Dr. Nicolas and Venessa Ellen are the founders of the Expository Counseling Training Center and have spent over 25 years teaching and counseling around the world. Together they fielded some of the thorniest situations biblical counselors face.
But before we got to the questions, Dr. Nicolas Ellen opened with a single reframe that shaped everything else he and Venessa said over the next hour: “We don’t have marriage problems. We have character deficiencies that show up in the marriage.”
It’s a small shift with enormous implications.
When One Spouse Won’t Come to Counseling
From there, the first question set the tone: what do you do when a wife is in a painful marriage, her husband has given her ultimatums to “get her act together,” and he refuses to come in for counseling himself? Venessa’s response was immediate and practical. Start with definitions — what exactly does “get your act together” mean, and are the issues he’s naming sinful, neutral, or simply matters of personal preference? Then get a male counselor involved to try to draw the husband in, because, as she put it plainly, “I only have one side of the story.” She’s learned the hard way — she described a case where a woman arrived with visible signs of physical abuse, convincing enough that the church moved into action, only to discover through further investigation that the wife was the one abusing her husband. “I just don’t do the one-sided thing unless I absolutely have to,” she said.
Dr. Nicolas Ellen added a piece of hard-won wisdom about people who resist counsel altogether: “People who like to give direction, who can’t receive direction, are the most difficult to work with.” He named three reasons a Christian might not be obeying God — lack of knowledge, lack of skill, or lack of will — and was candid that a counselor can do a great deal with the first two. The third, though, is a heart posture only God can change. “You can’t make a stubborn person not be stubborn.”
The Limits of a Church That Won’t Get Involved
One of the sharpest exchanges of the night came from a counselor who works with couples from churches that simply don’t engage — pastors who “stay in their lane” and leave families to fend for themselves. What’s a biblical counselor supposed to do when there’s no functioning church authority to appeal to?
Dr. Nicolas Ellen’s answer balanced compassion with real caution. Do everything you can for the person who’s willing to receive help — support, counsel, safety if it’s needed — without crossing into territory that dishonors whatever leadership does exist. But he was unusually direct about something counselors don’t always want to hear: liability. If a counseling ministry operates outside real church authority and something goes tragically wrong, the counselor and their ministry can bear real legal responsibility. “This is a litigious society,” Venessa said. Their own counseling center requires anyone seeking counsel from outside their church to bring a pastor with them or formally join their congregation and submit to its process, including Matthew 18. It’s not a formality — it’s what allows them to help someone long-term rather than absorbing a risk that was never theirs to carry.
Flipping the Script Back to the Heart
A particularly moving case came from a counselor working with a pastor’s wife — a woman married into a family where her father-in-law had gone through church discipline and never repented, and whose husband, now a pastor, had grown up learning to perform rather than to be honest about struggle. The wife was afraid to even ask her husband to join counseling, worried he’d cut her off from the relationship entirely.
Dr. Nicolas Ellen’s counsel modeled exactly the reframe he’d opened with. Rather than continuing to build a case against a husband who wasn’t in the room, he described how he’d gently turn the questions back toward the wife herself: “What do you think God is trying to teach you about your own heart in this? If your husband challenged you to think, speak, and act like him, how would you feel — wouldn’t you call that controlling?” It’s not that the husband’s growth doesn’t matter. It’s that the counselor’s actual assignment is the person sitting in front of them — helping her distinguish, as Dr. Ellen put it, “the difference between a preference and a precept,” and examining whether her own silence is rooted in genuine wisdom or in the fear of what she might lose by being honest.
The Dialysis Delusion
Dr. Nicolas Ellen closed the evening with a story that captured, better than any principle could, just how much discernment this work requires. A woman who’d only recently begun attending his church — not yet a member, barely known to him — called in distress. She said she’d put a man out of her home for cohabiting with her against biblical counsel, and now claimed he was abusing her and that her own son was somehow “in cahoots” with him. She refused to go home. She needed her medicine. Nothing she said quite added up.
Dr. Ellen found himself in what he called “a rock and a hard place.” As a mandatory reporter in Texas, he couldn’t dismiss a claim of abuse. But he also had no way to verify a single detail of what he was hearing. He called her son — carefully, disclosing nothing, saying only that he was reporting what he’d been told and hoping to help. The son offered an explanation Dr. Ellen had never encountered before: his mother was on dialysis, had missed a treatment, and the toxin buildup was causing delusions. After a tense three-way call, the woman made it home safely. It turned out to be exactly what her son described — a medical crisis wearing the mask of a domestic one.
“What’s coming out of somebody’s mouth may not be 100%,” Dr. Ellen said, reflecting on this situation. Not because people are lying, necessarily, but because pain, fear, and — in this case — a genuine medical condition can distort a person’s account of their own reality. The story became a parable for the entire evening: do your due diligence, involve the people who can confirm or complicate the story you’re hearing, and hold every account — even a frightening one — with enough humility to keep asking questions.
Where Love Meets Liability
Near the close, one counselor asked for encouragement around something every biblical counselor feels: how much is genuinely outside your control? Dr. Ellen’s answer is a principle worth returning to often. “There are things you can’t cause to happen, and there are things you can’t keep from happening.” A counselor’s job is to provide everything within their role and responsibility — love, insight, support, presence — and then to recognize clearly where that role ends. “Where my support, care, and insight is going to move beyond what could be my possible role and responsibility,” he said, “that could move into liability. That is not something I should take on.”
He named a temptation many know well: wanting more for people than they want for themselves, and quietly taking on sacrifices they were never willing to make on their own behalf. “Their choices then become your liabilities,” he warned. The wisdom isn’t in caring less. It’s in learning, as he put it, to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” — fully present in the relationship, but never confused about whose choices ultimately belong to whom.
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