Darrell Greer
Northern News Services

RANKIN INLET (Mar 17/99) - The Training in Biblical Counselling course being sponsored by Rankin Inlet's Anglican Parish Centre is in full-swing in the hamlet and Canon Paul Williams says the course is progressing wonderfully.

Williams says Biblical counselling differs greatly from popular counselling which, he says, is more based on the needs of the individual.

"There's nothing wrong with that, I just don't think it goes far enough. It starts with the individual and, basically, ends with the individual," says Williams. "If a client comes to me, in terms of popular counselling, he's looking for his own needs to be met and often, although not necessarily exclusively, at the expense of someone else's needs.

"Biblical counselling looks not so much through the needs of the individual, but at that individual becoming the person who God intended them to be. In a sense, it's looking at it more from God's point of view rather than the individual's. Biblical counselling isn't necessarily aimed at fixing or putting a Band-Aid on a problem, but, rather, at using that problem as a way of focusing a person's life on where they are in God's plan."

Williams says problems often take people away from an image of God. He says Biblical counselling begins with the premise that we were created in the image of God and a lot of our lives are spent trying to get back to that image.

Popular counselling can't help in that search because it has no connection to the spiritual side of a person, he says.

"I'm still a student of Biblical counselling myself, and my understanding is that it tries to bring us back to a restored mental picture that we are the image of God and how, then, do we live our lives as a result of that image?

"Sometimes it means living our lives in spite of the problem, sometimes getting actual healing and having a solution to the problem and then reacting to that problem."

Williams says with Biblical counselling, more front-line workers are able to offer counselling and help guide the person themselves, rather than just refer them to a professional.

He says many times a person doesn't need an expert, just somebody to help get them back on track.

"An expert is great, but there are times our world system seems to divide us into two camps -- we are either experts or those who are expert to the pawn. This approach to counselling goes back to the Biblical concept that we are our brother's keeper and encourages people to pick up that ministry of helping each other, of coming alongside each other and walking together.

"So, in a lot of ways, it's a ministry of encouragement."

The course has participants from Thompson, Manitoba, La Range, Sask, Yellowknife, Repulse Bay, Clyde River and Rankin Inlet. It is being administered by Dr. Clair Schnupp and his

wife, Clara. The two have offered counselling seminars previously in Rankin Inlet, including a four-day workshop on counselling the sexually abused in 1997.