Integration of Faith and Learning
Faith Integration Plan for GDCP
March, 2008The integration of psychology and Christianity suggests an ongoing dialog between faith, science, and practice. We attempt to accomplish this integration by being an intentional community of faith and through a series of courses that involve theological education, spiritual formation, and conversation between religious studies scholars, psychologists, and students.
The integration curriculum, thoroughly revised for the 2008 academic year, involves a series of classes in spiritual formation, integrative approaches to psychology, and religious studies. The religious studies classes are all team-taught with a religious studies scholar and a psychologist working together in order to engage students in the important themes of Christianity and other world religions and to draw out implications for the science and practice of psychology.
Our goal is to train psychologists who value and understand the importance of a Christian view of persons in the human services, who are respectful of disparate faith beliefs and values, and who are adept at addressing various faith concerns confronted in the practice of psychology. We accomplish this by beginning a conversation about spiritual and religious issues from the first day of training with the hope that the conversation will continue throughout the students’ years on campus and beyond.
We follow a developmental model of integration that assumes students enter our program with some basic biblical literacy. Prior to the first semester of study, students who do not have prior theology coursework complete a proficiency exam to demonstrate basic biblical literacy. Students who do not pass the exam on the first attempt participate in a study group during their first semester in order to become more familiar with biblical literature.
Year 1
In the first year of training, we introduce students to various approaches to integration and provide an initial spiritual formation course.
Year 2
We introduce biblical theology in the second year while continuing to emphasize spiritual formation.
Year 3
By this point in training, students have learned a good deal of psychology, they have been in two spiritual formation courses, and they have interacted with biblical theology. The goal of the third year, then, is to continue developing that which has been introduced to students, to study world religions, and to look at the development of Christian doctrines throughout history.
Year 4
By this time students have become well-versed in psychology, they have invested sustained energy in spiritual formation, and they have learned the overarching themes of biblical, historical, and systematic theology. The final year of integration training is devoted to what happens in the professional psychology office.
