Member Spotlight: Wayne and Susie Vanderwier—Overseas Instruction in Counseling

Wayne Vanderwier had a question: Who’s helping pastors in other nations create training and certifying organizations for Biblical counseling?

God had an answer: Wayne and Susie Vanderwier.

Wayne was a pastor in Indiana and had become a certified Biblical counselor through the National Association of Nouthetics Counselors (now known as the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, or ACBC) when the question kept occurring to him.

He knew that Biblical counseling training was abundant in the U.S.

“In America, there are literally hundreds of good places to get true Biblical counseling training,” he says.

He should know. He is a Fellow with ACBC, has two doctorates in the discipline, and is a member of the Biblical Counseling Coalition Council Board. That has allowed him to promote a form of counseling that assumes the sufficiency of Scripture to address the emotional, relational and mental challenges of life.

But for about a decade, it nagged at him that “somebody really needs to dedicate their life to training Biblical counseling trainers overseas.” Who, he asked God, was helping pastors in nations around the world “where there is sometimes very little formal theological education and probably almost no training” in Biblical counseling?

God showed him and Susie that they were that “somebody.” So in 2006 Wayne left his pastoral work and Susie her Indiana University Northwest teaching job to create Overseas Instruction in Counseling.

OIC’s mission is to train Christian leaders in other nations to establish national counseling training and certifying structures. Wayne hopes that means that OIC will eventually be unnecessary.

He says that has happened or is happening in three nations already:

• Biblical Soul Care Australia has been established.
• An organization is starting in the Philippines.
• Russian Christians are “well on their way” toward building a training ministry.

OIC leaves it to local organizers to determine how their national structure will work.

“We don’t dictate the name of the organization or the certifying process that will be used in each nation,” Wayne says. “Leaders in each nation need to make those decisions. We coach them.”

But first, they teach them.

OIC has two “delivery systems,” Wayne says. One is through modular programs that are offered for three to five days twice a year in a nation, “typically in multiple locations within each nation.” The four required modules and two optional modules take two to three years of training to complete. The programs provide the information, accountability and “the skill that they need to be able to do effective Biblical counseling.”

The other system is academic training through master’s degree programs. Those are done by partnering with schools in other nations.

“Because we’re a mission agency, we can’t give a degree to somebody,” Wayne says.

Partner schools in three of the 11 nations OIC travels to provide Bible and theological training while OIC instructors provide Biblical counseling instruction.

“What we do is train folks to use the Bible to effectively meet the challenges of life,” Wayne says.

That training happens with teams of teachers that include pastors, Biblical counseling center directors, and college or seminary professors. God also provides “good translators and interpreters.” Wayne and Susie and one other couple are the only full-time missionaries with OIC, but “nearly two dozen additional people are in the pipeline to soon become OIC missionaries.”

In the meantime, the Vanderwiers are frequently on the move for OIC, organizing training sessions and raising support. Wayne, whose official title is executive director, and Susie, administrative assistant, each travel “something like 150,000 air miles per year” on behalf of OIC.

Besides being taxing, that also requires adaptation to many different cultures. Wayne calls it “contextualization.”

“We attempt to learn about cultural specifics, what makes the people of this nation choose to respond the way that they do,” Wayne says. “We tailor our training to whatever degree we can to meet the needs of that nation.”

For example, areas in Southeast Asia have a “shame-based culture.” Students aren’t going to raise their hand in class and ask a question because “that would cause them to be singled out as individuals and would cause them to be noticed.” In Russia, though, a student would be likely to stand to get the teacher’s attention and argue “vociferously some issue if they felt that was necessary.”

“In Egypt, it’s even one step further,” Wayne says. “Typically people stand and start yelling. You don’t have to ask them what they’re thinking; they just let you know.”

But while there may be cultural differences in training and teaching methods, counseling is the same everywhere.

“Since people are people around the world, since sin is sin around the world and since struggles are the same around the world—struggles with emotional issues, struggles with marriages, with families, with children, with finances—we just believe the Bible speaks authoritatively to every issue of life,” Wayne says. “So we train people to effectively use the Scriptures to be able to help people with the challenges of life.”

Besides cultural differences, OIC must battle the “psychologization” of many Christians in other nations.

“They have been exposed to and have studied humanistic forms of people-helping,” Wayne says. “In some cases, these materials are by people who are certainly Christian but who have most or all of their training in humanistic institutions of higher education. As a result, they have taken those humanistic concepts and simply attempted to add some Scripture to them to validate them or to make them sound like they come from the Bible.”

That means OIC has to change some minds.

“We typically have to spend some time describing what Biblical sufficiency really means, that what God has given us in His Word really is enough to address the struggles that we have in a fallen world,” Wayne says.

Biblical counseling, Wayne says, is not clinical psychology, talk therapy, or any other kind of a “dump your junk” approach.

“We’re talking about person-to-person, believer-to-believer ministry based on the authority of the Word done in the context and under the authority of the local church,” he says. “It’s not for the purpose of alleviating pain or solving problems, but for the purpose of restoring that broken believer’s heart to the grace of God. We’re not in the problem-solving business. We’re in the connecting broken believers to the grace of God business. We don’t give psychological therapeutic methodologies. We minister the Gospel of Christ and the grace of God to the hearts of struggling believers.”

The desire for that kind of counseling is growing, Wayne says. OIC will soon enter several countries for the first time and have “nearly a dozen on our waiting list.”

It sounds like God is still answering Wayne’s question.