RESILIENT CHURCH

In August of 2010 I went across to Sydney Australia to begin an Accreditation Course on "The Resilience Doughnut" led and presented by Lyn Worsley and the RD team. It presented me a model of Resilience and ways to teach that to children and youth. I completed all the necessary requirements but during my extra study and my current job as Minister in the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand (PCANZ) I saw wider applications which could be made at group level and community level to transform how we do mission. Currently I perceive the approach being made in many different denominations and community is a "weakness" and therefore "pessimistic" approach to mission. The church needs a new language of HOPE and for me this is about being optimistic and the means to moving that optimism into reality is about learning a strengths-based approach to doing so.

Out of that study I wrote with the help of Lyn Worsley, "Building a Resilient Church" which has been made available here at a nominal download cost so that you can access it and use it. Feedback on your use of it via the contact form in this website would be appreciated.

DOWNLOAD and purchase page for "Building a Resilient Church"

RESILIENT MENTORING - A new approach to discipleship

Concurrent work with the Resilient Church concept is to re-visit how we do discipleship. I have written 5 workbooks which address various aspects of mentoring followers of Christ using the Resilience Strengths Based focus.

1. A Christ Centred Core

This explores the idea of Christ transforming inwardly our sense of "I AM" and "I HAVE" and "I CAN" identified at the three areas of resilience by the International Resilience Project. It shows you how to begin a strengths based mentoring, no aiming at "perfect" disciples or mentees, but at Resilient Mentees who learn how to manage the adversity of life while centred on Christ.

2. A Strengths Based Approach

This workbook helps you explore the concept of a strengths based approach and how to implement that in terms of yourself or your mentees. You are given sufficient detail to do asset or strength assessments and to get started on the strengths-based approach. I recomment purchasing a copy of Lyn Worsley's book "The Resilience Doughnut" from her website.

3. Resilient Thinking

This larger workbook helps you step through by exercises, video links to explain, and basic material on how to reduce irrational thinking so that you manage your adversity from a different emotional base. This also doubles as a short self-taught course on applying Cognitive Behavioural techniques to your daily living.

4. Strengths management of Weaknesses

Resilience is not a Pollyanna approach. It is more about realistic optimism. You have honest inventories of what you have, who you understand yourself to be and what you perceive you can do confidently in terms of working your strengths. Are there weaknesses present? Of course there are! This further workbook shows you how to manage the problems that can arise and gives you ideas of how to spot what your personal strengths and talents are. It also gives you tips on how to manage the weaknesses so that they do not highjack the resilience mentoring process.

5. Tweaking the Traditional

This workbook gives you some ideas of how to take your strengths based philosophy and integrate it into one of the many excellent discipleship training books there are available. You get to see how to use the strengths based approach and adapt it to integrate some more specific practices of Christian formation.

DOWNLOAD and purchase page for the workbooks