review of Fernando Garzon and Kimberly A Tilley’ s article

This is a review of Fernando Garzon and Kimberly A Tilley’ s article titled “Do Lay Christian Counseling Approaches Work? What We Currently Know.” The thread that runs throughout the paper is an examination of the “effectiveness of lay Christian counseling”; and whether studies support a claim that lay counseling is effective. According to the authors, Durlak review of forty-two studies, comparing paraprofessional to professional counseling revealed that the former is just as effective as the latter. The paper acknowledges that while paraprofessional counseling has been a subject of empirical evidence over its effectiveness, lay Christian counseling still swims on the backwaters. The article explored recent studies on the approaches to lay counseling.
The current approaches do not provide an accurate picture that “lay Christian counseling is effective”, perhaps, when compared to “paraprofessional counseling” in entirety. Only a single waiting list control group research was conducted, and it was on the eclectic method, with the CBT part. Obviously, there are other lay models that exist; however, the recent precursory research on two methods; “one from the IHP category (TPM) and the other from a mixed model category (FICM)” offer a patchy result of the people who have received the methods and provide some precursory evidence on its effectiveness. The findings must be ascertained with a properly developed effectiveness study. While the paper explored several papers, these studies fell short in providing current data that can allow the authors to make an authoritative declaration that indeed lay Christian counseling is effective.

Considering the directness that lay model creators to work together on research-studies, integration-focused degree programs provide an opportunity to address such a significant gap that exists in lay Christian counseling research studies.
Bibliography
Garzon, Fernando L., and Kimberley A. Tilley. “Do lay Christian counseling approaches work? What we currently know.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 28, no. 2 (2009): 130-140.