Christian counseling

Christian counseling is pastoral counseling that draws upon psychology and Christian; practitioners approach psychology through the lens of the Bible.

Christian Counseling began in the end of the 1960s leading into the 1970s with the Biblical Counseling Movement directed by Jay E. Adams which brought to attention in his book Competent to Counsel a Christian-based approach which was different from the psychological and psychiatric solutions of the time. He was a devout Protestant who believed that it was the job of the church to heal people who he believed were morally corrupt, but labeled by society as mentally ill. He rejected other models of counseling, such as the Medical model, which gave clients a medical diagnosis based on a list of their behaviors or actions. Adams believed the lists of maladaptive behaviors listed under each diagnostic category, were actually behaviors emanating from our volitional nature, rather than an illness we were suffering from. Maladaptive behaviors are a matter of sin and therefore subject to confrontation and education in God's word, exhorting the client to choose behavior that is obedient to God's word, thus removing the sin in their life. Adams' disagreed with any attempt to reclassify our behavior that removed us from complete responsibility for our choices.

Adams gained converts but also lost popularity among people as well. Adam's model of Nouthetic counseling identifies many scriptures that a counselor may use to exhort clients to change their behavior and come into obedience and away from sin. The term "Nouthetic" is derived from the Greek word "noutheteo", meaning "to admonish". Critics however point out the complexity of God's creation and that telling an anorexic to eat because starving themselves is a sin, is not likely to be an effective method of treatment for eating disorders, nor many other issues clients present with that have intermingled bio-psycho-social-cultural origins as identified in scientific research.

Efforts to combine counseling, psychotherapy or other scientific or academic endeavors with Christian or other religious perspectives or approaches are sometimes called "integration." Integration of academic subjects with theology has a long history in academia and continues in many colleges and universities that have continued their founding religious underpinnings. There are multiple kinds of integration, as it has been defined differently over the years. The way in which Christianity has been integrated with psychology thus far is by considering the ways in which psychology and the bible agree and not integrating the teachings of psychology that don’t agree with the bible. While this tactic is still in progress and continuing to be looked at there have been significant efforts to try and integrate the two. Two men Stanton Jones and Richard Buteman came up with a list of three different methods on how to integrate psychology and the Christian faith. The methods are called Pragmatic eclecticism, Metatheoretical eclecticism, and Theoretical integration. The first method, pragmatic eclecticism, looks at the best solutions for resolving patients' problems based on previous research comparing different methods that have been used. The second method is concerned with the effectiveness of the counselor and looks at the tactics they are using that are beneficial and those that are not. The third method takes theories that are previously existing and makes that the baseline from which further research can build upon. What all integrators of Christianity and Psychology do believe as underlying truth is that all truth is God's truth.

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