Spirit-Centered Counseling and Second-Order Change: The CPR Model

Abstract

Building upon a previous exploration of Spirit-centered counseling, which described its purpose as expanding the redemptive pattern of God’s story by following the transformative wisdom of Jesus (Buker, 2021; Decker et al., 2021), this paper offers a model that conceptualizes how such a process might be facilitated. Depicting it via the three general phases of connection, perception, and redemption (CPR), the CPR model draws on the concept of second-order change to describe the epistemological shift that occurs when the transformative wisdom of Jesus is embraced. Spirit-centered counseling is portrayed as helping clients experience similar shifts by deconstructing the taken-for-granted epistemological assumptions that inform perception, especially their source in the conventional wisdom of culture, while constructing new perspectives based on the transformative wisdom of Jesus. The goal is to help clients, caught in repetitive cycles of struggle, enter and expand the redemptive pattern of God’s story.