By Dr. Eric L Johnson | Where does the desire for integration come? The Holy Spirit, who draws God’s children into the unity and communion of the Father and the Son (John 14:26; 16:13-15; 17:11, 21-24; 1 Jn 1:4; 1John 1:3), into conformity to Christ’s image (2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29), in one’s mind, heart, actions, and relationships. This involves becoming more whole and integrated in Christ and healed of our fragmented and dissociated sinful existence, and it occurs through the triune God’s establishing his centrality in our lives and undermining our self-centrality, primarily through worship and love of our their Father. An important goal of the Christian life, then, is greater and more pervasive integration, a robust version that we will call maximal integration (MI).

By Dr. Eric L Johnson | Most previous discussions of the contemporary challenge of integration have tended to view it as a disciplinary and conceptual problem that is the responsibility of the individual Christian. One goal of this article is to frame it as more cultural than disciplinary, more social than individual, and more linguistic than conceptual. Let us consider the following: Christians in the field form a minority subculture within a majority secular culture, and each has its own self-constituting discourse rules.

By Dr. Eric L Johnson | Having considered the impact of late modern rules of discourse and practice with which Christians in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy have had to cope over the past few decades, we turn to consider three different faces of integration which have developed in response to these late modern pressures.