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Rating: 
Summary: Has some strong points
Review: Crabb believes that the local church should assume the responsibility for restoring people who are in need of healing. For too long the church has abdicated this biblical role. He states that there are three levels of counseling. Level I is counseling by encouragement which every member of the church can do by helping hurting people focus on establishing biblical feelings. Level II is counseling by exhortation. This level of counseling requires a good biblical background, it can be done by elders, Sunday School teachers and pastors. Level III is counseling by enlightenment that tries to establish godly behavior through changed thinking. A picture is worth a thousand words. Larry Crabb's charts give clarity and meaning to his writing. While having a strong biblical basis, Crabb does not ignore the contributions of secular systems of psychology, rather, he puts them thorough the sieve of biblical truth to find practical helpful advise. I appreciate his thoughtful critique of competing systems of psychology. He gives the reader a general introduction to the different schools of counseling, both secular and Christian. Rather than bashing the non-Christian viewpoints he notes their strengths and exposes their humanistic presuppositions. The discussion of Transactional Analysis on pg. 39 demonstrates a model of secular psychology adopted by the evangelical church. While Transactional Analysis can be a helpful tool for the pastor, Crabb looks at its humanistic presuppositions and warns of its misuse. He sees man's basic need as significance and security. People need to know that they have worth and that they are loved. Crabb has a gift to communicate in a clear way some rather technical stuff. Also worthy of note is Crabb's discussion how problems develop in chapters six and seven. I really enjoyed this book but I felt as if I were duped. The church is to have three levels of counseling, yet, it is not until pg. 165 that Mr. Crabb states that Level II counseling (counseling by encouragement) is for "elders, pastors, deacons . . . other spiritually mature." The bulk of the book is about Level III counseling which requires specialized training of six months to a year to learn. Mr. Crabb admits to not having develop a teaching curriculum for it. Clearly, Level III counseling requires a time commitment that few pastors and lay people can afford to make. The book gave me hope that we can do Level I and II counseling with very little training. I am afraid, however that Level III counseling is out of reach most churches. The time, expertise and expense in trading are beyond the means of most small churches. Personally, this book helped me order my thinking on pastoral counseling. In seminary, I was taught an eclectic model of counseling with no biblical worldview. It left me drifting in a mass of psychobabble. I highly recommend this book because if its excellent survey of competing schools of thought and its thorough analysis of them.
Rating: 
Summary: Unique
Review: Crabb's approach is unique in the Christian world and very effective. This book sets out his general approach but his later books fill out the practical outworkings.
Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: Crabb's approach is unique in the Christian world and very effective. This book sets out his general approach but his later books fill out the practical outworkings.
Rating: 
Summary: Not really "biblical" counseling at all
Review: The basic tenets of Crabb's counseling are purely secular with a few "Christian" sounding words added in and mixed with a portion of Scripture for good measure. If you are looking for actual BIBLICAL counseling, where the Bible is considered sufficient for meeting the counseling needs of people, you will not find it in this book. If you are sold on the concept of psychology, then you will most likely enjoy this work. However, I must challenge you to beware of this idea of Crabb's that we are to "spoil the Egyptians" and take the "best" from the secular world of psychology and add it to the Bible. I think this is a very dangerous position for a Christian to be in. This assumes that man's wisdom needs to be added to the wisdom found in the Bible for the counseling to be "effective". This belief, however, is rooted in the teachings of Freud, Jung, Skinner, and Rogers, all of whom were blatantly anti-Christian in their beliefs. Crabb's view of man, man's sinfulness, and our basic need for a Savior has been replaced with our "needs" for love, self-esteem, and essentially anything other than calling sin sin. Many good-hearted Christians are going into the field of psychology, wanting to help others in this way, but finding that the secular brand of counseling is not at all effective, as the title of this book would suggest, but actually it is as ineffective and impotent as the secular belief system that fuels this type of counseling. I highly suggest those who are interested in helping others in a truly biblical way search out those books that will give a much more biblical view than this one, such as "Introduction to Biblical Counseling" by John MacArthur, Jr., and Wayne Mack, "Competent to Counsel" by Jay Adams, "PsychoHeresy" by Martin and Deidre Bobgans, and "Psychobabble" by Richard Ganz, just to name a few.
Rating:
Summary: Not really "biblical" counseling at all
Review: The basic tenets of Crabb's counseling are purely secular with a few "Christian" sounding words added in and mixed with a portion of Scripture for good measure. If you are looking for actual BIBLICAL counseling, where the Bible is considered sufficient for meeting the counseling needs of people, you will not find it in this book. If you are sold on the concept of psychology, then you will most likely enjoy this work. However, I must challenge you to beware of this idea of Crabb's that we are to "spoil the Egyptians" and take the "best" from the secular world of psychology and add it to the Bible. I think this is a very dangerous position for a Christian to be in. This assumes that man's wisdom needs to be added to the wisdom found in the Bible for the counseling to be "effective". This belief, however, is rooted in the teachings of Freud, Jung, Skinner, and Rogers, all of whom were blatantly anti-Christian in their beliefs. Crabb's view of man, man's sinfulness, and our basic need for a Savior has been replaced with our "needs" for love, self-esteem, and essentially anything other than calling sin sin. Many good-hearted Christians are going into the field of psychology, wanting to help others in this way, but finding that the secular brand of counseling is not at all effective, as the title of this book would suggest, but actually it is as ineffective and impotent as the secular belief system that fuels this type of counseling. I highly suggest those who are interested in helping others in a truly biblical way search out those books that will give a much more biblical view than this one, such as "Introduction to Biblical Counseling" by John MacArthur, Jr., and Wayne Mack, "Competent to Counsel" by Jay Adams, "PsychoHeresy" by Martin and Deidre Bobgans, and "Psychobabble" by Richard Ganz, just to name a few.
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