CCEF Course Registration

The way that you counsel other people is determined by how you understand God, yourself, other people, life’s pressures, and change. This course addresses the depth, breadth, and balance of your understanding. How does Christ’s past grace, present grace, and future grace speak to our hearts and change how we live our daily lives? This course is about people. It is about how we face the troubles of life. It is about how we deal with our inner struggles. It is about how we change into Jesus’ image. Through case studies, class lectures, assigned readings, and Scripture, you’ll explore these practical questions. Self-counseling projects will help you to make first-hand, practical application of the concepts learned in class.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• Why Does it Have to Hurt? by Dan McCartney
• The Christian Life by Sinclair Ferguson
• Optional (portions of this book are available individually throughout the course, but you may wish to purchase the entire book): Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture (Resources for Changing Lives)

Let’s say you have a basic and growing understanding of biblical counseling. You know the key ideas and have been able to apply them to yourself. Now comes the hard part: How do you apply this understanding in your everyday relationships? This course will take the content you already know and get specific about how you can actually deliver the content. Case studies, lectures, and group discussions will help you grow in your ability to listen well, know people, interpret another person’s story from a biblical perspective, and offer biblically-based truth that will motivate others in their growth in Christ.

Note: This course has two unique requirements. First, you will be paired with two other students for a bi-weekly community group. This group will decide when they want to meet, and what format works best (Skype, Google Hangout, Phone Call, etc.)

You will also meet weekly for an hour with someone (a friend, fellow church member, neighbor, etc.) to put into practice what you are learning in Helping Relationships. You will receive more information about these activities in your course syllabus and in the opening lecture.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• Side by Side by Ed Welch
• The Heart of the Servant Leader by C. John Miller
• The Gift of Therapy by Irving Yalom

Biblical counseling – is it just for the pastors and elders? Or for trained professionals? What does it look like to restore counseling to the local church? The purpose of this course is to:

• to broaden students’ understanding of counseling to include all relationships
• to build a thoroughly biblical understanding of the local church as a ministering community where everyone plays a part
• to help students find their place of ministry within the context of the local church and to help others do the same
• to see the importance of both public and private ministry of the Word and how they interrelate
• to examine present ministry opportunities

Topics covered include a biblical foundation for private ministry of the Word; the role of community and relationships in the process of sanctification; developing a practical ecclesiology; and developing an eye for ministry opportunities such as conflict resolution, evangelism, and church discipline.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• How People Change by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp
• Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Relationships: A Mess Worth Making by Timothy Lane and Paul Tripp
• Pastoral Theology in the Classical Tradition by Andrew Purves

Who is God? Who are we? Most everything we do comes from our answers to these questions, so we want to get the answers right. This course will focus especially on the questions Who am I? and Who are we? Since we are made in the image of God, we will also have the pleasure of asking Who is God? The goal is practical theology. We want answers that will inspire, instruct, guide and provide direction for our face-to-face ministry.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• Love’s Executioner by Irving Yalom
• Collected Writings of John Murray. Vol. 2, Systematic Theology,John Murray, pp. 3-119
• God Dwells Among Us by G.K. Beale and Mitchell Kim

This course aims to go deep with the everyday and universal problems of life, such as guilt, shame, fear, anger and suffering. The course content also goes broad by considering problems that are not found in a concordance, such as bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, anorexia and bulimia, and addictions. Through case studies, lectures, and outside readings, you’ll learn to move toward people with any type of struggle in a way that is engaging, helpful, and Christ-centered.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• When God Weeps by by Joni Eareckson Tada and Steve Estes
• What Grieving People Wish You Knew about What Really Helps (and What Really Hurts) by Nancy Guthrie
• Crossroads: A Step-by-Step Guide Away from Addictions by Ed Welch (either facilitator or student version)
• Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness by Ed Welch
• Running Scared: Fear, Worry and the God of Rest by Ed Welch
• Shame Interrupted by Ed Welch
• An Unquiet Mind by Kay Jamison
• Choose one: Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill or Love into Light by Peter Hubbard
• *DSM-5 by the American Psychiatric Association (sections on Anxiety, Eating Disorders, and Schizophrenia) by Ed Welch

*We do not require you to purchase this text, due to the high cost. Instead please make every effort to secure this reading from the public library or borrow a copy from a friend. If you have made every effort to locate the DSM-5 from a public source or a friend’s library and still cannot locate it, you may do an extensive search on the internet for the topics that require this text.

The modern psychologies provide the lenses through which most people view life’s problems. They shape how people interpret troubling behaviors, emotions, and relationships—so that sin is never part of what goes wrong with us. They shape the solutions offered—so that Christ plays no necessary part in addressing what is going on. Through practical assignments, group discussion, lectures and assigned readings, you’ll develop skills to lovingly and wisely engage the ways others seek to understand and solve personal problems. You’ll develop your ability to reinterpret what they see most clearly and care about most deeply. This class will help you to understand where biblical counseling fits both within the church and in relation to the surrounding mental health system.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context by David Powlison
• The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies by Stan and Jan Berenstain
• Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns
• Forgiveness: I just can’t forgive myself (booklet) by Robert Jones
• Inside Out by Larry Crabb
• Psychology and Christianity: Five Views edited by Eric Johnson
• The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud
• Seeing with New Eyes by David Powlison
• Speaking Truth in Love by David Powlison

Today’s children and teens struggle with many common counseling issues, such as depression, eating disorders, broken relationships, suicide, and peer pressure, to name a few. At the root of these problems is a heart struggle that the Lord wants to redeem and transform through the application of Gospel truths. Through practical, hands on project assignments and creative class exercises, you’ll learn how to build a relationship with a child or teen and apply Scripture in a way that gives life. You will apply the counseling strategies and methodology taught in class, with a child or adolescent of your choosing, with whom you will commit to meet weekly throughout the duration of the course. You’ll also have lectures and assigned readings that help you understand a biblical method of family counseling; issues of learning and development; and develop an understanding of common counseling problems with children and teens. While this course focuses on applying counseling skills to children and teens, the skills you’ll build are applicable to counseling adults as well, learning to draw them out and feel comfortable discussing their problems, and applying Scripture.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.

Required Textbooks

Students must purchase separately, any other required reading is provided with course access.

• Child Proof: Parenting by Faith, not by Formula by Julie Lowe
• More Creative Interventions for Troubled Children and Youth by Liana Lowenstein
• Engaging the Soul of Youth Culture: Bridging Teen Worldviews and Christian Truth by Walt Mueller
• Play in Family Therapy by Eliana Gil

What does actual counseling look like? It’s one thing to learn about biblical counseling through reading books and listening to a lecture, but it’s quite another to learn by actually seeing it done. You’ll have the opportunity to observe various CCEF counselors and faculty members as they counsel actual cases, either live or on video. You’ll experience the unscripted, unpredictable, and often messy aspects of face-to-face personal ministry, and be introduced to the artfulness, skill, and utter dependency on the Spirit that is needed to counsel wisely. Class discussion will focus on topics that arise out of each counseling session, and you’ll learn how to make effective progress notes to document your own counseling sessions.

Taught by Mike Emlet

*Please note: Dynamics of Biblical Change and Helping Relationships are prerequisites for this course.

If you are considering taking the course as an audit student rather than for credit please contact us to discuss this first.