MARSCAST

Episode 318: 318. The Birth of the Biblical Counseling Movement

What happens when the church stops trusting herself to help her own people—and hands the job to the therapist's couch instead? In the 1970s, one pastor's book sold a quarter of a million copies by daring to say pastors and elders were still competent to counsel their flocks from Scripture alone. In this first episode of a four-part series, Dr. Jared Poulton joins Jared Luttjeboer and Dr. Alan Strange to trace how the biblical counseling movement was born out of a head-on collision between the rise of secular psychology and the church's calling to shepherd souls—and why the "alphabet soup" of counseling organizations it spawned still shapes what pastors, elders, and even your church library look like today. Whether you've never heard the term "nouthetic counseling" or you've read every Paul Tripp book on the shelf, this episode will change how you see the counsel happening in your own congregation. Next episode: the man behind it all.

Learn more about the Institute of Reformed Biblical Counseling.

Find Dr. Poulton's new book here.