of abuse; how do biblical counselors need to use the Scriptures to respond wisely and with care to people who have been victims of abuse?

When we made that decision in the spring of 2017, it was impossible for us to know that over the last few months in 2018, Southwestern Seminary and it’s now former president would be involved in the level of controversy that it has been involved in about the very subject of our conference. What became clear over the last couple of weeks is that it was just going to be impossible for ACBC to have a biblical counseling conference on abuse at the location that has had so much controversy about that very subject and that we needed to move it.

We are really thankful that some dear friends of ours at Countryside Bible Church, also in the Fort Worth area, when we reached out to them, they were very, very eager to help us relocate the conference and very, very eager to work with us logistically, and they were very, very eager to do it on very short notice. So we are thankful that the ACBC Annual Conference, which is entitled Light in the Darkness: Biblical Counseling and Abuse, is going to be held in Fort Worth at Countryside Bible Church instead of the campus of Southwestern Seminary. The reason for that decision is because we want to have a consistent message that at ACBC, for any biblical counselor that is certified with us, we want to stand up for the care and protection of women or anyone who’s been a victim of abuse and we don’t want to dilute that message by saying the right thing in the wrong place, and it just became clear it was going to be too confusing for us to give the message we want to give to the people we want to hear it at the place we had originally been scheduled to have it. 

Now, making that decision raises some questions, and one of the questions that we have been asked is, “Why did you take so long to make the decision?” My response to that question is, I actually don’t think we took a long time at all. We announced our decision to relocate the conference early last week on Tuesday after Memorial Day and that was less than a week after the Southwestern Seminary trustees had made their decision at the time to remove their president from office and make him the President Emeritus. Now, we needed to wait. It was right for ACBC to wait to see what the board of trustees would do. Our relationship at ACBC was with the institution of Southwestern and not with their presidents. It was right for us to see what the trustees would do. When the trustees made a decision that we felt like would be confusing for the people that we want to come to our conference, we very quickly sprang into action, but it takes some time to make the necessary arrangements, to make all the logistical changes, to make all the contacts, to find a location that is going to be willing to have a couple thousand biblical counselors from all over the world come to their location on short notice. 

I actually think we moved pretty quickly, and in fact, I would want to say thank you to all the staff members at ACBC and all the staff at Countryside Bible Church who worked to pull this off on such short notice. One of the reasons I think that’s a question is because we live in a social media, Twitter, Facebook world where if there’s not an instantaneous response, then there is not a response, but most of us don’t have the luxury of living our normal lives on Facebook and Twitter and in social media. Our lives are lived out in the real world where some things take time to work on and things have to happen behind the scenes before they can be announced publicly. For those who felt like maybe we took a little longer than we should have taken, I’m just telling you, I very rarely in my life spent as much time on the phone as I did in the week between the trustees decision at Southwestern and our announcement this past week. I also think there’s been few weekends where staff members at ACBC have worked as hard as they did on this Memorial Day weekend. We actually moved really quickly, for those who asked about why did it take so long.

Other questions about moving the conference had to do with, “Wouldn’t it be better to have the conference at Southwestern and still give the same message but at a place that needed to hear it?” Quite frankly, that is an option that we considered and that we considered very, very carefully. At the end of the day, we decided to move the conference though for a number of reasons, but one of the most significant reasons is that ACBC is an independent ministry from the institution that had decided to host us, and we decided we could not have our ministry and the decisions we need to be making tied to the decisions of another ministry and the decisions that they need to be making, particularly when those two sets of independent decisions might cause confusion for weak people that we most want to minister to. So, we made the decision that we have to make a very clear separation in order that our ministry and our message can stand on its own so that people we want to listen to us aren’t confused. 

Some people have asked, “Are we now going to move the conference back?” If you’re not aware of the most recent information, late on Wednesday evening, May the 30th, Southwestern Seminary announced that their former president was now going to be terminated completely and was not going to remain as the President Emeritus or have any benefits, and so the question came, are we going to move it back? The answer to that question is no, we’re not going to move it back because we did end our relationship with them. I formally communicated that to the leadership at Southwestern, and the reason we made that decision, as I said a moment ago, is because we needed our ministry in the decisions we need to be making separate from the decisions that Southwestern were making, and so part of that is we’re now in a different relationship with a different ministry all together to host our conference and we’re not looking back at this point.

Perhaps the most substantial question that came over the last several days had to do with questions about divorce, and do biblical counselors support divorce as a response to domestic violence, as a response to abuse. I want to talk about that, and I want to be really careful about how we answer this question. ACBC has a Standards of Doctrine and a Standards of Conduct that inform what counselors certified with us are to believe and it informs how they are to behave in counseling ministry. Those Standards of Doctrine and Standards of Conduct have a very, very clear statement about a biblical response to abuse. That clear statement includes the urgency of keeping the victims of abuse safe and the importance of involving the authorities at every appropriate situation.

The ACBC Standards of Doctrine and Standards of Conduct do not have a formal statement about what is required in terms of divorce, and one of the reasons that is true is because there are a number of perspectives on divorce in the Evangelical Christian world that are considered to be acceptable. Let me walk you through some of those. There are some people in the larger Christian community who believe that divorce is acceptable only for adultery and desertion. There are other Christians who believe that divorce is acceptable for adultery, desertion, and they include physical and sexual abuse under the banner of a kind of desertion. There are other Christians who take either of those approaches and say divorce is acceptable for one of those two or three reasons, but don’t believe remarriage is allowable. Then there are other Christians who think that divorce is never taught as being acceptable in the Scriptures, and so remarriage for any other reason than death of a spouse is not acceptable. The point is, there are Christians as they seek to interpret the Scriptures, particularly Matthew 19 and 1 Corinthians 7, who come down in different places on this.

What I think we want to say as Christians is, Christians are going to be allowed to have different approaches to the topic of divorce. What we want to say at ACBC is we’re not going to have different approaches to whether we keep the victims of abuse safe. Here’s the important point I want to make. I would not want to say to someone who has a different understanding of Matthew 19 and of 1 Corinthians 7 than somebody else does, that they are therefore not in favor of keeping victims of abuse safe. As a matter of fact, you can have one view of divorce and still be committed to keeping the victims of abuse safe, so I actually want to make an appeal that we not confuse the issue here. Where the dividing line is on this issue is who is willing to fight tooth and nail to keep victims safe. The issue is not, “What is your position on divorce?” We can have people agree to disagree on what constitutes biblical grounds for divorce, but still agree that we need to keep victims safe. So, I want to focus on that issue and not be distracted by different perspectives on abuse.

Perhaps you have more questions that weren’t answered, but we are out of time on the podcast this week. If you haven’t learned anything else about ACBC over the last couple of weeks, I hope you hear loud and clear that our message is we want to protect weak people from harm. That is our commitment as an organization because it is codified in our guiding documents as an organization, and that is codified in our guiding documents as an organization because it is written in Scripture. We stand with God and we stand with God’s word for our protection of weak people.


To read ACBC’s Statement on Abuse and Biblical Counseling visit our Committed to Care [1] website.