Name: Matt Magee

Ministry Role and Place: I’m an pastor at Oak Grove Church in Shellsburg, IA.

Role/Responsibilities/What you enjoy on the Core Team: I help with administration and website management.

When did you begin serving on the EIBCC Core Team?

I’ve been blessed to learn from the EIBCC training and equipping since 2019, and am the new guy on the EIBCC Core Team since joining in October 2022. I was humbled when given the opportunity to serve with the team because I knew that building deeper relationships with other team members would enable me to glean from the team’s combined years of experience and exposure to a broad range of counseling problems and solutions. Beyond my “selfishly pure” desire to learn deeply from current core team members, I am also deeply committed to helping further the EIBCC’s vision by helping folks from participating churches build meaningful relationships and contributing to the team’s communication, teaching, and equipping efforts.

How have you been blessed by the EIBCC? 

The attention given to a variety of counselor equipping topics and personal counselor soul care guidance has been a significant blessing in my own counseling, and for equipping others in my church. Topics ranging from counseling progression and direction to anger, trauma, church discipline and habits of worship have each been helpful in their own way. 

How has your church been blessed by the EIBCC?

Our church has been blessed by having several attendees grow from the training at the EIBCC and build relationships with other participants. It has been especially helpful for lay counselors in our church to sit around the tables with many of you to get to know one another, pray together, and see that they are not alone as lay counselors and disciplers. They are encouraged in their own growth and personal counseling development as they see others in the EIBCC growing as well.

Favorite memory you have about the EIBCC?

A favorite memory was the 2019 Marriage Conference when we brought about a dozen from our church and saw a significant number from our team capture a vision for the necessity and value of biblical counseling and marriage enrichment which has been transforming for our church. As it relates specifically to marriage or biblical counseling in general, the Marriage Conference weekend  sparked a conversation and learning that is still ongoing. People are seeing the need to move away from pragmatic tips which change the environment but don’t employ biblical principles, to biblically-rich truths to root our lives in.

How would you like to see the EIBCC grow in the future?

I’d love to see the EIBCC grow by increasingly coming alongside your and other churches through training workshops, possibly in your church, to help to support churches with existing BC ministries as well as churches without BC aspects of their ministries. I would also love to see us help foster intentional relationships and connectivity among one another here to find support, prayer, and coaching between our meeting dates.

Bonus Question: How can the EIBCC be praying for you?

Oak Grove would appreciate your prayer. We are still relatively young in our embrace and development of biblical counseling. Our aim is to see every ministry employing BC principles throughout so that heart-level engagement with discipleship, counseling, and leader coaching in BC principles becomes our DNA. Each generation brings a new opportunity to carry the faith to the next, and we must embrace our good work of helping our next generation become a church that cares well for the hurting, and calls every member to a deep and abiding relationship with Christ through faithful one-another ministry.