Christian Counseling &
Educational Foundation
Restoring Christ to counseling and counseling to the church
Biblical Counseling at CCEF
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. We intend 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.
Our Mission
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. We see 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 our heritage and heartbeat.
CCEF works to restore counseling to the church.
We believe 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. We see ourselves as an extension of the local church, and we want 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. Our goal is to equip Christians to live, love, and counsel.
receive ministry updatesOur Building Blocks
Our strategic vision-the building blocks at the very core of who CCEF is-describe how CCEF will aim to stay faithful to our calling in the years ahead. We have put together a series of videos to flesh out these building blocks. You can view them by clicking “Learn More” below.
Connected to Christ: We must each remain rooted in Christ-personally, corporately, and doctrinally.
Tilling Up New Soil: We aim to till up new soil by creating faithful, fresh, and timely resources that go wider and deeper than biblical counseling has gone before.
Equipping People: Our ministry must include giving hands on feedback and training to effectively equip God’s people to grow in counseling.
Critical Contribution: We want to make everything we do as accessible as possible to churches, designed for the benefit of churches, and with the goal of strengthening local churches around the world.
learn moreOur Distinctives
Within the growing CCEF literature and teaching, there is a common core. Here are seven recurring themes within that core.
The triune God-Father, Son and Spirit-have always known reciprocal fellowship and unity, and he has created us to participate in that fellowship. He welcomes us to himself through Jesus Christ. The Spirit connects us to Jesus, and Jesus is the only way to the Father.
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.
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The Spirit presses the very word of God into our hearts. He reveals 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. “The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10). Here are implications of this truth.
- 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. For example, we can see “defense mechanisms” through the lens of humanity’s tendency to run anywhere except to the Good Shepherd in order to defend ourselves from the reality of our sin and suffering, to hide from the Lord, and to blame others. Put another way, 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?
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People are complex creatures. We are 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.
This graphic is one way to capture the complexity of these influences. The circles represent the prominent categories that influence us. The person-body and heart-is at the center. These influences all become part of a give and take in which they both affect us and are affected by us. They can bless, curse, and shape how we see the world. We, in turn, can idolize these influences, enjoy them by faith, interpret them as “trials of various kinds” (James 1:2), and pursue justice and mercy as a way to bring change to them.
Our bodies are unique among these influences because they both affect us and they are us. We are physical beings who experience all the blessings, limitations, strengths, and weaknesses that come with that. These body and brain-based abilities might sit quietly in the background of our counseling conversations when other people are similar to us. But when we are quite different from each other because of various psychiatric problems, trauma, learning disabilities or brain injuries, then we must understand the embodied nature in order to effectively help.
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Amidst 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.
And there is more. Further in are our moral desires and conscience. Here, we notice our movement toward right or wrong, and the battle between the two. These point to the very center of our lives where we face God or turn away from him. We are most fully human-and we grow progressively nearer to God-when we listen to the words of the Father, believe in the Son, come to Christ because of the Spirit’s work, turn from sin and death, and live in faith, hope, love, and wisdom.
But we do not always turn to him. Sin has invaded humanity and brought death, oppression, spiritual war, and an endless variety of trouble. We have become nearly blind to the fact that we live our life before the face of God. Yet, even with the contaminating effects of sin, we witness actual good in each other that reflects the character of God.
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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. Some will be strengthened by a particular text of Scripture. Others will be moved by a personal story that helps them see God and their relationship to him in a new way, an act of love giving a taste of God’s kindness, or the death of a friend painfully reminding them of human need for redemption of body and soul. 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.
Taken together, a common path emerges. Our help joins our knowledge of the person with the knowledge of God. Our help unites the person’s story with God’s story. We aim to know the person accurately, meaningfully, and compassionately. We aim to know God through his Word, in which we understand his words in their context and as a larger story of redemption and love. In response to him, we give him our trust, love, and worship.
All of us are saints, sufferers, and sinners. We will see good, hard, and sinful things in ourselves and in the people we help. We aim to look for the good, hard, and sinful-in that order.
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. Yet its setting is the wise, encouraging conversations that are essential to church vitality, and the skillful help offered during crises. 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.
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Biblical counselors are not alone in our 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.
Our view of science is not a primary difference with other Christian and secular voices. Like others, we make observations about people that are useful to our counseling practice. We are also intentional to learn from the observations and experience of others, which includes the burgeoning Christian and secular literature. 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.
We have come a long way in our journey to grow in counseling wisdom. And we have a long way to go still. We are not yet what we will be, and we aspire to be continually refined and sharpened.
There is an invitation to the fresh wisdom that comes as we continue to explore how the riches of Scripture meet the complexities of life. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bring real hope and a vision for change. May our God grant us ears to hear, eyes to see, compassionate and humble hearts, and a desire to grow together.
Meet Our People Beliefs & HistoryWhat We Do
Counseling
Our counselors seek to walk alongside struggling and suffering people with humility, love, and biblical wisdom. We also offer support and mentoring through consultation to ministry leaders and counselors to help them better serve those in their care.
Learn MoreResources
Our authors produce books, minibooks, and other training materials that are rooted in Scripture, practical, and accessible to individuals and churches. We publish the Journal of Biblical Counseling three times a year, and through our website we provide a wide array of resources including blogs, podcasts, and other audio and video resources.
Learn MoreEvents
Our annual National Conference is a unique opportunity for people to enjoy robust teaching on important counseling topics and to connect and worship with hundreds of like-minded people around the world. Our faculty and counselors also speak at other seminars, events, and conferences upon request.
Learn MoreSchool
Our fully online program allows students from all over the world to delve into a wide range of courses on biblical counseling. Whether our students seek personal edification, equipping in formal or informal ministry, or training for a career in counseling, our courses offer rich content and meaningful opportunities to connect with others for a transformative learning experience.
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