Maranatha Christian College guidance counselor Stephanie Colinco recently embarked on her doctoral studies in Biblical Counseling at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
In July 2021, she earned a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling degree at The Master’s University in Sta. Clarita, California upon the approval of her thesis which was entitled “Job Satisfaction in Ministry: Counseling Comfort Idolatry in the Heart of a Financially Discontented Ministry Worker”.
She then enrolled in “leveling classes” to qualify for the Doctor of Educational Ministry program at SBTS. A three-year program, the D.Ed.Min in Biblical Counseling is designed for Christian education ministry professionals who serve in counseling roles.
One of the few Filipinos who are certified Biblical counselors, she is now a member of the US-based Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. She was briefly a counseling volunteer at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and is now one at Third Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky.
Since 2018, she has been on study leave from MCC whose staff she joined as a guidance counselor right after graduating cum laude in psychology from Silliman University in 2017 with a certificate in human resource management. She also served for some time as a licensed psychometrician and a senior high school teacher at MCC.
While studying at Silliman University, she was an academic scholar, an exchange student at Hannam University in Korea, and an editor-in-chief of The Weekly Sillimanian, the school publication. She graduated valedictorian from the MCC high school department in 2009 and was conferred a Graduate of Theology diploma by its sister school, Maranatha Baptist Bible College in 2012.
In 2018, just before the start of the fall semester, she was miraculously issued a student visa although her visa application had been initially denied by the U.S. Embassy. The application however was inexplicably approved a few days later even though she still had no documents to present to the consul who had based the previous denial on the grounds of “no proof of capability to pay” for her studies in the US.
It was the first in a series of miracles from God that she experienced over several years as a financially-challenged international graduate student.
At TMU, she paid for tuition and living expenses by working part-time at the school café where in her second year, she was promoted to student manager of its coffee shop. Since moving to Louisville, she has been employed by the SBTS coffee shop as a part-time barista who is under training for a supervisory position.
In her online bio, she describes her ministry journey:
“It was a whole new world when I went to another city (Dumaguete) to get my degree in psychology. It was where and when I started asking questions about my faith and wondering how the Bible, which I grew up learning about, can be used in life’s problems. In God’s sovereignty, He brought me to a place called L’abri Fellowship (in Korea) in 2016 where I first heard about Biblical counseling. My desire to learn about this kind of counseling grew more when I was working as a school counselor in our Christian high school. In 2018, God brought me to Santa Clarita, CA to get my Biblical counseling training.”
As explained in stephaniecolinco.com, Biblical counseling is “a ministry of the church for the church using God’s sufficient Word with the ultimate goal of helping the counselee become more like Christ. It is an intensive Bible study and discipleship ministry targeting areas of struggles to provide hope, encouragement, and practical help using Biblical principles.”