COUC 747 Week 3 DB Blog 3: Scholarship and Faith Example

Discussion Board Blog 3: Thread and Two Responses

COUC 747 Instruction in Counselor Education, Discussion Board Blog 3, Scholarship and Faith (thread and two responses)

Thread by [Student Name]

The blog prompt and the colleagues' posts are composites standing in for the course's own discussion board; the textbooks, ethics code and published works are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for COUC 747.

Thread

Last semester, while I assisted in a master's ethics course, a student asked during the unit on the ACA code whether a Christian could honestly teach the code's rule that a counselor must not press personal values onto a client (American Counseling Association, 2014). Her question was really about us as faculty: does our faith belong in the classroom, and if so, how? My answer is that counselor education should be faith-informed, not faith-imposed.

Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2004) help me see what that means. They reject the idea that there is only one Christian way of relating faith and learning, and they describe how different Christian traditions bring different intellectual resources to scholarship. Faith, in their account, enters scholarship in more ways than supplying conclusions; it can shape the scholar's motives, the questions chosen, the methods trusted and the way findings are applied. For a counselor educator, those possibilities are practical, because every syllabus and every research agenda involves choices about what matters. I see at least three ways faith should shape mine.

First, faith shapes the questions a scholar asks. Christian convictions about forgiveness, hope and the worth of each person have helped open whole lines of counseling research. Worthington et al. (2011) meta-analyzed 51 samples from 46 studies with 3,290 clients and found that religious and spiritual therapies produced greater improvement than secular alternatives on both psychological (d = .26) and spiritual (d = .41) outcomes. Those findings exist because scholars asked questions their faith made important.

Second, faith shapes the virtues with which we work: honesty about data that disappoints us, humility about what we do not know and patience with students who learn slowly. These virtues are not uniquely Christian, but Scripture gives me reasons to practice them when they are costly, such as reporting a null result in a study I hoped would succeed or giving a struggling student a second chance at a skills evaluation.

Third, faith shapes respect for students and clients who believe differently, which is the very thing the student feared faith would erase. Under the ASERVIC competencies, a counselor first examines personal beliefs, then talks about spirituality in ways that fit each client's worldview and to assess and use clients' beliefs in treatment when the client finds them relevant (Cashwell & Watts, 2010). A counselor educator who models that respect is teaching the ACA standard through faith, not in spite of it.

In my syllabus, this will mean a section on spirituality in assessment, an assignment that asks students to examine their own beliefs, and a clear statement that students of every faith or none are welcome.

Colleagues: where have you seen faith shape scholarship or teaching in ways that respected students' freedom?

Response to Grace

Grace, you wrote that you plan to open every class meeting with prayer and a passage of Scripture, as your own professors did, because it reminds students that counseling is a ministry. I understand that desire, and in a Christian university with a shared faith commitment, prayer can create a sense of community. I would only add one question from the ASERVIC competencies, which I think strengthens your plan rather than weakening it.

Cashwell and Watts (2010) describe competencies that begin with self-awareness: counselors examine their own beliefs and how those beliefs may affect clients and the counseling process. Applied to teaching, that self-awareness includes noticing who is in the room. Some of our students are from other Christian traditions, and some online students in counseling programs hold no faith at all. A student who prays differently may experience a daily devotion as a measure of belonging.

One way to honor both your conviction and their freedom would be to invite a brief moment of reflection or prayer, explain why you offer it and make clear that participation is a personal choice. That models the very skill we hope students will use with clients whose spirituality differs from theirs. How do you think your own professors handled students who did not share their faith, and did those students feel free to say so?

Response to Thomas

Thomas, you argued that faith should stay out of research entirely, because scholarship is credible only when it is neutral, and that bringing faith in will make our work look less scientific to colleagues at secular universities. I share your concern about credibility, but I think the research record suggests a different conclusion.

Worthington et al. (2011) did not lower scientific standards to study religious therapies; they compared outcomes across controlled studies and reported effect sizes, including where religious accommodation did not add psychological benefit. Treatments that included religious content outperformed matched alternatives on spiritual outcomes, but not on psychological ones. That is careful science asking a question many clients care about. Surveys of clients in many regions show that faith matters to how they understand suffering, so ignoring it could make research less relevant rather than more objective.

Jacobsen and Jacobsen (2004) suggest that no scholar is truly neutral; all of us bring assumptions about human nature and what matters. The question is whether we are honest about those assumptions and rigorous in testing our claims. A faith-informed researcher can be more transparent, not less. Could the standards of method you value be the very safeguard that keeps faith-informed research credible? Preregistering hypotheses and reporting every outcome would protect a faith-informed study as well as any other.

References

American Counseling Association. (2014). ACA code of ethics.

Cashwell, C. S., & Watts, R. E. (2010). The new ASERVIC competencies for addressing spiritual and religious issues in counseling. Counseling and Values, 55(1), 2-5. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2161-007X.2010.tb00018.x

Jacobsen, D., & Jacobsen, R. H. (2004). Scholarship and Christian faith: Enlarging the conversation. Oxford University Press.

Worthington, E. L., Jr., Hook, J. N., Davis, D. E., & McDaniel, M. A. (2011). Religion and spirituality. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(2), 204-214. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20760