New resource from the Susanna Wesley Foundation
The Susanna Wesley Foundation is pleased to offer a new resource: ‘Flourishing ministers: flourishing communities’, written by Dr Kathryn Kissell, a counselling psychologist who is an associate tutor in pastoral studies at Ridley Hall, teaching on relationships and emotional management in ministry.
The ‘flourishing’ resource provides deep insight into the powerful influence of relational dynamics and emotional processes in ministry settings. Kathryn uses examples and case studies to illustrate foundational concepts and help the reader get under the surface to unpick what is happening to create difficulty, pressure and dysfunction in a variety of contexts. The design includes helpful visual representations of key ideas.
Read more about the resource here.
At our launch events on the 8th and 15th March, we heard from Kathryn as she explained some of the concepts at the heart of the resource. At these online events, Kathryn also introduced a new group coaching initiative for ministers to enable them to apply the principles in order to change their practice and understand the dynamics at play in their own contexts.
If you missed the launch events, you can watch Kathryn’s presentation here:
Kathryn, a coach in Bowen Systems with a practice in Harley Street, has been married to a Church of England vicar for 20 years. This resource is founded on Kathryn’s professional expertise and is a response to needs identified as a result of her own experience and research. She is alive to the fact that ministers are under an enormous amount of pressure and to counter this they are being encouraged to be more mindful of their well-being – to exercise, to take days off, to set boundaries, etc. She recognises, however, that despite an awareness of what constitutes best practice, the ability to adopt these measures often proves difficult, if not impossible.
Kathryn has found that successfully establishing a flourishing ministry not only entails understanding the explicit tasks and behaviours which nurture well-being, but also requires an understanding of the implicit dynamics simultaneously at work. Without an understanding of the unconscious processes involved at both an individual and a collective level, the best of flourishing intentions can be sabotaged and the flourishing of the minister and their community is compromised. Kathryn’s work is about enabling flourishing and overcoming our individual and group tendency towards sabotage.