Dr Paul Allen

I’ve worked in the field of psychology for over a decade now. I’ve done private practice and taught in a graduate psychology program. I loved my work, my clients, my students, and my colleagues. I was respected in my community as a professor and psychologist. But I left my job in psychology to start and lead a biblical counselling ministry at a church across the country. Why? When I talk to people about biblical counselling, it brings up varied thoughts and emotions. Some people are unfamiliar with it. But to others, biblical counselling connotes misquoted Bible verses, uncompassionate calls for repentance, and an overly reductionist view of mental health struggles. They’ve experienced (or know people who’ve experienced) counselling from well-meaning pastors and ministry leaders that made them feel utterly misunderstood, with their suffering and pain reduced only to a trial that must be embraced with joy. My heart grieves when I hear those stories. And yet, here I am—a psychologist tur...

We don’t realize how disorienting grief can be. In the aftermath of a dearly loved one’s death, you feel like you are living two worlds at once: one with that loved departed family member, and one without. The death of a loved one is a blade that pierces beneath the armour, an arrow that lodges down in the soul. It brings a hurt we cannot defend, a pain we cannot forget, an injury which will never fully heal. Though life goes on without noticing our loss — daily broadcasts continue, people shop at grocery stores, buses come and go — we are no longer the same. The ache will not finally leave, the groan, not silence, the limp not amend until we remove the tattered garments of this life. They are no longer with us. Though life for us has not ended, it has changed. There is no real going back. Death’s Prolonged Victims Death often inflicts its greatest havoc upon its survivors; its primary victims do not yet lie in the grave. The dead are with Christ, healed. Our bleeding goes ...

We desperately need Christians who know what they believe and can confess and defend it before the world. The world will turn from its corruption and moral chaos only as God sovereignly calls people to faith through our confession of gospel truth. Knowing, believing, and confessing the truth are radical acts. Our culture denies that objective truth exists, and we’re seeing the consequences. Only in the radical truth of the gospel is there hope for our dying world. And knowing what we believe, why we believe it, how to defend it, and how to share it is how we’ll shine the light of the gospel into the lives of lost men and women. Knowing, believing, and confessing the truth requires a new mind transformed by His truth. Fallen contours of ungodly thinking are cast off and replaced with new Scripture-determined structures as we dig deep into the theology of God’s Word (Rom. 12:2). When His Word takes root in our minds, it also penetrates our hearts, bringing us to salvation and moving...

Haydn Shaw’s new book  Generational IQ: Christianity Isn’t Dying, Millennials Aren’t the Problem, and the Future Is Bright ,  This year has been scary for church leaders. Pew Research Center’s   report   back in the spring demonstrated that Millennials are leaving Christianity and that there is a rapidly growing trend towards Americans with no religious affiliation at all. Shaw’s research provides a more thorough analysis of these trends and what they mean. Here are a few of the highlights from the book that stood out to me: Parents often raise their children anticipating the world will be basically the same as the one whey grew up in. While that was more the case in the past, it becomes a less accurate assumption every year. (Churches tend to adopt the same mentality.) We get especially upset when another generation questions the ideas that “go without saying” to our generation. In 1900, the average lifespan was 48; today it’s 78. As people live longer, ...