"If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever."

~ Tim Keller

 

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

~ T. S. Eliot

 

Getting Started:

 

Providing a range of services:

  • brief intervention
  • counseling (individual, marital and family) 
  • consulting and program design

 

Location:

Polis utilizes church offices, private study rooms of public libraries & Skype in order to provide flexible, accessible care.

 

Areas of focus:

(in addition to issues of emotional distress, relational conflict and spiritual direction)

  • addiction recovery (substance and sexual)
  • psychiatric
  • sexuality
  • trauma 

 

Therapeutic Approach:

  • biblical counseling
  • transtheoretical model stages of change
  • motivational interviewing
  • solution-focused brief therapy
  • narrative therapy
  • sexual identity therapy framework

 

Research Interests:

  • addiction recovery
  • theological anthropology, personhood & identity 
  • motivation
  • process of change
  • worldview & social imaginary
  • community development
  • public policy
   

"Perhaps the main task of the minister is to prevent people from suffering for the wrong reasons. Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. Therefore ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions or immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts. 


No minister can save anyone. He can only offer himself as a guide to fearful people. Yet,
paradoxically, it is precisely in this guidance that the first signs of hope become visible. This is so
because a shared pain is no longer paralyzing but mobilizing, when understood as a way to
liberation. When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can
mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

Through this common search, hospitality becomes community. Hospitality becomes community as it creates a unity based on the shared confession of our basic brokenness and on a shared hope."

~ Henri Nouwen