Online CCEF Courses

Dynamics of Biblical Change is the foundation course for Level 3, and one of two prerequisites for other courses. It is 10 week online course. Coursework includes weekly lectures, critical reading, projects, and live interaction online.

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-counselling projects will help you to make first-hand, practical application of the concepts learned in class.

Let’s say you have a basic and growing understanding of biblical counselling. 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 is the second prerequisite, but may be taken in the same term as a third course. In this course, you will take the content you learned in Dynamics of Biblical Change and get specific about how you can use the content to help others.

**Note: This course has two unique requirements. First, you will be grouped with 3-4 other students for a bi-weekly community group. This group will decide when they want to meet, and what format works best (WhatsApp video or audio, Zoom, Google Hangout, etc.)

Helping Relationships is a 10 week online course. Coursework includes weekly lectures, critical reading, projects, and live interaction online.

Applied Theology of the Person Who am I? Who are we? This is a practical theology course examining Scripture’s unfolding answer to personal identity and corporate humanity.

This course will give you a theological framework for understanding yourself and those around you so that you may know people better and help more effectively.

Scripture is authoritative and sufficient for counseling, but how do you connect God’s Word effectively to the lives and struggles of people around you? Do you frequently turn to the same familiar passages, but are less confident in using other biblical passages to communicate the power of God’s love and faithfulness in the Gospel? How do you use the Bible’s redemptive story in counseling so that counselees grow in their knowledge of and love for the sovereign Lord?

This course will help you understand both people and the Bible more thoroughly and is designed to strengthen your ability to rivet Scriptural truth to real-life ministry situations. Through lectures, class discussion, and interpretive assignments, you’ll develop your skills in interpreting and applying any passage of Scripture to help people to grow in love for God and others more fully in the midst of their complex, daily lives.

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

– to broaden students’ understanding of counselling 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.

This course requires four prerequisite courses to first be completed.

EPC considers more than ten everyday problems that people face in a fallen world, such as suffering, shame, conflict, and anger. With each problem, we will consider how the Bible conceptualizes the experience and how it leads us to practically help others to persevere through problems with the goal that their faith expresses itself through love (Gal 5:6).

This course provides students with a “real-life” demonstration of how the biblical counselling methodologies explored in other counselling classes can be wisely applied in the counselling room. Each observation class is unique, as the observation experience will vary based upon the particular counsellor and the counselee’s particular problem and circumstances.

Students will quickly learn that biblical counselling is highly relational, not wooden or formulaic – there is no “one size fits all” approach.

This course introduces marriage counselling and its complex, dynamic, and yet crucial form of counselling. This course will provide you with both a basic theological framework and methodology for counselling couples. This will equip you to better move couples beyond and beneath their complaints to address the dynamics, heart attitudes and interpersonal patterns within their relationship.

This course equips students with a biblical anthropology that will help distinguish between spiritual and physical issues in the lives of counselees. Students will deepen their understanding of some acute and chronic problems having physiological manifestations, particularly those that affect intellect and mood. Students will learn to critique presuppositions of biological psychiatry that serve to undermine Scripture’s authority in counselling.

In this course students will learn how to understand psychologists’  observations, theories, and practices, and how to engage them critically, humbly, and lovingly. Students will respectfully reinterpret the things that psychologists see most clearly and care about most deeply. Students will examine where biblical counselling fits in their cultural context, both within the evangelical church and within the surrounding mental health system.

This course develops a biblical-theological framework to navigate and evaluate the ethics of biblical counselling. Students will be equipped to assess situations related to their context, calling, and counselling relationships in a biblical, ethical manner. A framework will be offered to help students evaluate various ethical dilemmas and come to decisions that ultimately glorify the Lord and edify the body.

This course brings the lens of Scripture and hope of God’s redemptive perspective to complex problems of human suffering and sin. We will explore topics with a careful nuance that seeks to truly understand the experience of what it is like to live as an embodied soul who wrestles with deep distress, profound brokenness, or an entrenched sin pattern with the hope of meeting strugglers with compassion, grace, and biblical truth.

This course requires five prerequisite courses be completed, including Marriage Counselling.  

In marriage, oppression occurs when one spouse seeks to control and dominate the other through a pattern of coercive, controlling, and punishing behaviours. Abuse is not a marriage problem. As a result, traditional marriage counselling will likely cause us to do more harm than good. In this course, we will seek to understand the distorted and dangerous beliefs of an oppressor that require us to have a distinctive counselling approach. To minister and care wisely for people ensnared in abusive relationships we must understand abuse biblically, know what God says about it and how he calls us to participate in his rescue.

A biblical counselling model will be presented that will conceptualise abuse and provide guidance for counselling both the abused and abusers.