Good counsel

Family tragedies have prompted two evangelical leaders to promote improvements in Christian counseling for the mentally ill—and one venerable group has changed its name.

After Melissa Page Strange, the 32-year-old daughter of Frank Page, committed suicide, her dad—president and CEO of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention—appointed a mental health advisory group. That group last month proposed that churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges improve preparation and education regarding mental health problems.

Last year Matthew Warren, son of Saddleback Church pastor and author Rick Warren, also committed suicide, and this spring a Saddleback conference on faith and mental illness drew 2,000 attendees. Rick Warren is now speaking often about mental health treatment, and last month Saddleback hosted a meeting for family members of those who have killed themselves.

Suicide is the extreme sadness, but many Christians who are not mentally ill, just weary, find counseling helpful. In another sign of the times, the American Association of Christian Counselors, a broad organization that does not certify counselors, has almost 50,000 members. Meanwhile, a certifying organization founded in 1976, the National Association of Nouthetic Counselors, has changed its name to the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors.

ACBC, which has 1,200 certified members, was originally the brainchild of Jay E. Adams, the Westminster Seminary professor whose 1970 book Competent to Counsel emphasized the importance of biblical counseling. Adams, 85, has not served on the organization’s board in recent years. He told WORLD, “I’ve been very sick. At one point everyone thought I was going to die. … My wife even gave away my socks.”

Adams said he hopes ACBC will “become very selective about whom it certifies. The membership should include only those who really subscribe to doing biblical counseling exclusively. I suspect that there will be influences trying to broaden out the membership qualifications. … Time will tell.”

Bitter tweets

Two faiths collided last month on Twitter. Retired pitcher Curt Schilling, a professed Christian who vowed a decade ago never to hide his beliefs (see “Never hide,” March 19, 2005), tweeted a series of comments critical of macro-evolution, including, “Show me the fossils that became human” and “Where are the fossils?”

ESPN’s Keith Law showed his faith in Charles Darwin by responding, “There are hundreds of transitional fossils on record, Curt,” and offered as evidence a Wikipedia “list of transitional fossils.” That list, though, is based on cladistic analysis, which assumes that species have a common lineage, so if they have a similar anatomical character they are related: Thus, birds are the descendants of two-legged dinosaurs. Critics of cladism, though, say birds may not have evolved that way, or God may have created them.

The evolution debate continues to be a clash not of religion vs. science but faith vs. faith and science vs. science: As man gains greater knowledge of cell structure but no greater knowledge of transitional fossils, the holes in Darwinism become more apparent. Yet the hostile tweets Schilling received have a very low common denominator: Faithful evolutionists believe any criticism of their dogma is evidence of stupidity.

The Center for Science and Culture website (discovery.org/id) has at least 25 articles explaining why fossils that purportedly show how birds, horses, whales, tetrapods, and humans evolved show nothing of the kind. You can see that list, which includes items like “Human origins and the fossil record” or “Fact-checking Wikipedia,” and read the clear articles by going to wng.org and searching for “Schilling.” —M.O.