Leaders keeping on learning

In the book, Supervision in the Helping Professions, the authors discuss the need to continue to learn and flourish in your work environment. Since this relates to National Mission's ongoing concern for the health of ministers and leaders in the church, I thought I'd add here a couple of lists they include in their chapter on the topic (notes in brackets are mine).

Firstly, in relation to being effective at work:

1. Be in love with learning. Stay at your learning edge and have a learning project.

2. Be clear about your learning style and keep expanding it. [Knowing your learning style helps you be sure that you're learning at your own pace, not at the pace of others.]

3. Attend to your emotional well-being.

4. Increase your capacity to relate to and engage with others. [They suggest going outside your comfort zone of people you relate to easily.]

5. Attend to your physical well-being - diet, exercise, sleep, breaks. [Days off!]

6. Have a personal or spiritual practice. [For Christian leaders, this means not neglecting those spiritual disciplines - they're often one of the first things to fall off this sort of a list.]

7. Find a group of good co-learners/fellow travellers. [People who encourage you - people who can mentor you.]

The second list will appear in a separate post.

Simple approaches to wellbeing

In the October edition of In Touch, the newsletter put out by the Mental Health Foundation of NZ, five ways to improve your wellbeing were noted. Wellbeing and wellness are much of our focus here at National Mission, and so I'm passing on these five points (with a few of my own comments in brackets).

They begin by saying that wellbeing is a state of feeling good and functioning well. The five ways to wellbeing - all simple, straightforward approaches - are as follows:

1. Connect: develop your relationships with friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. These connections support you and enrich your life. [Tapu Misa wrote about this aspect of health in one of her recent columns.]

2. Give: do something for a friend or stranger and see yourself and your happiness as linked to the wider community. [Think of the 'Pay it Forward' approach]

3. Take notice: be aware of the world around you and see the beauty in [both] everyday and unusual things - reflecting on them helps you appreciate what matters to you. [Note the word reflecting: taking notice takes time.]

4. Learn: try something new or rediscover an old interest, or take on a new responsibility or challenge. Learning makes you more confident and can be fun.

5. Be active: physical activity helps you to feel good so find something that you enjoy and that suits your personality. [The biggest difficulty with this is that when you feel down, it's hard to get moving in physical activity, even something as simple as going for a walk. Having someone else to do the activity with you makes a huge difference. The same applies to point 4.]

Wrong/Right about buildings

Earlier this month, Dan Kimball (he of the most extraordinary hairstyle) wrote a post on the Out of Ur blog saying that he was wrong about church buildings, that is, wrong to say that people who built them weren't missional and were basically building for their own sakes.

He seemed to make good sense.

However, this week along comes Ken Eastburn with a response - and a fairly impassioned one at that - in which he says Kimball was right before he changed his mind. In Eastburn's view, church buildings are a hindrance to mission, and he knocks down most of Kimball's arguments with equally valid ones. (Eastburn belongs to a community called The Well - their website is called, Leave the Building.)

Certainly church buildings have been synonymous with Church for centuries: they've been refuges, places for opponents to burn down, centres of towns, the sites of local cemetaries, places of worship and far more. And while not having a church building does have its advantages (it's a good deal cheaper to maintain for starters), it also brings its own set of problems. (I belong to a church community that hasn't had its own building for over a decade now, and knows just what a pain it is to have to set up in someone else's hall every Sunday.)

Wellness - from a Maori writer's perspective

In a video on the Perspectives on Wellbeing page of the Mental Health Foundation of NZ's website, Maori language scholar and author Ruth Makuini Tai talks about finding out who you really are - by leaving behind the 'other' voices in your life, as well as providing new insights into the meaning of 'aroha' and the simple greeting 'kia ora' (which turns out to say considerably more in those six letters than you'd think).

The video runs for a couple of minutes, maybe three, and Ruth packs a good deal into that short space of time. I can't link directly to the video, because it's not a You Tube-type, so here's the address.

On the same page, there's another video, this time by Judi Clements, in which she discusses the five ways everyone can support their own wellbeing and that of the world around them, including family, friends, colleagues and the wider community. The five ways are connecting, being active, taking notice, learning and giving.

Real Relationships

The Maxim Institute reports:
The British based Relationships Foundation has released a new pamphlet, estimating "the financial cost of failure" in families and relationships. Taking into account measures such as "lone parent benefits," costs in "health and social care" and "housing," as well as related social services, When Relationships Go Wrong: Counting the cost of family failure puts the cost of "relationship breakdown" at a massive £37 billion. Warning against a "focus solely on economic concerns at the expense of relationships," the Foundation calls for a policy, and a culture, which prioritises relationships, and "greater wellbeing."

The massive figure, based on more detailed calculations in the pamphlet, is food for thought enough. But it is the companion pamphlet, When Relationships Go Right: Enabling thriving lives, which contains a fruitful metaphor when it comes to the debate on family. It draws a parallel between "the wellbeing agenda" and the green movement, hoping that, just as politicians and wider culture have come to prioritise the environment, so also will government and society come to prioritise relationships and "wellbeing." The pamphlet offers a number of examples of what this might look like, from the greater use of "health visitors" and "district nurses," to proposals that encourage healthy work-life balance through things such as cutting travel time.

Read the rest of Maxim's comments here; When Relationships Go Right is the second half of the pdf file link above.