As we begin Truth and Love, it is my first opportunity to lead this podcast, and I’m really excited about our time moving forward and how we think through all the things that we want to do on the podcast. The first thing that I want to do, however, is to look back at the faithfulness of Heath Lambert. I’m so grateful for Dr. Lambert and his work with ACBC; the work that he’s done has just been tremendous. We had an opportunity, if you were with us, to join together to tell him thank you for all the work that he’s done for his faithfulness, for his diligence, for the way in which he led our organization, the way in which he championed biblical counseling for the last several years with ACBC.
I do want to highlight, if I can, several of Heath’s achievements during his time with ACBC, because I think it’s something that we should all remember. We should praise the Lord for his faithfulness in the way in which he served us. The Scriptures tell us in Hebrews 13:7, “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God, Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.” I think it’s appropriate that this passage is certainly talking about our pastors, but Heath has done a really good job of leading our organization and I think we should honor him for the way he’s led us in the Word for so many years of teaching. We should be excited and we should celebrate.
Let me mention several achievements that he had over his tenure: the name change. We now are the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. For over 35 years, our name was the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors, and under his leadership we changed that name in 2013. We updated our Membership Covenant in 2013 as well; it’s a critical piece of literature for our organization. The Standards of Doctrine! I cannot tell you how critical this document has been for our organization in bringing together a standard of what we believe, a statement of faith that we believe in. He was able to bring that about through his leadership and the work of the Board of Trustees in 2015.
He followed that up in 2016 with the Standards of Conduct. How should counselors act as biblical counselors? What is the expectation? How do we respond? Nothing, at least that I’m aware of, had existed in the world of biblical counseling until that document was written as a guide, a code so to speak, of how we should act. There was a statement on mental illness written in 2014, there’s also a statement on sexuality at our conference in Louisville 2015.
This past year, we had record-breaking conference attendance; this was the largest in the history of our organization in 2018. We also have had, over the last several years, record-breaking membership growth. This is the largest that our organization has been in our history. We have had a 60 percent increase in the last five years, we’re over 1,800 members now. Praise the Lord for that.
What about the Truth and Love podcast? Heath has been faithful over 170 podcasts that he’s produced, and over that time we’ve had over 700,000 people listen to the podcast. Another development I’m excited about continuing is our ACBC Essays. Our first volume came out in 2017. Also, many of you received specializations this past year at our conference. Heath rolled out that idea in 2017, an idea we hope to continue at some point.
There are a lot of things that we can be thankful for, these are some of the achievements, but even more so the resources that we have of Heath’s faithful teaching in the form of books and in the form of his preaching and teaching. Praise the Lord, we are so thankful for his time that he devoted. I want to remind you, if you will, just pray for his time at First Baptist Church of Jacksonville. The Lord has given him a new responsibility that we are so grateful for, but it’s a big responsibility to be a shepherd of such a large and influential, wonderful church. We pray for Heath on a regular basis for this task now that the Lord has called him to do. The Lord tells us in His Word that it’s an honorable thing to seek to be an overseer, and so we need to pray for him in this.
Now, I do want to talk a little bit about direction for the podcast. How do we think about this? I don’t know that I want to change a whole lot, I’m so appreciative of all the things that Heath was able to do with the podcast, but maybe a couple of areas of focus. One of my goals, if we were to think through Hebrews 5:14 it says, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.” One of my primary goals is that we become mature, that we learn to discern good and evil. There are all kinds of ideas out there about counseling methodology, about doctrine and theology, and I want us to be able to use the information that we received to learn, to be discern errors of good and evil. I think it will train us to be better counselors.
Of course, we’re going to continue with interviews. It’s always fun to get to know other people throughout our organization, the work that they’re doing, the ways God is blessing them to be involved in different areas. I’m excited that we continue to get to know other people to hear from them. The Lord allowed them to walk through and experience and the way in which they’ve been comforted, now He’s going to allow us an opportunity to be comforted by the things that they learn. Learning from other people is going to be important.
Resources. This is a great way for us to be introduced to new resources—books that have come out or teaching opportunities—those types of things, as we listen to people talk through things that they’ve written or things that they’ve thought through and they’re producing resources. The podcast itself then becomes a resource as we work through passages of the Scripture and we brainstorm on how to think through some of these ideas and how to apply them biblically in the counseling room.
I also want to use it for instruction, that this would be a way to for us to learn in the Scriptures together, to learn to think biblically. At base when we think about biblical counseling, what we’re doing is we’re listening for unbiblical thinking and we’re trying to teach the counselee how to think biblically. We’re listening for unbiblical thinking and we’re learning to correct that with biblical truth.
A fourth thing that I want to think about is apologetics. Biblical counseling has done a wonderful job over the past several years beginning to formulate exactly what we believe, and we have tons of resources now that we’re so grateful for. But every generation has to wrestle with an apologetic of why we believe what we believe, and in being able to defend what we think about biblical counseling and what we think about other forms of counseling. I always want us to be vigilant with those types of topics on the podcast to make sure that we’re articulating from a biblical perspective, distinguishing what we believe very firmly in the Scriptures and how we practice that from other ways of thinking.
Finally, we would think through current events. Life is happening in our country at a rapid rate, things are happening so fast. With so many ideas thrown around, it seems like we’re in this downward spiral, consistently, in many arenas of our culture. I want us to be able to use this time to address some of those issues and I want you to work with us as we think through those current events and how we can think through those issues biblically, whether we’re talking about sexuality or things like the “me too” movement that’s going on now. These types of issues are going to be critical as we think well about these in the church, and particularly the counseling issues that we’re going to face as a result.
I’m excited about what we’re going to learn in the future. We’re so thankful for all the material that we have in the over 170 podcasts that have already been produced, and we look forward to many more. We hope that it’s going to be a great resource for you. We also want to look forward to your questions. I know that’s been a highlight of the way we’ve used the podcast in the past, and so I want to make sure that we’re hearing from you. We want to answer questions that you have. We’re excited to work through some of those questions, we already have a bank of those questions that I want to address in podcast in the near future, and so keep your questions coming. We want to be a resource for you. We want to be able to provide information for you.