What is BCCE’s purpose and scope?
Hello…my name is Ariel Gonzalez Bovat.
I founded Biblical Clinical Counseling and Education, a nonprofit counseling ministry specializing in trauma and PTSD. I am also a student at Liberty University pursuing a PhD in Psychology and Theology, where I am researching and writing about trauma through the lens of theology. The Lord saved me at 33, so I had lots of depravity-riddle lived a life before Christ, including growing up in a single-parent, low-income home in some of the poorest or violent areas of LA county, Arizona, and New Mexico. My mother was and still is a Jehovah’s Witness, so during my childhood years, my only exposure to Christ was through the lens of JW books. Most of my family on my dad and mom’s side are Catholic or simply just unbelievers. I rejected all things faith-related throughout my mid-high school years, all through my 20s, and started considering faith again in my early 30s while in the Army and in an abusive marriage. I left the Army and that marriage after a deployment during OIF. 6 months later, the Lord saved me. I soon remarried and have been Paul’s wife for 20 years. We are a multiethnic blended family. When we got married, my husband had 3 daughters from his previous marriage, and I had 3 daughters of my own. In God’s infinite and providential wisdom, God saw fit to bless us with a son. I homeschooled my last two, my youngest daughter recently graduated from a university and my son has now entered college.
Since God saved me, I have loved the church….with all its imperfections. Though I have experienced church hurt, church rejection, and church isolation, I never questioned my love and affection for the body of Christ. Midway through my saved life, after a few years of leading women’s bible studies, God gave me a desire to study theology and counseling. With my husband's patience, I now have 2 seminary degrees (working on my 3rd) and a collection of theology and counseling books to reflect the fruit of that desire. That was a little background information to say that my life does not reflect many who grew up in the church. I am that Samaritan woman whom God saved through an encounter with Christ, and because of that reality, I use my pre- and post-salvation history to help struggling saints understand their own histories through the lens of Christ’s gospel.
What is Biblical Clinical Counseling and Education?
Biblical Clinical Counseling and Education or BCCE, is a method or type of counseling that uses Biblical theology in an applied functional way. It includes addressing a person’s theology and addressing the clinical aspect of being human. In Genesis 1 and 2, we read that God made humans as embodied creatures by giving them a body and a soul, which He made in His image. When referring to the Biblical part of counseling, we use God’s word as the foundation to understand what it means to be made in God’s image. This encompasses the purpose of why and how we were created, how we interact with our Creator and with each other, how the fall disrupted that purpose, and those relationships. It also includes how the Gospel of Christ, after salvation, repairs the soul through the work of the Holy Spirit, which is what we call progressive sanctification. Progressive sanctification simply means growing holiness, which Scripture calls all Christians to do (Hebrew 12:14).
To understand progressive sanctification, 1 Peter 1:13-25 and 2 Peter 1:3-10 provide a wonderfully succinct description of what growing in holiness looks like. Peter’s words in these passages are the goal of those BCCE serves.
Biblical Clinical Counseling and Education (BCCE) meets believers on their journey of progressive sanctification, meaning they are already saved saints struggling with how to live a life that glorifies God and reflects 1st and 2nd Peter. Because God has already done the work of justification in the life of believers, unhelpful or erroneous theology often interferes with sanctification because of unbiblical, legalistic, or unrealistic beliefs of what it means to live a Christian life. In other scenarios, licentiousness masked as liberty can also interfere with living a life of progressively growing in holiness. Let’s also not forget how easily even the subtleness of a prosperity gospel can interfere with sanctification, especially when understanding a proper Biblical theology of suffering.
For this reason, I use a Biblical Clinical Counseling methodology that takes into account Biblical theology and a clinical approach to addressing a believer’s struggles. Mine is just one approach to counseling Christians but I don’t think it’s the only one that works. What works for one or even many will not always work for every believer so its ’s always important to remember that any method, though successful at times, is simply a vessel of grace that God can use for His good pleasure.
What does Biblical Clinical mean?
Biblical – using God’s word to address the cognitive and affective qualities of the soul. Cognitive qualities of the soul include thinking, mental processes, intellect, and rational processing. Affective qualities of the soul are a person’s desires, which include expectations, assumptions, and understood feelings, meaning to be able to put words to one’s feelings, along with emotions that can be verbally assessed and described.
Clinical – using a functional applied theology to address the volitional and physiological qualities of the body. Volitional qualities include an individual’s on-purpose and sometimes not-on-purpose behaviors. Not-on-purpose behaviors are those physiological activations of bodily processes that impact a person’s volitional responses to stressors, struggles, and suffering.
What is the purpose and goal of creating a nonprofit parachurch entity as a counseling ministry?
Biblical Clinical Counseling and Education (BCCE) recently became a non-profit entity with a purpose and goal to serve professing believers. I understand the church is an institution established by God to preach the gospel of Christ by expositing the Scriptures to both believers and unbelievers. I recognize that at any given church gathering, both believer and unbeliever will be present in those gatherings so it is important for church leadership and the teaching that comes from the church to continually point to Christ and the gospel for salvation since there is no other means to be saved (John 14:6; Acts 4:12; Romans 10:14-15). The church is that sacred space that is formed around a formal worship experience for saints to come together to hear God’s word preached and share in the Lord’s supper. The church offers new saints baptism as established by Christ in Mathew 28:19. It provides fellowship with others in the body of Christ for encouragement, edification, and discipline when necessary and serves as that place where a body of believers gives witness to one’s faith in community. In obedience to Scripture, a church should equip saints to engage in the work of making disciples.
However, those who are adopted into God’s family and into the fellowship of believers might struggle in various ways. BCCE was created to help struggling saints overcome and understand their soul and body struggles in a way that the church does not often address. Under the banner of common grace, BCCE seeks to merge and synthesize (not syncretize) Biblical theology with research, case studies, published findings, and resources to offer that extra bit of knowledge to help saints understand how their bodies and souls have been impacted by the Fall and most importantly, how Christ and the gospel changes the soul from dead to life which enables the body and mind to exhibit the fruit of God’s spirit in their lives.
All those who seek counseling with BCCE love the Lord. They desire to obey His word and grow in Christ-likeness. However, they are also very aware of their struggles and feel stuck on how to overcome them. This is where BCCE comes in, where the goal is to help professing saints by equipping them to walk out their union and identity in Christ with confidence, despite and maybe even in the midst of struggles. This confidence is not the kind of self-elevating confidence that the world or secular counseling offers. BCCE offers a Biblical confidence that shows up in 3 ways:
1) help believers grow in the assurance of their faith as they work out what it means to live under Christ’s reign over their entire lives
2) grow in the trustworthiness and goodness of God’s sovereignty
3) teaches them how their God-created bodies interact with the world around them as embodied image bearers after the Fall and, most importantly, after salvation.
These are 3 areas where saints struggle the most regarding various mental health issues, so BCCE fills in the gap with applied functional theology to help suffering saints in those struggles.
BCCE understands the church’s role in the life of a Christian. We are not trying to replace what the church offers. We are simply supplementing what the church does by helping suffering saints apply the theology they learn in church settings to their day-to-day lives, relationships, and experiences. The end goal of an applied functional biblical theology is 4-fold:
A continued renewing of the mind that is not conformed to this world but matures in transformation by testing and growing in discernment regarding the will of God in the lives of struggling saints to know what is good, acceptable, and perfect in living out their faith in the gospel of Christ (Romans 12:2)
A growing reflection of the fruit of the Spirit according to Galatians 5:22-23
Offering saints opportunities to grow in spiritual worship by learning how to present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable (Romans 12:1), and with reverence and awe (Hebrews 12:28)
Because their lives are hidden with Christ in God, learning how to set their mind on things above and not on this earth by putting off the old nature and its habits and putting on the new nature with new habits, which is being renewed with knowledge after the image of its Creator (Col 3:1-17).
As a parachurch non-profit entity, BCCE understands that we are a ministry that is limited in our ministry focus, scope, purpose, and service we offer to believers. Because of these limits, we expect and encourage those we counsel to be a committed member of a local church (Heb 10:23-25).
What does “applied functional biblical theology mean?”
BCCE believes that every person who God saves, justifies, and begins His work of sanctification will bring that work to completion on the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6). BCCE also believes that every person God saves is working out their salvation with fear and trembling, knowing that is it God who works in them, both to the will and work for God’s good pleasure (Philippians 2:12-13). As saints work out their salvation, they become theologians seeking to understand what and how this “working out their salvation with fear and trembling” means.
BCCE understands that working out one’s faith with fear and trembling is a theological psychology in which a person seeks to apply theology to their psyche in a functional way that impacts their daily lives, their thought-to-thought processes, and their volitional interactions with God and others as a form of worship. All Christians operate with a functional theology every single day (Johnson, 2015).
Keith Johnson, in his book Theology as Discipleship, writes, “Our functional theology includes default assumptions about who God is, what God is like, and how God relates to us.”
God saves people from unchurched and churched backgrounds. Those from church backgrounds will have some form of theology inherited from their parents or previous exposure to the Christian faith. Unchurched people will have some form of positive or negative understanding of the Christian faith that they have heard from the culture or some other exposure to Christianity. Upon salvation, both of these groups will begin exploring their understanding of God in light of their salvation, which, in essence, is theology applied.
According to many theological writers, like Augustine, Aquinas, Turretin, and Bavinck, theology is a science. Since science comes from the Latin word “knowledge” (Sproul, 2014), we can see that Scripture contains this word many times, along with God’s directive to attain knowledge. (Proverbs 1:5, 2:3-6, 3:13, 4:7, 15:14, 18:15-24, 19:2; Philippians 1:9, 2 Peter 1:5, 3:18).
We can and should attain knowledge by studying God’s revelation as revealed in special revelation and general revelation. Special revelation discloses God’s plan of redemption using narrative that leads from creation to the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ (Sproul, 2014). These are crucial and important areas of revelation that cannot be learned through the study of nature.
Oftentimes, whenever we think of theology, we look to those Christian writers who cohesively created systems of theology by which to understand God’s word. Any cursory review of those theological writings will lead us to formal discourses on systematic theology, biblical theology, historical theology, dogmatic theology, elenctic theology, theoretical-practical theology, and lastly, applied theology.
As helpful and meaningful as all these theologies are in the life of a Christian, BCCE focuses on applied theology. Our goal is to help suffering saints understand what it means to apply Scripture to their lives in a functional way that helps them mature as believers.
