Last week I attended a Joni and Friends FUSE Conference in Winchester-Canal, Ohio. It was filled with great speakers and a tremendous number of interesting and insightful people who are involved in supporting individuals and families with a disability. I spoke at four different Breakout sessions and we had a wonderful time of interaction.
The Sweeten LifeVIP Family Ministry is unique for several reasons.
1. We are holistic and teach people how to deal with every dimension of humanity, body, mind, relationships, family, motivation, spirituality.
2. We integrate Practical or Biblical Theology with Practical Psychology. My teaching always has very practical applications that the people can use immediately at home and ministry.
3. We include how the entire family is impacted by disability, disease, drinking, drugs, etc. In fact, we believe that the family is THE best source of comfort and healing.
4. We believe that there is hope for some growth and change for every condition no matter how desperate the diagnosis.
5. We have many tools to equip family, parents, siblings, teachers, preachers, counselors, etc.
6. We do outcome research to see if our ideas work.
How did I develop these things?
I attended a conference in 1969 that caused me to alter my career and focus. The conference was led by the most famous Psychologist in the history of the United States. That person was Carl Rogers, a drop out from seminary. He signed up instead for graduate school in Psychology.
Later Dr. Rogers developed Client Centered Therapy. Despite his public rejection of Christianity, Rogers kept the most basic principles of Christian theology. He gave different names to them but a careful look at his model, as imperfect as it is, is based on grace, mercy and love.It is a secular humanist approach to grace and love and it fails because there is no supernatural Spirit to empower the Counselors and Clients to live with grace and love.
Rogers was also a famous researcher on what really worked in Counseling. So, he trained hundreds of students who carried out his ideas. They were dedicated to see if their ideas really worked in practice. In the research outcome were several shocking discoveries. It was some of his statements at the that 1969 conference startled me into reconsidering my career choice.
Another person with less fame but a lot of influence on American Psychology was in my small group. He had been an alcoholic for many years but discovered sanity and sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous. He was an agnostic who strongly promoted the 12 Steps and its basic belief in finding sanity by turning our lives over to God.
His name was O. Hobart Mowrer. He founded what was called Integrity Therapy that has a strong emphasis on morality and true moral guilt. It was he who trained the well-known Christian founder of Biblical Counseling, Jay Adams.
What could these two famous agnostic Psychologists have to say that could impact me? can you guess why they might have been so influential on my thinking and why their approach is being affirmed by more and more research? What have I preached, taught and written about for decades?
Get my book Hope and Change for Humpty Dumpty and see. This book by Steve Griebling and me distills the insights of several decades of experience.
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