Mustard Seed Counseling Model

Counselling, whether secular or Christian deals with change. Change of thoughts, behaviour and feelings to solve the problems of living of the counselee or client.

     There are many differences between biblical counselling and secular counselling. The most important, in my opinion, is that in biblical counselling God is in the centre of the counselling, however in secular counselling man or client is in the centre.

     Biblical counselling is not new. It started since the creation. God counselled Adam and Eve after the fall when they committed sin of disobedience. Ever since, Christian counselling is carried out by pastors and priests of the church. A person has a problem used to go to the clergy who, after a short conversation, helps him or her to find some kind of solution and prays with him or her and that is all.

     It is only due to one man, Jay Adams, the protestant pastor who made an effort to make the Christian counselling process systematic and structured when he published his first book “Competent to counsel” CtC in the early 1970s. Ever since biblical counselling has become a well recognised discipline and has been studied at universities and colleges.

     However, two main issues have been emerged:

1. Would Christian counselling be a pure biblical based only on the word of God in the Bible, or it could be mixed with secular psychology (known as integration method).

2. Can biblical counsellors counsel non Christian unbelievers or not.

     The above two issues are studied in details in the first five chapters giving the readers some ideas of what is the pure biblical counselling referred to  Jay Adams model, in contrast to the integration model of Larry Crabb, the model that has been adopted by Pastor Colin Dye, the well known charismatic preacher.

     The last chapter deals with my model of “The Mustard Seed Counselling.”  The uniqueness of this model, besides it is a mere biblical counselling, it is based entirely on the Holy Spirit with His fruit and charismatic gifts besides the Scripture.

     I pray that this book will make a difference for the readers. First, to know our Lord Jesus more closely, without him there would be no hope either in this world or in the eternity and would be no effective biblical counselling. Second, to introduce biblical counselling that has attracted more interest recently, here in the UK and worldwide.

Ibrahim Youssef PH.D