I’ve been thinking a bit more about the Recovery Model as a helpful tool for churches. In this post I will consider three of the elements, that recovery:
- is a journey rather than a destination
- does not necessarily mean getting back to where you were before
- happens in ‘fits and starts’ and, like life, has many ups and downs
Journey
Journey is a metaphor that is widely used in faith. I know that there are some people who don’t find it a helpful one, but for an organisation ‘journey’ seems appropriate.
Why? Well because organisations evolve and change. People travel through those changes together, often exploring side roads and dead ends. People also travel in different ways and at different paces with different concerns and priorities at different times.
For organisations, everyone being at one place at the same time is problematic. That’s why making decisions that please everyone is almost impossible.
This raises lots of questions for me.
Should there be a variety of congregations that make up a local church?
How can we minister to ‘what is’ and ‘what might be’ with ever decreasing allocations of minister’s time to pastorates?
How do we go about training ministers and give permission to others to be pioneers and entrepreneurs, creating new ways of being church?
Back to Where You Were
Many denominations seem to have a collective wish to return to the golden age, mostly an imagined period when everyone went to church twice on Sundays, everyone believed in God and everyone respected the views of the church. Sunday schools had a million kids and there was no crime…
Some of that is of course true. Sunday schools were bigger. But were they full of children who wanted to be there? And if all was so good why didn’t those children keep coming to church?
Recovery isn’t about returning to a previous point.
Recovery is about moving forward having lived through and changed by an experience.
Recovery is a learning experience.
We can learn from our very difficult experiences. The problems almost always come when we don’t learn from them. We repeat the same behaviours over and over again expecting different results.
In recovery from mental health this learning includes being aware of the things that might contribute to you becoming unwell and those things that promote well-being. Those things are not always the same for every person so there is no formula, but focusing on the positive while dealing with things which are problematic is always key ingredient.
I wonder how we can do this as communities?
It would almost certainly involve us being open and honest in our communication. Perhaps that’s a good place to start?
Fits and Starts
When we are well we have a line, kind of like a plimsoll, the red line round a ship, which marks the point at above which the water level becomes a problem. We are aware of things lapping over the side like a big wave. When that happens we make allowances, put in place things to deal with the problem. On a ship they have bilge pumps to remove the water that gets in. When they stop working the ship is in trouble.
I wonder what our equivalent is in church? Do we use membership numbers as our plimsoll line? Is that a healthy measurement? And what about our bilge pumps? What are the things, probably people, that work hard to keep us afloat?