A Christian Counseling Model: Christian

The integration between psychology and Christianity has been a hot issue for Christian counselors since mid 1970s. The movement of integration has been developed in reaction to the acceptance of psychology in the area of pastoral counseling without any criticism about psychology from the Christian viewpoint. Since Jay Adams totally rejected psychology in the area of pastoral care, the effort to integrate psychology with Christianity became so strong during the past two decades. Even though the effort to integrate the two spheres has gained strength, there is a great diversity on how to integrate and what to integrate. Nowadays, diversity seems to be increasing much more rapidly. There are many scholars who want to integrate psychology with Christianity through establishing models of Christian counseling (Hall and Johnson, 2001; Moon, 1997; Bouma-Prediger, 1990; Worthington, 1994; Farnsworth, 1982). There are others who are interested in doing integration through spirituality (Decker, 2002; Moon, 2002; Eliason, Hanley, and Leventis, 2001; Rose, Westefeld, and Ansley, 2001; Howard, McMinn, Bissell, Faries, and VanMeter, 2000; Johnson, 1998, 1997, 1992). There are some scholars who show their interests in integrating various issues of psychology and Christianity (Johnson, 2001; Bufford, 1997; Hall and Hall, 1997). There are other scholars who present their own integration positions between psychology and Christianity (Tan, 2001; Carter and Narramore, 2000; Collins, 1983). Out of the diversity on how to integrate and what to integrate between psychology and Christianity, this paper aims at studying models of Christian counseling. As the writer looked into the existing models of Christian counseling, there are four different models that stand out: level-of-explanation model, integration model, Christian