Teaching a course on integrating religion/spirituality into counseling for christian counselors

The purpose of this study was to introduce a course incorporatingreligion/spirituality into counseling for Christian counselors and to explore their feedbacks to the course. A total of 23 Christian counselors, 2 males and 21 females, participated in the study. The course included four goals which were to enhance counselors’ spiritual awareness, to increase the understanding of multi-religions in Taiwan, to enhance the sensitivity toward clients’ religious diversity, and to enhance the competencies of spiritual assessment and intervention. In order to reach the goals, 10 themes in 30 hours were included in the course. To explore the reactions of the participants toward the course, 6 focused groups were conducted in the middle and the end of the course. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Results showed positive feedbacks. Participants increased spiritual awareness, gained insight about the positive impacts of counselor’s spirituality on their spiritual works, clarified the ethics of spiritually integrated counseling, discerned about the difference of religion and spirituality, changed attitude into positive toward religion and spirituality, increased competency of spiritual intervention, obtained mutual supports and learning from each other, moved toward the integration of spirituality and counseling, andchanged the perspectives and actions toward both Christian and non-Christian clients. Results also showed participants expressed the contexts of self-disclosure on spirituality, and concerned the value conflicts toward non-Christian clients. Recommendations for future course design and research were proposed in the end.