Abingdon Press.

Abingdon Press is a subsidiary of The United Methodist Publishing House. It was originally established in 1914 by the Methodist Episcopal Book Committee as the book publishing department of the Methodist Publishing House. The significance of the name Abingdon derived from the fact that it was also the name of a town in Maryland where Cokesbury College, the first Methodist college in the United States, was opened in 1787. Upon the unification of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and the Methodist Protestant Church in 1939, Abingdon Press joined Cokesbury Press, the name of the book publishing department adopted by the Southern Methodist Book Committee, and was subsequently known as Abingdon-Cokesbury Press. Around 1953, however, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press became Abingdon Press once more and has remained as such. Abingdon Press describes itself as America's oldest theological publisher, and it provides an ecumenical publishing program which focuses on religious books that advance knowledge and facilitate praxis within the academic community, with an emphasis on the United Methodist denominational market.

According to a preview sample of the Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling, the book was created with the intention of being "an authoritative, diagnostic reference book for anyone involved in the study or practice of pastoral care and counseling" and enlisted the participation of "nearly 600 Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish contributors." Rodney J. Hunter, Professor of Pastoral Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, was the dictionary's general editor. Its associate editors were H. Newton Malony, Liston O. Mills, and John Patton.

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