In this 2-week, two-armed randomized controlled trial, the authors investigated an online contemplative prayer program for Christians with daily stress. Drawing from the stress and coping, mindfulness, religious coping, and contemplative literatures, the brief program sought to help Christians with daily stress change their evaluation of environmental demands by surrendering to God’s perceived care. With roots in the contemplative Christian tradition, the Jesus Prayer was practiced both formally and informally for a 2-week period of time. Findings revealed both within- and between-groups differences, with the Jesus Prayer group (n = 44) outperforming a wait-list group (n = 42) on measures of stress and surrender as a form of religious coping. Study limitations and directions for future research are offered in order to continue to build this burgeoning research base on Christian-sensitive interventions for the amelioration of recurrent psychological symptoms.

In the last two decades, mindfulness has made a significant impact on Western secular psychology, as evidenced by several new treatment approaches that utilize mindfulness practices to ameliorate mental illness. Based on Buddhist teachings, mindfulness offers individuals the ability to, among other things, decenter from their thoughts and live in the present moment. As an example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) teaches decentering and mindfulness techniques to adults in an eight-session group therapy format so as to reduce the likelihood of depression relapse. Yet, some Christian adults may prefer to turn to their own religious heritage, rather than the Buddhist tradition, in order to stave off depression relapse. Thus, the purpose of this article is to present centering prayer, a form of Christian meditation that is rooted in Catholic mysticism, as an alternative treatment for preventing depression relapse in adults. I argue that centering prayer overlaps considerably with MBCT, which makes it a suitable treatment alternative for many Christians in remission from depressive episodes.

The authors investigated an integrative, culturally sensitive model of worry via 3 studies. In the first study, we empirically examined our proposed model for Christian adults, developed by combining a Jesuit contemplative writing on surrendering to divine providence, the psychology of religion literature, and intolerance of uncertainty (IU) research, among Christian college students at a Christian-affiliated university (N ϭ 209). With the second study, the authors attempted to replicate these findings with a community sample of Christian churchgoers (N ϭ 99). For the last study, we presented pilot research on providence-focused therapy for recurrent worry (PFT-RW), drawing from the aforementioned empirical model as the foundation for an 8-week group approach for self-described chronic worriers (N ϭ 13), with contemplative prayer as the primary intervention. Consistent with the proposed hypotheses, adequate support was found for both an overall model fit and IU as a mediating variable linking surrender and worry, as revealed by path analyses in the first 2 studies. Moreover, within the pilot study, medium to large effect sizes emerged pre-to posttreatment for chronic worriers among all of the outcome variables, suggesting PFT-RW may hold promise as a culturally sensitive intervention for recurrent worry among Christian adults. Current limitations with generalizability are discussed, as are recommendations for future research so as to strengthen these preliminary findings and apply them to a wider range of denominations within the Christian tradition.

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