Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation: Restoring Christ to Counseling and the Church

Since 1968, the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation (CCEF) has been at the forefront of biblical counseling, teaching individuals how to delve into the wisdom and depth of the Bible and apply its grace-centered message to the challenges of daily living. CCEF's mission is to restore Christ to counseling and counseling to the church.

CCEF's Core Purpose

CCEF exists to restore Christ to counseling. The foundation has a passion for personal change that is centered in the person of Christ. CCEF also exists to restore counseling to the Church, believing that the body of Christ is God’s primary context for change, the community God uses to transform his people.

CCEF’s mission is to equip the church to be this kind of transforming community. It accomplishes this mission through a unique synergy of counseling, training, publications, and conferences.

The Importance of Acknowledging Pain

CCEF recognizes firsthand that people’s experience of pain should be taken seriously. The message, as captured by faculty member Ed Welch’s popular blog post, “No More Minimizing Pain,” is simple yet profound: only the gospel of Christ can satisfy a suffering soul. People are meant to “speak both the joys and sorrows” of life to the Lord.

CCEF's Commitment to the Church

God intends the local church to provide the context in which suffering people find wise counsel and support. CCEF sees itself as an extension of the local church and strives to serve and promote its ministry. The good news of the gospel is meant to be preached, taught, and counseled with relevance to individual people. The goal is to equip Christians for life and ministry.

CCEF's Activities and Resources

CCEF provides free content on the web, including weekly blog posts on a variety of counseling topics. They are also capturing and editing their classes in video format for distance education.

CCEF has doubled the number of students in its internship program in order to equip and train new leaders for the church. All of these endeavors are costly and cannot be accomplished without financial gifts from partners who share their mission.

School of Biblical Counseling (SBC)

CCEF’s School of Biblical Counseling (SBC) offers affordable graduate-level distance learning. Online courses are taught by professors at Westminster Theological Seminary from their Master of Arts in Counseling (MAC) program, and cohorts of students are guided and graded by trained Online Instructors. CCEF courses are internationally renowned and available to anyone; no application or prior educational degrees are required!

Dynamics of Biblical Change

The course "Dynamics of Biblical Change," taught by the late Dr. David Powlison and current CCEF Executive Director Alisdair Groves, is a transformational, self-counseling course. The way one counsels (or disciples) other people is determined by how one understands God, oneself, other people, life’s pressures, and change. "Dynamics" is a 3-credit course, delivered virtually and graded by a trained Online Instructor, with whom students interact weekly.

CCEF's Beliefs and Theological Grounding

CCEF seeks to apply the core commitments of historic orthodoxy in humble and winsome ways. They affirm the unique authority of Scripture and subscribe to the historic creeds of the early church and Reformation (i.e., Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Westminster Confession of Faith, London Baptist Confession, Heidelberg Catechism).

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While Protestants grounded in the Reformed tradition, they also seek to minister to and with Christians from a range of theological perspectives. Because God teaches us to see the world the way he sees it, and to see all things as they exist in relationship to him, CCEF is committed to the complete trustworthiness and primacy of the Scriptures.

Because the working of God in human life unfolds historically, CCEF is committed to the narrative perspective provided by redemptive-historical theology, the story line that frames our understanding of systematic theology, practical theology, and church history.

Because God’s saving work in Christ Jesus creates a people for his own possession, CCEF is committed to serving the visible church and Christians of many different denominational associations. Because God’s ways and words are relevant across time, in all places, and to all peoples, CCEF is committed to cultural sensitivity and engagement, moving towards the world redemptively rather than existing in defensive or hostile isolation.

A Brief History of Pastoral Care and CCEF's Role

The Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation (CCEF) was founded in 1968 and stands in a long tradition of pastoral care that dates back to the 1st century church and the New Testament.

In principle, for the first 1900 years of the church’s existence, the Scriptures formed the basis for diagnosing both psychological-spiritual maladies and interpersonal problems, offering a consistent basis for addressing people’s problems by rooting lives in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. CCEF’s ministry expresses this heritage of a God-centered understanding of people and a Christ-centered understanding of how God redeems people, applying these time-tested truths to modern problems.

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However, a fundamental shift came with the advent of the modern secular psychologies, pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the late 1800’s. Historic biblical categories of creation, fall and redemption were replaced by secular categories of mental health and mental illness. The main effect of that shift meant that secular psychological thinking excised the personal God from the world he made. In the new theories and psychotherapeutic practices, there was no mention of sin, of God, of the necessity of a Savior, or the promise of eternal life. The solution to our “personal and interpersonal problems” lay within us and counseling involved drawing it out.

From the turn of the 20th century, a shift took place in pastoral care instruction in seminaries. While many seminaries continued to make the Scriptures primary in the preaching of God’s word, they no longer made the Scriptures primary in pastoral care and counseling. This vacuum was filled by a host of alternatives that tended to minimize, change or overshadow the redemptive message of the Scriptures.

In response to these trends in the church and pastoral training, a “biblical counseling” movement emerged in the late 1960’s. The initial spokesman for this approach to pastoral care and counseling was Jay Adams. In 1968, Jay Adams and John Bettler started the Christian Counseling & Educational Foundation just outside of Philadelphia. For the past four decades, CCEF has been growing and contributing to the biblical counseling movement as that movement has grown in both influence and maturity.

CCEF’s early history was largely prophetic and therefore polemic, challenging the church to rethink its beliefs about why people struggle and how to help them when they do. CCEF called pastors and seminaries back to the primacy of Scripture as the basis for thoughtful and effective pastoral care and counseling. From the beginning, there was always a concern to define what could legitimately be learned from modern psychology, but Scripture provided the orienting “generalizations”: a God-centered view of people and problems and solutions. What was at stake was which source would be primary.

As CCEF entered the 1980’s and 90’s, it was apparent that the second and third generation of leaders benefited from the strengths of their predecessors as well as learned from their weaknesses. They moved CCEF in a direction of increased sensitivity to human suffering, to the dynamics of motivation, to the centrality of the gospel in the daily life of the believer, the importance of the body of Christ and to a more articulate engagement with secular culture.

As CCEF enters the 21st century, it continues this positive trajectory with a commitment to work out the implications of biblical counseling in many areas of counseling methodology, emphasizing the centrality of the body of Christ as the primary context for care and counseling while recognizing the legitimate place of broader resources within the body of Christ. The relationship between biblical counselors and fellow evangelicals involved in professional, clinical counseling continues to be worked out in the pursuit of cordial relationships in which differences can be constructively discussed. Biblical counseling offers a distinctively Christian understanding of people, problems, influences, suffering, motives, and change processes. These beliefs are continuing to be developed and applied at CCEF.

CCEF's Mission and Distinctives

The aim of CCEF is to consider how caring for people’s souls can be increasingly wise and helpful. This is sometimes identified as biblical counseling. CCEF intends this not as a protected trademark but as a body of work to which many contribute. It describes the troubles we face, how those troubles are experienced, how God speaks to us during those troubles, and how we help each other with wisdom and love.

CCEF works to restore Christ to counseling. Each of us has personal and interpersonal struggles. Jesus Christ knows those struggles, he cares about strugglers, and so he enters into our lives. CCEF sees him bring about significant change in people’s lives every day. Because this is who Christ is, and because this is what he does, he is preeminently relevant to counseling. This conviction is the heritage and heartbeat of CCEF.

CCEF works to restore counseling to the church, believing that the body of Christ is God’s primary context for change. God uses Christian community to transform his people. CCEF’s mission is to equip the church to be this kind of transforming community, seeing themselves as an extension of the local church, and wanting to serve and promote its ministry.

CCEF's Building Blocks

CCEF's building blocks describe their path forward-the way they order their priorities most strategically in order to fulfill their mission. They cannot restore Christ to counseling and counseling to the church without prioritizing the following four elements:

Remaining Connected to Christ: Remaining rooted in Christ-personally, corporately, and doctrinally.
Breaking New Ground: Creating faithful, fresh, and timely resources that go wider and deeper into the treasures of Scripture and the troubles of life.
Equipping People: Providing hands-on feedback and training that effectively equips God's people to grow in counseling.
Making a Critical Contribution to the Church: Making everything accessible to churches, designed for the benefit of churches, and with the goal of strengthening local churches around the world.

Seven Recurring Themes Within CCEF's Core

Within the growing CCEF literature and teaching, there is a common core. Here are seven recurring themes within that core:

The personal God gets personal with us: The triune God-Father, Son, and Spirit-has always known reciprocal fellowship and unity, and he has created us to participate in that fellowship, welcoming us to himself through Jesus Christ. This foundational reality has critical implications. God’s plan is to be close to us and for us to draw near to him. Herein lies the source of our interest in relationships and human connection. In response, our care for each other is inviting and familial.
Scripture comes from the mouth of God: The Spirit presses the very word of God into our hearts, revealing Jesus. In Jesus, we find all wisdom and goodness. No one else can so deeply nurture and sustain us. The Spirit applies Scripture to our hearts. Scripture must shape the details of our counsel, including how and why we listen, what is important, how we speak, and what we say. Scripture must be the lens through which we see the world and its many observations about people. We want to translate everything we hear, including the best and most helpful observations of the secular world around us, back into the language of Scripture. In short, we aim to understand everything through this question: Who is the Lord and what has he said?
We are embodied souls shaped by a world of influences: People are complex creatures, affected by our own bodies, other people, culture, work, money, spiritual beings, and much more. These contribute to our endless diversity, and they can build us up or tear us down.
Our hearts are active: Amid the swarm of life’s influences is the human heart-that is, the soul. Made in God’s image, we are both physical and spiritual. To know the heart is to know the person. And to know a person you must know what he or she desires and loves. The heart has depth and layers. Most apparent are our natural desires for love and meaningful work. These desires are either satisfied or thwarted. And there are our emotions-anger, fear, shame, love. All of these reveal what is important to us.
Help and change follow a path, but not a script: The care of souls is not formulaic or predictable. What helps one person might not help another. When you listen to people’s stories, you can be helpful in so many ways. God uses people, circumstances, his Word, our own choices, and the direct power of his Spirit. Humility is an essential quality of a helper. We are constantly reliant on God, the wisdom and experience of others, and the input of those we help.
Care and counsel are pastoral and at home in the church: As the care of souls, biblical counseling is the ministry of the Word done face-to-face. It shares the same interests as the preaching of the Word in that it brings the many facets of the gospel of Jesus to the details of daily life. Biblical counseling is one-another ministry carried out by every person in the church in which we speak the truth in love so that we might all grow up into Christ (Eph 4:15). From this home in the church, biblical counseling moves out and appears in conversations with neighbors, parachurch organizations that strengthen communities, professional counseling offices, and many other places where God’s people work to meaningfully bring the truth of Scripture to the troubles of life.
Biblical counseling engages with the voices around us: Biblical counselors are not alone in the desire to help others. There are many helpful Christian voices out there, and yet there are differences among us. Differences in practice usually reflect different theological emphases, particularly differences in how to understand people and how people change. There are also many secular voices whose differences in practice reflect more fundamental differences about who God is and his activity in our lives. Biblical counseling adds, however, that all these sources are then interpreted and refined by the question: Who is the Lord and what does he say? When we do find differences between biblical counseling and other counseling theories, we aim to identify the strengths in those theories and represent others and their viewpoints accurately. When we disagree, we want to engage with respect and a generous spirit, as if we were face-to-face.

CCEF's Activities

CCEF offers counseling, resources, and events to support its mission.

Counseling: CCEF counselors seek to walk alongside struggling and suffering people with humility, love, and biblical wisdom. They also offer consultations to ministry leaders and counselors to help them better serve those in their care.
Resources: CCEF authors produce resources that are rooted in Scripture, practical, and accessible to individuals and churches.
Events: CCEF's annual national conference is a place for God’s people to come together for learning and encouragement. Throughout the year, their faculty also speak and teach at various opportunities in the US and around the world.
Courses: CCEF courses train students to embody the wisdom and love of Jesus in their interpersonal ministry, whether laypeople, pastors, or even vocational counselors.

Addressing Domestic Abuse

CCEF is also addressing the issue of domestic abuse, which thrives in silence, confusion, and isolation. Many church leaders feel unprepared-not for lack of care, but for lack of adequate training to recognize it or respond wisely.

CCEF has created a video series meant to be viewed and discussed together as a church body or leadership team, helping to create a community where suffering is seen, truth is spoken, and people no longer have to carry their pain alone. The series, entitled "Becoming a Refuge: Responding to Domestic Abuse in the Church", aims to help churches become communities where suffering is seen, truth is spoken, and people no longer have to carry their pain alone.

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