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The Future of ACBC and Biblical Counseling

Truth in Love 153

Dr. Dale Johnson and Dr. Heath Lambert discuss the future of the biblical counseling movement.

May 7, 2018

Heath Lambert: A conversation about biblical counseling and ACBC on this edition of Truth in Love. I’m Heath Lambert, and you’re listening to Truth in Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, where we seek to provide biblical solutions for the problems that people face. This week on the podcast, I’m going to be answering some questions about biblical counseling and ACBC, but we’re going to do that in a little bit of a different way and to explain how that’s going to happen our operations director Sean Perron is going to explain how it’s going to work this week.

Sean Perron: By now, many of our listeners are aware of the upcoming transition in October between Dr. Heath Lambert and Dr. Dale Johnson, and we wanted to give Dr. Lambert an opportunity to answer some of those questions that our listeners have been asking. We’re thrilled to have Dr. Dale Johnson here to ask those questions. On a personal note from the staff, we are very excited about this transition. We have seen both of these men work together and both of these men be committed to the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling, and we could not be more thrilled for what’s taking place. Dr. Johnson, we’d love to hear an inside peek at what is taking place inside the movement and inside ACBC in particular. So, what questions do you have for Dr. Lambert?

Dale Johnson: Well, Heath, it’s so wonderful to be in this position to have a conversation with you about the transition and the excitement that I have. I want to personally say how grateful I am to you in the way that you’ve handled this process. You’ve been very encouraging to me and been willing to help in any way possible. Your relationship with the staff has been very encouraging to me in the way that they work, they serve, they’ve been willing to embrace me, and to help me, and so, I want to say personally that I appreciate your role in this transition, but I also want to give you an opportunity to explain a little bit of background and some rationale behind the transition from ACBC and your role as the executive director.

Heath Lambert: Well, the first thing I would want people to know is that there is no loss of love for ACBC that is represented in this transition. Instead, what happened actually has more to do with I Timothy 3:1 than it does with me not liking ACBC anymore. I love ACBC. I remain committed to ACBC but in I Timothy 3:1 it says that a man who desires the work of pastor desires a noble task. And from the time I was in college and the Lord started awakening a call to ministry in my life, that text has been very important to me as the Lord mediates calling and ministry through desire. And several years ago, I was asked to come to First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida with the idea of being here and working towards a transition in leadership to becoming the senior pastor here and what happened last summer is that the church voted to call me as the senior pastor and through a lot of careful prayer and reflection it was clear that the Lord was directing the desires of my heart towards focusing exclusively on the ministry here at First Baptist. Not that I think bad things about ACBC, but as I was talking with my wife Lauren, as we were talking with the Board of ACBC, and as we were talking with even other leaders here in the church, it became clear that I was spread too thin. And so, wanting to be a faithful minister of the gospel, wanting to be a faithful husband, and a faithful father with young kids in the house, leading two large and growing organizations was not going to be possible anymore. And so, I went to the trustees and said, “Guys, I can’t do this anymore. It’s not about not loving ACBC. It’s not about not being committed to ACBC. It is about I think I can be a more faithful servant of ACBC as the senior pastor at First Baptist Jacksonville than I can as the executive director of ACBC.” So, the board established a transition committee. They asked if I would serve on it, I was happy to do that, and we instituted a national search for my replacement that led, I’m thrilled to be able to say, to you. So, I’m happy to answer the question because when people see about some of these transitions or somebody stepping away and somebody else is coming in, we have a sort of a natural conspiracy theory that kicks in and people wonder what’s really the rest of the story. Well, what’s really going on is it is just not a good idea for me to lead two organizations anymore. I was honest with the board about that, and the Lord has very kindly led us to a faithful man like yourself. So that’s what happened.

Dale Johnson: Well, Heath, I appreciate that so much and just being able to hear the real nuts and bolts of the story and expressing your desire to be a pastor. What an encouraging thing, and I’m so grateful for the people at First Baptist Church Jacksonville, and they will be able to serve under your leadership. I do want to ask maybe one other question. For the last six years, you’ve served as the executive director of ACBC, I want you to just take a moment or two to reflect on the progress that you’ve seen in ACBC during those last six years and even in the biblical counseling movement at large.

Heath Lambert: Yeah, you know, the progress is important because one of the reasons that I felt the freedom to be able to leave at this point is that when I was first elected as the executive director back in 2012, I submitted to the board a 10-page document of the things that they could expect from me and my leadership. When I wrote that document and submitted it to the board, I thought it might take 15 or 20 years to be able to complete all that stuff. And as I looked around, I had completed almost everything in the document as of last year. And so, there was sort of this moment when we were considering, hey, what do I need to be doing in terms of my time? I was looking at the things I said I would do at ACBC, and I had done them. And so, I kind of did what I came here to do, and it seemed like a natural space to think about going. So the accomplishments that we made together over the last six years were, first of all, changing the name, that happened early and it was an overwhelming majority 92 or 93 percent of our members that approved of that change, we also did an overhaul of our membership exams, both at the regular membership level and at the fellow level, we revised our covenant to make it more clear, we didn’t diminish any of our standards in the covenant, but we were always, every year, getting questions about some phraseology in there, we changed that, and we did a complete overhaul of our standards of conduct and our standards of doctrine so that today we have the clearest, most faithful expression of biblical Christianity of any counseling document in any counseling organization in the world, and I’m really thankful for the bold articulation of our standards that ACBC has made. In addition to those things, we also have had a goal to expand our training centers and to expand our members. We’ve had a goal to double our membership in 10 years, so we want to accomplish that by 2025. I’m taking my hands off the wheel on that with this change, but one of the things we’ve been really encouraged by is that every year for the last four years we have broken records in our membership, we’ve broken records in our donor base, and we’ve broken records at our conference attendance. So, those are some really good things that we’ve done. We’ve also opened up the opportunity for women who are pursuing certification with our organization to be able to have a level of supervision and involvement in that process from other women. And so, those are some things that we’ve done that I’m really, really thankful we’ve been able to see happen.

Dale Johnson: Well, as I hear your answer, I’m so grateful. We often have the tendency to not pause and think about the faithfulness of the Lord in recent past, we sometimes get caught in the present. And so, man, as I hear that, to hear the faithfulness of the Lord through the ministry of ACBC and certainly through you being a tool that the Lord would use to lead us as an organization in that way, I just find myself being grateful. I want you to talk for just a second about your future involvement. I’m excited about working with you in the future. You’ve been very helpful to me, even up to this point, and I want you to talk about your involvement as a pastor and as a person who’s been involved with the biblical counseling movement and ACBC. Talk about future involvement if you will.

Heath Lambert: Yeah. So, one of the reasons I’m thankful for that question is because it’s been interesting that over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been surprised that the announcement that I’m stepping away from ACBC indicates that I’m somehow perhaps less committed to ACBC than I have been before. I want everybody to hear me. I am more committed to ACBC than I’ve ever been. The reason I’m stepping away from ACBC is because I believe ACBC will be better off under your leadership than under mine. I believe ACBC can be more faithful without me than they can with me. I believe I can be a better minister of the gospel doing one thing instead of two things. And so, it’s a commitment to ACBC and to it growing and being a strong organization that has led to my decision to want to do this, not to any concern about ACBC or not wanting to be a part of it. I am committed to ACBC going forward. I have said to you privately, both in writing and verbally, and I’m happy to be overheard saying here that I will do anything that I can to help ACBC grow and expand in terms of faithfulness, in terms of numbers, and any other way. I have great confidence in your ability to lead this organization. I have great confidence in the convictions you have about biblical counseling. And when you pick up the phone and say, “I need something”, I’m going to want to do anything I can to follow your leadership and help. And so, people should know that on October 2nd, when I step down, I’m going to give you two things. I’m going to give you the keys to the offices and I’m going to give you my cell phone number and if you need anything from me, you can ask, and I want to do anything I can to help ACBC moving forward.

Dale Johnson: Heath, I’m so grateful and I think I speak for our membership when I say that you have been a faithful steward of that which the Lord has entrusted to you. And we’re grateful that we have men like you who have served for seasons with ACBC to help move the movement forward. And so, for that we’re grateful.