The Story of Neuroscience-Informed Christian Counseling
The early origins of NICC—and what is now the NICC Institute—go all the way back to my own training and the tension I found myself living in.
I was coming out of Bible college and seminary, immersed in biblical studies, church leadership, and discipleship. At the same time, I was in dialogue with the professional mental health world through my graduate training in counseling. And I felt called to the intersection of those two worlds.
But those two worlds were not at peace with each other.
In the theological and church spaces I was trained in, mental health was often viewed with skepticism—sometimes even fear. There was a concern that psychology was offering an alternative to the gospel. That it was a form of self-actualization that bypassed Christ. In some cases, incorporating mental health concepts into sermons or discipleship was seen as dangerous at best and heretical at worst.
At the same time, in the professional mental health world, the church was often viewed as outdated—almost like it was stuck in the Stone Age. The assumption was that the church’s role was limited to teaching Scripture and preparing people for the afterlife, while real help for anxiety, depression, trauma, and relational struggles belonged to the professionals.
So on one side, the church was suspicious of mental health.
On the other side, mental health professionals were dismissive of the church.
And I found myself right in the middle.
I respected voices on both sides. I was learning from both. But I also felt like I was getting shot at from both directions. And more than that, it just didn’t make sense.
If Jesus designed the nervous system, why wouldn’t we study it and use that knowledge to help people heal? And if the church is called to care for the brokenhearted, why would we outsource that responsibility just because the problems are complex?
That tension didn’t just frustrate me; it made me sad. It felt like a reflection of disunity in the body of Christ.
And honestly, I spent a lot of time complaining to God about it.
“Lord, this doesn’t make sense. Why is this the way it is? Why isn’t someone doing something about this?”
And like He often does, I felt the Lord respond with a question of His own:
“What are you going to do about it?”
That was a turning point.
I didn’t have a clear answer right away. But what began to form was a conviction: instead of choosing between faith and science, what if we took both seriously? What if we studied Scripture deeply and studied the nervous system deeply—and then asked how they work together in the process of healing?
That conviction shaped how I began practicing.
Early on, when it was just me starting out, I committed to trying to care for people in a way that honored both the truths of Scripture and the realities we were learning through neuroscience and attachment research. And because I also carried a deep conviction about mentoring and developing others, I started bringing students into that process—supervising them, training them, and learning together.
For the first 15 years, this was simply how we did things at MyCounselor.Online.
We read widely. We trained broadly. We experimented carefully. And over time, we saw something happen: people were actually experiencing meaningful healing and transformation. Not surface-level change, but real growth. And we weren’t compromising Scripture or ignoring science—we were integrating both.
As we talked with others about what we were doing, we kept hearing the same response:
“Where do I learn how to do that?”
And the honest answer for a long time was:
“You don’t. This is just what we’ve developed through years of practice.”
But it became increasingly clear that we weren’t the only ones feeling this tension. There was a growing hunger—for a way to care for people that didn’t force you to choose between being faithful to Scripture and being clinically responsible.
So we began to formalize what we were doing.
We took what had been an internal way of practicing and started turning it into a defined model. We created a consistent training process. We built a clinical residency to develop counselors in that model. And we began measuring outcomes to test whether what we believed was working was actually working.
In 2021, I stepped away for a focused period of time and worked to distill everything we had learned into a cohesive framework. From there, we spent several more years refining both the model and the training process.
And the results were clear.
The model was working.
The training process was working.
And the demand was growing.
We were receiving hundreds of applications every month from counselors who wanted to be trained in this way—but we could only bring on a small percentage of them into our practice.
At the same time, churches and ministry leaders were asking similar questions:
“How do we care for people well?”
“How do we handle mental health needs without doing harm?”
“How do we not oversimplify suffering—but also not outsource it?”
And all of this was happening against a much bigger backdrop.
Even the World Health Organization has acknowledged that the current mental health system cannot meet the global need. There simply aren’t enough professionals, and there never will be. The pipeline is too narrow.
From a secular perspective, that’s a problem to solve.
From a Christian perspective, it’s something deeper:
the church was always meant to be part of the answer.
That’s where NICC Institute comes in.
The Institute exists to take what we’ve learned—through years of practice, training, and measurable outcomes—and make it available to others. Not as a shortcut. Not as a quick certification. But as a formation pathway for those who want to care for people wisely, faithfully, and effectively.
My hope is simple:
That we would no longer feel forced to choose between faith and neuroscience.
That the church would be equipped to care for the brokenhearted again.
And that those called to help others would have a clear, responsible, and Christ-centered way to do it.
