A Moment With Pastor Fred

It is appropriate with the holiday this week for me to say how thankful I am for the ministry of Jay Adams who passed away a week ago at the age of 91. Jay Adams was the father of the modern biblical counseling movement. As a pastor Adams was dissatisfied with the counseling training he had received in seminary – with a mixture of secular psychology. In 1963, he was invited to teach practical theology at a seminary. He did extensive study on what the Bible taught about the conscience, guilt, who we are as humans, and how we can change. He saw the Bible’s way of counseling was radically dependent on the work of the Holy Spirit and the Bible.

In 1968 Dr. Adams and another man began CCEF – the Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation; his first book, Competent to Counsel, was published in 1970. As the movement grew, people asked for training. The need for certification became evident. In 1976 the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors was formed. Today its name is the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors – ACBC, of which I and others here are members.  

As a biblical counselor I am grateful for the dedication of this man. The biblical counseling movement has morphed since those early days – and it was necessary and needed. But God greatly used Jay Adams to awaken the church to return to the sufficiency of Scripture in meeting the answer to our problems. And because of that, our ministry here is indebted to Dr. Jay Adams. Well done, good and faithful servant.