LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Brief History of Pastoral Care
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Brief History of Pastoral Care
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. Through the centuries there have been high points and low points in the church’s
understanding and practice of good pastoral care. High points include the early church fathers,
the Reformation, the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards. 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. And Scripture offered a consistent basis for addressing
people’s problems by rooting our lives in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. So, in many
ways, CCEF’s ministry is not new, because its theology expresses this heritage of a God-
centered understanding of people and a Christ-centered understanding of how God redeems
people. But CCEF is doing something new in terms of its application of these time-tested truths
to modern problems.
Whether or not the church was doing a good job of pastoral care, for the first 1900 years all
Christians agreed that Scripture was the basis for restoring human lives. But a fundamental shift
came with the advent of the modern secular psychologies, pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the
late 1800’s. In a short amount of time, 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.
Though these were secular theories, they greatly impacted the church. 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.
Responding to this trend, David Powlison writes in his book Speaking Truth in Love:
Counsel in Community :
But as we look more closely at life, it becomes clearer and clearer that Scripture is about
counseling: diagnostic categories, causal explanations of behavior and emotion, interpretation
of external sufferings and influences, definitions of workable solutions, character of the
counselor, goals for the counseling process…These are all matters to which God speaks directly,
specifically, and frequently. He calls us to listen attentively, to think hard and well, and to
develop our practical theology of conversational ministry.
The Advent of CCEF and Biblical Counseling
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. For a more detailed history of the biblical
counseling movement, see The Biblical Counseling Movement: History and Context by David
Powlison.
CCEF’s early history was largely prophetic and therefore polemic. The church was
challenged 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. CCEF
continues to emphasize 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.
