A Density Problem: A Review of “Equipping Counselors for Your Church” by Robert Kellemen

Bob Kellemen has written a fantastic book, whose content often gets lost in the overwhelming flood of details. As the new pastor of discipleship and counseling at Cornerstone Baptist Church, one of my goals is to equip our congregation to fulfill the “one-another” commands of Scripture. This book provides some great help as I prepare to do that. But the density of the organizational details makes this book often frustrating. Equipping Counselors for Your Church will lose readers in the density of its training strategy.

There’s no denying that Kellemen knows what he is doing when he writes a book like this. He has been a counselor, professor, pastor, and coach for many years. As the Executive Director of the new Biblical Counseling Coalition he is pulling resources and voices from a variety of Biblical counseling organizations together to serve the church. In this particular book he draws from his years of experience, and the pool or resources he has acquainted himself with, to provide churches with the tools they need to equip their churches for Biblical counseling ministries. It’s a great goal, and it seems that Kellemen is the guy to do it.

The book is broken down into four parts, following the author’s 4E strategy. This 4 step process involves Envisioning God’s Ministry, Enlisting God’s Ministers, Equipping Godly Ministers, and Empowering Godly Ministers. The four parts of the book cover one of the four steps in the process, unpacking the details of what each looks like fleshed out in the church. One of the strengths of this book is the overall church focus of the author. Kellemen is not interested in launching counseling ministries as a distinct ministry of the church or an arm of the church. He is interested in equipping churches to be places of Biblical counseling, not simply places where it happens. Of his goals in writing this book, Kellemen says:

This book’s 4E Ministry Training Strategy offers a twenty-first century, best practice manual for Christ-centered, church-based, comprehensive, compassionate, and culturally informed mobilization of the priesthood of all believers. (20)

He addresses both informal and formal counseling, though he is clearly more focused on the latter. He instructs us on the community basis for developing and envisioning our counseling ministry, and how to train the most people for maximizing our ministry’s potential output. These are Kellemen’s strengths  The book however can at times swallow these strengths in the density of strategic plan’s outline.

The structure of the strategy can be overwhelming simply by sheer fact that there are so many details. So the 4Es (Envision, Enlist, Equip, Empower) sometimes go by more common labels: core values, connected people, coached people, comprehensive strategy. Under “Envisioning” we learn about the MVP-C, that is the Mission Statement, Vision Statement, Passion Statement, and Commission Statement (and the dash is not unimportant either). Under each of those there are more details, like developing the SWORD congregational evaluative tool, or utilizing the 4Cs as a good foundation for evaluation (Biblical Content, Christlike Character, Counseling Competency, and Christian Community). This list itself could become dense. We learn about the 4Gs of conflict resolution, the core proficiencies of competent counselors, and so and so on. There are so many acrostics in this book that it can feel like death by acrostic sometimes. These are not the strengths of this book.

One must concede that in training a church to equip counselors there is a lot of content that must be communicated and Kellemen has done his best to organize that content and make it accessible for readers. Yet, these details become so overwhelming that it can actually distract readers from the quality content communicated. Kellemen has so much to teach us about how to equip pastors, but the organization of his strategic plan feels simply dense.

I really enjoyed much about this book, though my review may not evidence it. I genuinely believe there’s much here that I can use, will use, and have benefited from. And maybe the book warrants a second reading before I shelve it. But there are parts of the book where the outline of the strategic plan becomes so complicated (with sub-points under sub points under main points) that it can begin to lose its value. As much as I value the content of the book I am not sure I will recommend it as a great resource to other pastors. Kellemen has much to teach us, but I don’t think he succeeds in communicating it all very well in Equipping Counselors for Your Church.