The American Association of Christian Counselors, Inc. (AACC) is the largest organization of Christian counselors in the world. [1]
It is a corporation [2] headquartered in Forest, Virginia, United States. [3] AACC, as it is often called, creates the largest gathering of Christian counselors once per year in North America with annual conferences that often exceed 5,000 attendees. Speakers for these events include, Dr. Henry Cloud, Dr. John Townsend, Gary Smalley, Larry Crabb, T.D. Jakes, Ron Hawkins, John Trent, Emmerson Eggrich, Joni Tada, Arch Harte, John Eldredge, and a host of other popular Christian writers. AACC is under the direction of Dr. Tim Clinton and celebrated their 25th anniversary as a professional trade association in 2011. They were previously headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. [4] It has about nearly 50,000 members. [5] It publishes two journals: Christian Counseling Today and Marriage and Family: A Christian Journal. [6] It has adopted a code of ethics used for Christian counseling. [7] [8] [9] In 2014 AACC amended its code of ethics to eliminate the promotion of conversion therapy for same-sex attracted individuals, encouraging those individuals to practice a celibate sexual life instead. [10]
The term Bible Belt refers to a region of the Southern United States and the Midwestern state of Missouri, where Protestantism exerts a strong social and cultural influence. The region has been described as one of the most socially conservative across the United States due to a significant impact of Protestant Christianity on politics and culture. The region is known to have a higher church attendance, more evangelical Protestant denominations, and greater emphasis on traditional religious values compared to other parts of the country. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes and the Mormon corridor in Utah, southern Idaho, and northern Arizona.
The General Conference of the Evangelical Baptist Church, Inc. was organized in 1935 as the Church of the Full Gospel, Inc, by members of several Free Will Baptist churches, under the leadership of William Howard Carter. The organization currently is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.
Steven Alan Hassan is an American writer and mental health counselor who specializes in the area of cults and new religious movements. He worked as a deprogrammer in the late 1970s, but since then has advocated a non-coercive form of exit counseling.
Edward Hindson was an American Christian evangelist and host of The King Is Coming, a syndicated television broadcast shown across the United States. A dispensationalist, Hindson wrote more than twenty books that deal with Bible prophecy and the imminent return of Jesus. He was a professor of Old Testament studies and eschatology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a frequent speaker on prophecy.
Pastoral counseling is a branch of counseling in which psychologically trained ministers, rabbis, priests, imams, and other persons provide therapy services. Pastoral counselors often integrate modern psychological thought and method with traditional religious training in an effort to address psychospiritual issues in addition to the traditional spectrum of counseling services.
Jay Edward Adams was an American Presbyterian preacher and author who was known for his development in the mid and late 20th century of counseling based on Biblical scriptures. He published more than 100 books related to this topic, which have been translated into 16 languages.
The American Counseling Association (ACA) is a membership organization representing licensed professional counselors (LPCs), counseling students, and other counseling professionals in the United States. It is the world's largest association exclusively representing professional counselors.
Thurgood Marshall Jr. is an American lawyer and son of the late United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Marshall worked in the Bill Clinton White House and is a retired international law firm partner. He also served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ford Foundation.
Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr. was an American Christian counselor, author, Bible teacher, spiritual director, and seminar speaker. Crabb wrote several best-selling books and was the founder and director of New Way Ministries and co-founder of his legacy ministry, Larger Story. He served as a Spiritual Director for the American Association of Christian Counselors and taught at several different Christian colleges, including Colorado Christian University.
Nouthetic counseling is a form of evangelical Protestant pastoral counseling based upon conservative evangelical interpretation of the Bible. It repudiates mainstream psychology and psychiatry as humanistic, fundamentally opposed to Christianity, and radically secular. Its viewpoint was originally articulated by American author and preacher Jay E. Adams, in Competent to Counsel (1970) and further books. A number of organizations and seminary courses promoting it have been established since that period of time. The viewpoint is opposed to those seeking to synthesize Christianity with secular psychological thought.
Ian Stephen Markham is an Episcopal priest and the Dean and President of Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) since August 2007. Previously, he served at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut as Dean and Professor of Theology and Ethics.
Timothy Foster Sedgwick is an American Episcopal ethicist. In addition to being the Clinton S. Quin Professor of Christian Ethics at Virginia Theological Seminary, he has served since 2007 as Vice President and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs.
Kelly Miller Smith Sr. was a Baptist preacher, author, and prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement, who was based in Nashville, Tennessee.
David Samuel Dockery is the President of the International Alliance for Christian Education. He is also Distinguished Professor of Theology and on April 19, 2023 was elected the 10th President of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Formerly he served as Trinity International University's 15th president. He was elected to that presidency on February 28, 2014.
The Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS), founded in 1956, is an association of American Christians in the counseling and behavioral sciences. It holds a yearly conference and publishes the Journal of Psychology and Christianity, which is indexed in psychological and other scholarly databases.
The Original Church of God or Sanctified Church is an association of holiness Christian churches headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. The members and clergy of the churches are predominantly African-American, though it includes people from many backgrounds. The official name of the body is The Original Church of God or Sanctified Church, General Body.
Thomas Bratton Warren was an American professor of philosophy of religion and apologetics at the Harding School of Theology in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, and was an important philosopher and theologian in the Churches of Christ during the latter half of the twentieth century.
Harding School of Theology, known until 2011 as Harding University Graduate School of Religion, is located in Memphis, Tennessee, United States. It is an entity related to the Christian private university associated with the Churches of Christ known as Harding University, the main campus of which is in Searcy, Arkansas. Harding School of Theology exists primarily to train religious ministers for congregations of the Churches of Christ. It is located in East Memphis on a campus which consists of part of a large estate given by a wealthy donor, on property shared with the K-12 church affiliated private school Harding Academy.
The Christian Congregation is an evangelical non-denominational and non-creedal church that began as an informal evangelistic organization along the Ohio River Valley in 1798 by followers of Barton Warren Stone and his Restoration Movement. Some sources cite Stone as the actual founder. Its church governance is Congregationalist in structure. While never intending to formally establish a church, the Christian Congregation, nevertheless, established its first formally organized congregation when former ministers of the Christian Church in Kokomo, Indiana, John L. Puckett, John Chapman, and Isaac V. Smith, desiring to unite with the movement on a non-creedal and non-denominational basis, incorporated the Christian Congregation in the State of Indiana in 1887.
Clinton W. McLemore is an American psychologist and author.
SCC ID: 06243554; Entity Type: Corporation; Jurisdiction of Formation: VA; Date of Formation/Registration: 9/24/2004