Many pastors feel ill-equipped to handle the challenges that arise when a couple is going through marital difficulties. If you are or have been in this situation before, this book shows church leaders how to counsel married couples from both a logical and biblical perspective. Author and pastor Jonathan Holmes offers you a practical guide to get started with the first sessions and then offers specific guidance on nine of the most common topics that come up in marriage counseling. In Counsel for Couples, Holmes provides you with: a biblical methodology that navigates you through the world of marriage counseling based on God’s word a theological counseling approach addressing the deepest of marital issues advice from several respected voices in the biblical counseling community In each chapter, you'll meet a new couple dealing with a different issue, much like the people in your church, office, and neighborhood. Whether you're a novice or already knowledgeable, Counsel for Couples provides theologically sound and biblically practical tools to help you as you help couples in need.

Everett Worthington provides a Christian perspective and biblically based theory of marriage and marriage counseling. With an analysis of the individual, the couple and the family, Everett uses techniques drawn from several psychological schools of thought, combined with solid biblical principles to help guide counselors through the process of intervention, assessment and implementation of methods for change.

Pastors and counselors regularly minister to people whose marriages or families are in crisis. Tempers run high and feelings are brought low when a marriage is hurting or a family is in disarray. Pastors and counselors need practical, biblical help in order to connect their theological training to the reality of modern messy relationships. These how-to training manuals provide relevant, user-friendly equipping for pastors, counselors, lay leaders, educators, and students, enabling them to competently and compassionately relate God's Word to marriage and family life.

Marriages are in trouble today. That is clear. Effective mothods of combating this trend are less evident. Counselors, pastors and social workers need more than mere theories or mere moralizing. They need a practical and comprehensive model for understanding couples and their problems. They need a throughly Christian perspective that is biblical, compassionate and human. Everett Worthington provides this in an integrated, biblically based theory of marriage and marriage therapy with analysis at three levels: the individual, the couple and the family. The model he has constructed, with techniques drawn from the major psychological schools, is standard enough to guide counselors in actual interventions and powerful enough to produce change. A thoroughgoing overview of the assessment process includes practical, workable guidelines for: creating realistic, mutually-agreeable goals for counselor and clients; estimating the number of sessions needed to reach those goals; and planning the actual assessment, intervention and termination sessions. Next Worthington offers specific techniques for enhancing cooperative change, intimacy, communication, conflict resolution and forgiveness within the marriage. But keeping couples from slipping back into old patterns is one of the counselor's most difficult tasks. So Worthington concludes with suggestions for solidifying change and effectively concluding the counseling relationship. Here is a text that will be a standard for counselors, pastors and mental health professionals in the years to come.

Many pastors, counselors, and theologians consider this book the most helpful on the issue of marriage and divorce.

A client raises spiritual questions. Can a Christian therapist working in a government agency talk with a client about faith? A young couple with two children asks a Christian counselor to help them negotiate an end to their marriage. What responsibility does the counselor have to try to repair the relationship? A youth group member confidentially reveals to the pastor that he is taking drugs. Should the pastor tell the boy's parents? A counselor who teaches a college course has a client show up for class. What should she do? These are just a few of the complex dilemmas that therapists, counselors and pastors face nearly every day. Handling these situations appropriately is critical for both the client's progress and the professional's personal credibility and protection from liability. State and federal codes, professional association statements and denominational guidelines have been drawn up to address ethical issues like competence, confidentiality, multiple relationships, public statements, third parties and documentation. In this book you'll find them all compiled and interpreted in light of Christian faith and practice. Written by qualified professional counselors and respected academic instructors, this book is an indispensable resource for understanding and applying ethics in Christian counseling today.

The classic book on counseling has been updated to provide the latest information to counselors and pastors. Recommended by Dr. James Dobson.

Everett L. Worthington Jr. offers a comprehensive manual for assisting couples over common rough spots and through serious problems in a manner that is compassionate, effective and brief.

The authoritative new reference guide that equips counselors, pastors and church leaders, and caregivers for an effective ministry of soul care. Under the guidance of the highly respected American Association of Christian Counselors (AACC), more than 40 leading Christian professionals have come together to provide this comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date reference guide for professional and lay counselors, pastors, and leaders in training. Competent Christian Counseling offers you: • the best contributions on spiritual formation and pastoral care from Scripture as well as from giants of church history • the latest research, theory, and successful practice methods in Christian counseling • a practical, 21st century model of Christian counseling that is not only “counselor friendly,” but also facilitates effective, biblical client change--all geared to help people mature in the ways and wisdom of Jesus Christ. Competent Christian Counseling, edited by Timothy Clinton and George Ohlschlager, is destined to be regarded for years to come as the authoritative, trustworthy resource for Christian counseling.

How Christian is Christian counselling? In what ways should one’s counselling practice be conducted in order to fulfil one’s role as a Christian counsellor? Is there a counselling practice that truly penetrates into the secular approaches while remaining faithful to the Christian traditions of healing? What are the theological roots of secular counselling? How may secular counselling both reinforce and challenge the Christian faith? In answering these questions, this book engages readers to navigate between two frames of reference: one Eastern, secular, social scientific, and modern; the other Western, Christian, theological, and traditional. At levels of both theory and practice, this book undertakes to integrate, synthesize, hybridize, revise, dichotomize and antagonize the two. It proposes a revised presence-centred counselling approach which may serve as a perspective that helps us to see things in more depth as we shuttle back and forth between the two frames. This book thus negotiates a revised presence-centred form of counselling that is theologically grounded, social scientifically informed, and cross-culturally sensitive. As the author’s counselling practice proceeds mainly in societies where Chinese is the majority, the cross-cultural examinations and proposals offered in this book have been bred in a space where Chinese culture meets the Christian (Protestantism in particular) West. This book is an outgrowth of the author’s experience teaching Christian counselling courses for 17 years and his 30-year clinical practice experience in places where East meets West, namely Hong Kong and South China (Guangdong Province).