Our History

Into my (Tony’s) teens and 20s, counseling was the last thing I wanted to be involved in. Connecting one-on-one with people came fairly easy to me, and I loved being involved in ministry. But, to me, counseling was too messy and time consuming to worry about. I longed to teach and plant churches in places without a Christian presence, and somehow thought was would be much less complicated. God challenged that perspective in a big way during a nine-month college missions internship in Pakistan, when I discovered we are all a lot messier and need a lot more time and help than we think. After four months of the stress of ministry among conservative Muslims, anxiety and depression overwhelmed my life. This ended up turning into a 10+ year struggle. However, God used that brick wall to slowly open me up to my deep need for Christ in ways I never knew I needed. I discovered the transforming power of his help through others, deep heart change, comfort, and love. I started to learn that we all struggle more than I imagined and that Scripture speaks to all of our problems in surprisingly insightful ways.  

This awakening led into the opportunity in 2008 to lead an at-risk youth mentoring outreach at Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, seminary and pastoral ministry with families and youth where mentoring and counseling was a key part of what I did. In 2018, we transitioned into the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). We expected that God would provide another pastoral role for me there, but to my surprise there were no openings anywhere. However, the door was open for counseling, something I actually longed to do more of. So, I started working part-time for Jacob’s Well Church in Green Bay and then our home church, Emmaus Road. It went well and led into online classes with the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF), and then starting work on a doctorate of ministry in counseling with Westminster Theological Seminary – and graduating in spring of 2022!  

As counseling work and study continued, I began to focus more on themes of helping people find God’s presence in the hardest struggles of life and saw them experience the unique transformation that comes through walking consciously with him. This became the focus of my doctoral work (facing anxiety coram deo) with an emphasis on knowing our Heavenly Father’s thoughts and heart towards us in the deep wounds of suffering and the equally difficult battle with the warped motives of our old fallen nature. I’ve been impressed how, when we engage these areas with a closer communion with God and intentional redemptive relationships among his people, remarkable things happen.

During this time, God helped develop partnerships with churches to help them in these areas through counseling and CCEF classes for the whole congregation. In the fall of 2020 we launched a three church partnership between Emmaus Road (our home church), Village Church, and Cornerstone Church. We set out to do expanded versions of two CCEF classes, How People Change and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands. In 2021 this work expanded to include our first long distance partner, Grace Presbyterian in Pardeeville, WI. In 2022 we launched a CCEF-oriented mentoring methods class at both Emmaus Road and Grace, which led to the start of heart-change focused mentoring ministries at both churches that fall. Mentor candidates were hand-picked by our ministry and leadership at the churches, and they immediately began impactful ministry formally and informally in all their leadership roles in their churches. At the same time I began contract counseling for other churches which led to partnerships with another three churches by the fall of 2022.

Due to the level of need we were seeing and the interest among churches to join in this ministry, we worked in 2022 to turn the part-time work I was doing with churches into a full-time non-profit ministry with a board and team of financial and prayer supporters, who could underwrite 70% of the cost of the work and intercede for the work. Fundraising for a type of ministry model that has never been attempted felt like a big leap of faith, especially because we felt I should still continue ministering part-time, while I reached out to people. Remarkably, by God’s grace we met our fundraising goal for 2023 in March of 2023, and I was able to transition to full time ministry as hoped. In the fall of 2023, the number of churches we are working with increased to 12, and we completed a summer lay counseling training to help promote six of our existing mentors to lay counselors. At the same time we helped two new churches train members in mentoring and lay counseling. By the end of 2023, we were involved with 16+ churches, and the need for more professional-level biblical counseling became very clear. Thankfully, in late May of 2024, God provided an experienced professional biblical counselor and certified family life educator from Blue Ridge Christian Counseling, Dreama Love. She joins our ministry as an online contract counselor, who can work with all of the 23 and counting churches that have expressed interest in this kind of help.

We are constantly impressed that, in spite of the stress of a daily focus on hard areas with families and individuals, fundraising, and the spiritual battles of this kind of work, God has been changing lives in ways we don’t expect (including ours!). Every week it’s impressive to see people confronting life-long destructive patterns, engaging relationships in new redemptive ways, finding Christ in the darkness, and building new, deeper community. The most exciting part is when whole church cultures are impacted, as their people meet Christ and love each other in greater ways.

In all of this I’ve come to more deeply appreciate that the whole church is a critical part of work of bringing God’s deep comfort and heart-change to his people and the world. His gospel and the ministry of the Spirit through his Word are the anchors. The church, in all its gifts, speaking the truth in love, is the key means. In the future we hope to continue classes and leadership development with existing partners, continue to provide counseling help and guidance, develop new partnerships that serve our entire region within a 90 mile radius, and hire additional staff for this task. We would love your prayers and joining together with us in any way God leads to help with this work.