ONE-to-ONE Counseling
Purpose Statement
The purpose of the Biblical Counseling Ministry of Pleasant View Bible Church is to glorify God by encouraging transformation in hearts, lives, and relationships. This is accomplished by compassionately relating the Word of God to offer hope to the hurting and healing for the broken.
Philosophy of Ministry
The purpose of Biblical Counseling is to relate the Bible to people looking for help and guidance with finding God’s direction for meeting the opportunities and challenges of life. The goal is change of the inner person to be pleasing to God. Personal ministry centered on Jesus offers real hope and loving help to a fallen and broken world.
- Centered on Jesus
We believe that effective counseling centers on Jesus and his cross and resurrection where God reveals the depths of sin and the heights of grace. Effective counseling gets to the heart of personal and interpersonal problems by bringing to bear the truth, mercy, and power of Jesus’ gospel of grace.
Authentic biblical counseling guides people to a dynamic relationship with Jesus. We desire to lead hurting and confused people to the hope and resources available only in Jesus.
We believe that counseling centered on Jesus will be missionary-minded by its very nature. We intend that our counseling should be a powerful evangelistic force in our world.
- Rooted in Scripture and Grounded in Theology
The Scriptures, rightly interpreted and carefully applied, offer us sufficient wisdom for understanding who we are, the problems we face, how people change, and God’s provision for that change in the gospel.
God intends that we care for one another from a perspective of a divine viewpoint, seeing the world and events as God sees them. The Bible calls us to use wise methods that minister in relevant ways to the specific counseling problems of specific people.
- Dependent Upon the Holy Spirit
We acknowledge the Holy Spirit as the One who illumines the gospel and energizes its application in everyday life. We serve in the strength which God supplies so that in everything God receives the glory (1 Pet. 4:11).
- Focused on Sanctification
We believe that effective counseling should be working toward heart change, not just behavior modification. Our goal is spiritual, personal, and interpersonal maturity evidenced by relationships, desires, and actions increasingly resembling Jesus, our Redeemer and Treasure. The lifelong change process begins at regeneration and continues until we see Jesus face-to-face (1 John 3:2).
- Embedded in the Church
We believe that the church is the ideal context for, and should be the center of, Jesus-focused, gospel-centered counseling. God desires that his people love and serve each other by speaking his truth in love to each other (Eph. 4:15).
- Founded in Love
We believe that Jesus’ incarnation is not just the basis for care, but also the model for how we care. We seek to enter into a person’s story, listening well, expressing thoughtful love, and engaging the person with compassion.
- Attentive to Issues of the Heart
The Word of God alone reveals and penetrates our heart, rightly weighing who we are and what we do before the eyes of God (Heb. 4:12). The Bible is clear that human behavior is not mechanical, but grows out of a heart that desires, thinks, feels, and is oriented toward or against Jesus.
- Comprehensive in Understanding
A comprehensive biblical understanding perceives human beings as relational, rational, volitional, emotional, spiritual, and physical. None of these factors can be ignored in effective counseling.
- Thorough in Care
We seek to discern both the differences and interconnections between sin and suffering, and to minister appropriately to each.