In the back corner of the Faith Biblical Counseling Center, there’s a small room with a table, a couple of tiny chairs and several larger ones. It’s easy to see it’s a child-friendly place: There’s a shelf full of plastic toy figures, a sandbox table, dozens of colorful books, and—if you dig a little—a stash of candy.
But this place isn’t for therapy. It’s for encouraging families to grow together trusting in the goodness and sufficiency of God and His Word.
Kelli Dionne, a longtime biblical counselor at Faith, is the main proprietor of this little room, where she helps children and their parents who are struggling with the heartbreaking consequences of sin in the world: trauma, fear, anger, family breakdown, and a host of other heavy burdens. Kelli is just one of the counselors that serves with children and parents: The team also includes Rachel Jarms, Sandy Cashion, Kathy Hilliard and Cathy Yates.
God has given Kelli a desire to help children address their burdens alongside their parents and the church. She wants to be part of setting them on a path for choosing God’s way their whole lives.
“They’ve got 50, 60, 70 years ahead. And I would just love for that not to be a train wreck. ‘If we could just figure out what you need to know about the goodness of God now, you’ll turn right instead of left at those junctures.’”
Kelli emphasizes that none of the toys, the books, the sandbox, or even the candy are “salvific or solvific.” Unlike what some call “play therapy,” these are not intended to be a solution for the problem that brought a child to meet with her. They’re just strategies to help children warm up and be ready to talk about it with her. Sometimes eating candy together or running their fingers through the sand will speed up that ice-breaking process.
Getting to the heart of the matter as soon as possible aligns with one of Kelli’s goals for her counseling sessions: “I try not to meet with them very long … I want to find out what is the main thing and try to address that and help the parents with it as quickly as possible, so that these kids leave saying, ‘I’m really glad I did that. If I need help, I’ll go back.’”
Kelli sometimes uses figurines to illustrate Bible stories and other scenarios in a way that connects with the children she is counseling.
When Kelli was new to biblical counseling, she was concerned that if she tried to counsel children without enough expertise, she might do more harm than good. But the pain and struggles of more and more parents asking for help persuaded her to do what she could for them. She meets with parents and kids all together. “I think most of the time, parents just get exhausted and discouraged and they need someone to walk alongside them.”
As she continued to see the needs in church families, Kelli decided to pursue what training was available for biblical counselors dealing with children, including several classes on the subject as part of her master’s degree in biblical counseling. In the end, she confirmed there’s no special key for counseling children – just the same truth we all need.
“All I learned, really, was that kids as well as adults just need to know God better,” Kelli says. “I’m just finding every way I can to tell a child, ‘Jesus is your Good Shepherd. I need to know that for me, you need to know that for you, and if you believe that, it is going to change how you feel about this situation that you’re in, even if it doesn’t get better.’”
Kelli often uses the children’s book Sammy and His Shepherd to teach kids about Jesus through the words of Psalm 23. She has the children read chapters as homework. When they come in, she has them explain the story to her to make sure they understand. Sometimes the shelf of toys comes in handy for young children to be able to describe the people and stories they talk about. A small tiger figurine helps when Kelli walks them through a lesson about fear and anxiety.
Books, toys, sand, and candy are her tools to point kids to the wonderful truths in God’s Word about the One who will ultimately satisfy their deepest needs.
Anxiety and lack of self-control are the two most common concerns Kelli sees in kids whose parents seek biblical counseling for them, though there are also many other issues that come in. She says adults’ worldly thinking can influence how the children see their problems.
For example, perhaps an overworked teacher will assume that a boy who is hard to manage at school has ADHD, and the teacher will seek such a diagnosis because it might mean she gets more help in her classroom. But that sets the boy on a track to incorporating that label as part of his identity.
“Just because a boy or a girl doesn’t have self-control does not mean that they have a disease,” she says.
Girls have more of a tendency toward fear and worry, and sometimes Kelli recognizes them picking up the same worldly expressions as some of the women she counsels: “I can’t sit still at school because of my anxiety. I can’t get along with that person because of my anxiety.”
“I want that kid to know the people at their church love them and love God and will help them.”
Once Kelli has reached a safe level of trust with a child or woman, she can challenge those statements: “Do you feel like your anxiety is sort of your pet or your friend? … Anxiety is sin. Worry is sin. I don’t want you to think of ‘my anxiety’ as someone that I put in my little animal carrier and it just goes everywhere with me.”
She teaches them to ask the Lord to help them put away such fears and not pick them up again. She teaches children “about who God is and how God wants to help, and what God tells us about fear, what God tells us about sadness. We teach how to lament. We teach that God is powerful; we don’t have to be powerful.”
Kelli realizes there is ongoing work that parents and churches will be doing with the kids long after their counseling sessions. She always meets with the parents and child together, and she doesn’t want any of them to see her as an expert who knows more than the parents do. If she sees an area where a father doesn’t seem to know how to parent well, she asks her husband (also a biblical counselor) or a pastor to help him.
Her goal is to build up the parents for their long-term, God-given job of shepherding their child. She asks the fathers to read Scriptures and pray during their sessions, so that their kids see where they can take their troubles. “I want that child to see that their parent wants to help them, and their parent knows how to ask God for the help that they need.”
She especially wants the parents to have the joy of leading their children to trust in Christ for salvation. “Counseling young children is very evangelistic. … I want them to know that God is big and good and faithful and helpful and loves them and wants to help them. And so we do have a lot of those gospel conversations. … We’ll talk about how, Mom and Dad, you need to keep having these conversations.”
Some of the issues they address in the counseling room involve serious trauma such as sexual assault. While she would love to just erase the painful consequences of such things immediately, Kelli says the child will likely deal with the fallout from that experience several times as they move into different seasons of life, such as puberty or planning to get married. And she wants them to remember that there is help available from their parents and from their church, so they will turn to them rather than sinful solutions when those future problems arise.
Kelli is clearly passionate about helping young people learn to love their church. Counselees who aren’t from Faith Bible Church must bring an advocate from their own church leadership to counseling sessions, so that the family remains connected to and fed by their local church for the long term, as God designed. “The last thing I want is for parents not to feel like their own church is the best, safest place for them.”
The Bible teaches that the only source of true spiritual change is the Holy Spirit working through faith in Jesus. Since it isn’t always possible to discern whether children are truly believers and have the Spirit living in them, sometimes parents have been told their kids can’t get biblical counseling. But Kelli says it’s important, even if they’re not yet genuine believers, to show children that the church is a place of help for their trouble rather than hurt.
“They have real pain, and I don’t want them to think that they can’t go to their church for help. … I want that kid to know the people at their church love them and love God and will help them.”
Kelli and the team also work through the counseling center to train people from other churches, because while she loves what she does, she knows she won’t be able to do it forever.
“I want to be training other people at other churches to do this with the right balance, because we don’t want to be therapists, but we do want to minister to the hearts of kids.”
Lynn and her husband, Doug, lead a Growth Group. Lynn serves as a writer and editor for Living Faith magazine and other church communications.
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