I’ve known Dr. Jeff Doll, Counseling pastor at Cornerstone URC, and Director of the Institute for Reformed Biblical Counseling (IRBC) for a number of years. We’ve both taught in one another’s counseling classes and I’ve used Jeff’s teaching materials at the Seminary. I am a huge admirer of his passion for training Christians to do more counseling in the local church, while also recognizing limitations and the need for professional help at times. (And for the purposes of full disclosure, my son and his lovely daughter recently got engaged, although neither of us can claim any credit for that!)

Anyway, I’m writing about Jeff because I want to bring to your attention the wonderful work he is doing at IRBC in promoting and educating Christians in a holistic view of Biblical counseling based on a strong biblical, confessional, Reformed perspective. He’s recently published part of his curriculum and it’s available here. This book presents the seven biblical principles of IRBC’s view of biblical counseling, the seven dominant domains of human problems, and seven steps of counseling.

It’s all good, but Jeff’s unique contribution is his work on the seven dominant domains of origin for human problems, which he divides into two main categories:

Internal Dominant Domains

  • Spiritual domain
  • Mental domain
  • Emotional domain
  • Social domain
  • Bodily domain

External Domains

  • Environmental domain
  • Production (or vocational) domain

I think you can immediately see that this is a serious attempt to expand the concept of biblical counseling in a way that is sensitive to all the mixture of influences and factors that come into play in so many human problems.

There’s much else that I could commend in Jeff’s approach, but would encourage you to get the book and study it yourself.