[Heath Lambert recently edited a collection of biblical counseling essays that will be released in October as A Call to Clarity. This article is an adapted version of his introduction to that book.]

Wishing Wells and the Word of God

One of the most famous and funny accounts from the lore of the Lambert Family involved a debate over the existence of a wishing well. The conflict began when my daughter was just old enough to speak in choppy sentences. She insisted that there was a wishing well by the long, winding road that led to our house in those days. Her older brother thought she was full of beans and was bold enough to say so. He reasoned to his younger sister that he had been driving down that road longer than she, and he had never seen one. Furthermore, he assured her that wishing wells weren’t even real and, so, it was impossible for there to be one on the road to our house.

The kid had a point, but his sister didn’t care. With perfect toddler innocence and persistence, she continued to talk about how much she liked the wishing well on the way to our house. This persistence infuriated her brother and so that conflict over a wishing well became one of the earliest and most serious between my two oldest kids.

The conflict put me in an awkward position. Like my son, I had never seen this alleged wishing well, and yet, my daughter was insistent. It appeared she was seeing something, but what? The only thing left to do was investigate. So, I loaded everyone up in the van to look for a wishing well and resolve a disagreement. As we drove along the road, Chloe was relaxed and patiently toyed with her pacifier while Carson sat eagerly on the edge of his booster seat, chomping at the bit for vindication. We had driven almost the length of the entire road, and I was just about to declare the non-existence of the well when we came around a bend . . . and there it was . . . a wishing well! It was situated beside a lovely tree in front of a bench. And it was beautiful. It was made of stone and had a bucket attached to a pulley mounted underneath a wooden roof. I was stunned. I hit the brakes and turned around to see my son with his jaw dropped so low you could have stored firewood in it. Chloe was unmoved. She pulled her pacifier out of her mouth just long enough to say, “See, there’s the wishing well.” As she was chauffeured back to the house, she sat with the confident pride of an Olympian who had just received a gold medal.

That family squabble from long ago reminds me of a contemporary disagreement in the biblical counseling movement. The counseling debate is not about the existence of wishing wells but about the place of the Bible in the ministry of counseling. The issues could not be more important. Counseling is a crucial ministry of the church that seeks to help people through the most challenging of life’s problems. The place of God’s Word in that ministry is an issue of tremendous importance. The great significance of that issue demands clarity from everyone in the contemporary biblical counseling movement.

The Issues

Before you can develop the proper conclusion to a debated matter, you must understand the issues at stake. That is turning out to be a real challenge in the contemporary confusion. Some out there on blogs and social media are confusing things by making the current debate about personalities. They have the people they like and the ministries they wish to endorse and they don’t like it when anyone expresses principled disagreement with a ministry or minister of whom they happen to approve. Instead of responding to principled disagreement with reasoned arguments of their own, they respond with emotional appeals, side-step the issues, misrepresent their opponents, write nasty private emails, cancel those who challenge them, and insult or harass those who say things they don’t like.

But the great disagreement today is about principles rather than personalities. Those principles are as old as the Bible and concern whether God’s Word is sufficient to help people in need of counseling care or whether that Word stands in need of syncretistic augmentation from contemporary and secular resources like the ones found in modern psychology. These two positions are mutually exclusive. Either Scripture is in fundamental need of help from outside resources, or it is not. Our ministries will either be biblically faithful or syncretistic. The issues could not be more stark or more urgent.

The Parties Involved

There really are only two alternatives to these important issues, but as the biblical counseling movement tackles this season of disagreement, three distinct parties are processing things. Different people have different approaches to clarity. As you wade through the issues, you need to know about the parties involved and be on the lookout for them.

The Deniers

I will refer to the first group as the deniers. These are The New Integrationists. The language of integration refers to their project, which is an attempt to integrate secular resources with scriptural resources for the purpose of counseling care. As a project, integration is nothing new—people have been doing it for a long time. What is new about contemporary integrationists is their effort to accomplish the old work of syncretism in a fresh way.

Two realities are new. First, they are seeking a new theological argument to justify their work of integration. Traditional integrationists justified their syncretistic endeavor with errant understandings of general revelation. The New Integrationists justify their syncretism with erroneous notions of common grace. Second, The New Integrationists are more cunning than their intellectual predecessors. Their cunning is seen in their use of language. For example, they admit that integration is crucial to their project but claim theirs is the authentic representation of biblical counseling. Then, they turn to people on their theological and methodological right and insist on assigning the name of nouthetic counseling to them instead of biblical counseling. To understand the importance of this move we need a brief lesson in biblical counseling history.

In 1976, Jay Adams and numerous other biblical counseling leaders came together to create the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors (NANC). A decade earlier, Adams founded the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation (CCEF) to train people in the principles of biblical counseling. By the mid-70s, the movement was growing to the extent that the CCEF board realized they needed a certifying organization to ensure counseling standards and so launched NANC to meet this purpose. Over the years, the membership of that organization has included the giants of biblical counseling like Jay Adams, Wayne Mack, David Powlison, Stuart Scott, Martha Peace, Steve Viars, Jim Newheiser, and many, many others. It has also grown to become the largest biblical counseling organization in the world with members and training centers in all 50 states and in over 20 countries. This October, nearly 5000 people will attend their annual conference.

But NANC’s name was controversial from the start. Going all the way back to its founding, Jay Adams thought it was a mistake to put the language of “nouthetic” in the title. He thought it best to use the language of “biblical” or “Christian,” as he had used in the name of the training center he started. Nevertheless, he was overruled by the board. Decades later, however, in 2013, the board of NANC voted unanimously to recommend to the membership that their name be changed to the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC). Jay Adams supported this move, and the membership approved it. The point is that this large and conservative body representing the classic stream of the movement has clearly stated their wish to be identified with the language of biblical counseling.

That brief lesson in history is important as we remember the cunning of The New Integrationists. Their refusal to refer to conservatives as biblical counselors is more than a lack of courtesy. It is a tactic. It creates division and redefinition within our movement. The deniers know the importance of language and of assigning names. They are seeking to make off with the label of biblical counseling and trying to take over leadership of the entire movement. It is an aggressive act, and it is happening right now. I refer to this group of New Integrationists as deniers, not only because they deny the sufficiency of Scripture for counseling care but also because they dishonestly deny the truth that their project is inconsistent with the classic stream of historic biblical counseling.

Those are the deniers. They are the ones trying to shake things up right now. But there are two other groups in the contemporary debate.

The Pretenders

Next are the pretenders. These are the people who know what is going on, understand the issues, and see what the deniers are doing. But they do not want to enter the fight. Some of them don’t want to fight because they are, after all, counselors. They went into counseling ministry to resolve conflict, not get mixed up in it. Involvement in disputes—even important ones—is against every ministry instinct they have. Others don’t want to fight because many of the deniers are their friends, and they desire to place personal loyalty above convictional clarity. Still, others are seeking to avoid the issues because they are pragmatists who want to avoid damaging their “brand” or limiting their influence by taking sides in a contested issue.

Whether because of ministry disposition, personal relationship, or a craven desire for influence, there is a group of people who want to pretend the current debate is not happening. The problem with this is that our ministry influence and leadership will not count for much if we fail to speak on the most consequential issues. In the long run, the pretenders are going to have nowhere to hide. Eventually, they will either be forced out of their concealment, or they will lose credibility when their constituents ultimately realize they failed to be clear and helpful when that clarity and care mattered the most.

The Defenders

Finally, there are the defenders. This is the group of people who are trying to defend the classical understanding of biblical counseling, uphold faithful teaching on important doctrines like common grace and the sufficiency of Scripture, and preserve honesty when it comes to lines that have always divided Christians who seek to provide counseling care.

Regardless of which of the labels you wear, the only way to get to the bottom of the issues at stake is to do what I did that afternoon when my kids disagreed about the wishing well. We must load up the car, drive down the road, and carefully investigate the evidence. It simply will not do to ignore the issues or cancel and condemn those who express opinions we find disagreeable. Clarity is only possible on the other side of those commitments.

Time Will Tell the Truth

Over the summer, I, together with several of my fellow pastors at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, released some important articles about the contemporary state of the biblical counseling movement. I was disappointed by the response to that content by the deniers and the pretenders. Instead of careful analysis and serious engagement with ideas, the response was too often defined by hysteria, caricature, misrepresentation, and personal attack. Many who should know better chose to ignore the careful and reasoned arguments advanced in those articles.

As frustrating as such responses are in the short term, I have great encouragement about the future of the biblical counseling movement. That encouragement is related to something I noticed about my young daughter’s demeanor on our mission to determine the existence of the wishing well. As we drove down the road, she was cooler than a quart of chocolate ice cream. Even as we got closer to the end of the road and it increasingly appeared she would be proven wrong, her calm demeanor never changed. The reason is that she knew the well was there and knew eventually her dad and brother would discover that too.

The principle she exemplified is that time always tells the truth. Over time, issues get clarified, faithfulness is vindicated, and deception is exposed. The New Integrationists will not be able to misdirect, deny, and mischaracterize for long. Over time, their misrepresentations will become apparent and their refusal to respond to arguments will be made obvious.

Even more than that, the Word of God endures forever. First Peter 1:24-25 says, “The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” That passage teaches that the contemporary effort at syncretism in the counseling world is simply not going to work. Time will prove that counseling programs overseen by faithful counselors committed to authentic ministry of the Word will reach dramatically more people than those overseen by The New Integrationists. Contemporary integrationists are not only choosing error but, over time, diminished influence. Conservative pastors and future pastors who long to wield the sword of the Spirit in real ministry will grow tired and dispirited amid continual arguments that the Bible they love so much just doesn’t have the goods to offer real help. They will not get on board in large numbers but will flock to authentic biblical counseling in droves. Those whom The New Integrationists are able to persuade to follow them into error will eventually discover that the shifting principles of secularity fall flat and can’t deliver their promised power and potency. Before you know it, the current work of The New Integrationists will be forgotten and replaced by the future work of people even more contemporary than they can imagine today.

But the Word of God will still be there working, changing, and transforming people like it has since the dawn of time. Ultimately, there is just no future for The New Integrationists. In ministry, the only efforts that have a future are those that are pointed in the direction of faithfulness. Every other effort will eventually fall away and be forgotten. It is that reality that compels me to write about these issues.

I don’t get a lot of love letters when I critique those guilty of counseling error, but before God, I mean to help those with whom I disagree. Clarity is not just a gift for the humble who seek to learn and avoid error. It is also a gift for the proud who teach that error. All of us must receive God’s gift of truth and minister that truth. When we do, it will be our pleasure to see lives changed by Christ and for his glory.