This is the story of Restoring Hope Counseling and Coaching (RHCC) - To God be the Glory!
The RHCC story predates the company's founding in 2012, going back to 1994. Without going into much detail, I became a Christian in January 1994. From the early days of my Christian Walk, I felt a strong compulsion to help those less fortunate than myself. I sought ways to help other people as I became convinced that the calling of a true Christian was, in part, to help those in need.
Fast-forward through the next 10 years, during which time I trained to be a pastor. This eventually led me to be hired as an associate pastor at an urban church and eventually the lead pastor of a small church in an Appalachian town. Some of the many things I learned in both settings were that although the location changed and the geographical contexts differed, the people's needs were the same. Everyone had a heavy burden and wanted someone to help them carry it.
After serving as a pastor, God began to give me a desire to help people through counseling, like the ones I had pastored. This led me to continue my education with a focus on counseling. Over the ensuing years, I earned a master’s degree in counseling and a Ph.D. in Counselor Education and Supervision. I started Restoring Hope Counseling and Coaching (RHCC) between those two degrees. While working towards my master’s degree, I worked for a local community mental health agency where I supervised a transitional residential facility for individuals who lived with severe mental illnesses and then transitioned to working as a full-time therapist. As a therapist for this agency, I was overscheduled, overworked, and underpaid. I had a caseload of 140 under-resourced and severely traumatized individuals for whom I did not have enough time in the day to treat. This discouraged me greatly as I believed these individuals deserved greater attention and more frequent sessions than I could provide. God used this realization to lead me to start RHCC, where I could provide the best counseling service possible to this same group of people.
With God's help, I started RHCC in 2012 as the only employee in the company. However, I knew I wanted to add other therapists to the practice as soon as possible. I wanted this because I knew it would be more fun to work with other people and that we could help a greater number of people as a group rather than just myself.
We grew slowly at first before God started to bless the work we were doing. For the first 3 years of RHCC, I continued to work full-time at the agency to provide for my family. From years 2-7, we doubled in size each year and grew much faster through and after the COVID-19 pandemic. In early 2015, the time came when I needed to decide to leave the agency and focus solely on building RHCC or stay at the agency and limit the growth of the company. At that time, we had grown to where I was almost earning an income from RHCC, which I received from the agency. My wife and I prayed together, asking God to give us direction regarding what He wanted us to do. On a Sunday night, we prayed and told the Lord that if He gave us 10 new clients by the end of the following Wednesday night, we would know He was leading me to step away from the agency and focus full-time on RHCC. This was a big step of faith as we were getting 1-2 calls from new clients a week then. By Wednesday night, God gave us 9 new clients. Although that wasn't 10, we saw that as a sign of what God wanted us to do.
During the years of rapid growth, several people in the company committed or re-committed themselves to serving God, and we were able to assist in starting five other practices! Only with God's help were we fulfilling the mission He had planned for us to complete.
With growth comes challenges. Many of those challenges included finding enough space and offices at a reasonable cost for our increasing number of therapists and learning how to create business infrastructure to support business growth. During those years of growth, we added a training team, a medical team, and an operations team.
We continue to learn and grow as we face more challenges related to fulfilling the mission God has placed in our hearts to accomplish.
What is the future of RHCC? At the end of a company retreat in September 2022, my wife and I believed that the Lord was directing us to dedicate RHCC to Him as a ministry and to pursue integrating faith into the company's operations and activities. She and I prayed a prayer of dedication as we left the retreat and started to think and continue to pray about how we might accomplish this task.
Since we knew that we just made a spiritual commitment, we suspected that we would experience a spiritual pushback, and we did. We had to change the employee responsibilities and the business structure to honor the Lord. One of the results was that several people left the company to pursue other interests and employment. Consequently, the number of employees we had decreased. Even as this occurred, we began to understand that the Lord was expanding His vision for RHCC, and He was pruning the company to allow us to be more effective in the work He called us to do. While we were retracting in size, we were expanding in vision.
As we move into the future, RHCC is developing services that look beyond only providing mental health services to individuals, couples, and families. While we believe that we will always do that, we are developing services that will integrate mental health care into the ministry of churches, mental health consultative services with Christian schools, mental health care within small and medium-sized companies, and coaching services for other private practices to coach them to develop a healthy leadership culture and to operate in alignment with HIPAA and ethical practices.