GOING FURTHER - Written by Canon Frank Watts

Study Three - The Church and Wholeness

EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY RELIGION.
A particular form of religious thought and practice is emotionally healthy if;
1. It builds bridges not barriers between people.
2. It strengthens a basic sense of trust and relatedness to the universe:
3. It stimulates the growth of inner freedom and personal responsibility e.g. encourages healthy dependency relationships, mature relationships with authority:
4. It provides and effective means of helping persons move from a sense of guilt to forgiveness, ie. is not concerned to emphasise ethical trivia:
5. It increases the enjoyment of life:
6. It handles the vital energies of sex and aggressiveness in constructive ways:
7. It encourages the acceptance of reality, i.e. it fosters mature religious beliefs , encourages intellectual honesty with respect to doubt , faces the ambiguity of life and its complexity.
8. It emphasises love and growth:
9. It gives its adherents a satisfying philosophy of life, and a meaningful object of devotion, it gives its adherents a sense of transcending the earth boundness of life:
10. It encourages the individual to relate to their unconscious through living symbols, ie. penetrates beneath the outward and the ‘sensual’ experience to discover fundamental meanings and relationships.
11. It strengthens self esteem, i.e. increases a persons respect for themself.
By Howard J. Clinebell jr.

SIGNS OF A HEALTHY PARISH.
+ People are constantly expressing disagreement, and they do it right out in the open.
+ The Rector is always behind in his work.
+ The Vestry can never seem to make ends meet financially. And they are forever giving money away
+ New groups keep cropping up and bumping into each other over schedules and competing over volunteers.
+ A number of people miss meetings and insist on spending time with their families.
+ The choir is filled wirth a lot of amateurs.
+ The kids are noisy and all over the place, including worship.
+ The prayer books are wearing out, the coffee hour is crowded and confusing, the front door is almost off its hinges, the electric bill is way over budget, and it seems an awful lot of people have keys and all kinds of people are coming and going.
+ The place is full of losers. People who have lost their loved ones, people who know they can’t make it on their own. People who are losing but also finding their lives in receiving and giving a lot of love, for Christ’s sake.
IN SHORT, A HEALTHY , GROWING, LIVELY CHURCH !

• Consider the above signs and see how many of them apply to your parish.
• What other signs would you consider appropriate to ensure a healthy parish?
• Talking about this is one thing - To what extent would you be prepared to put yourself in the firing line to ensure your thoughts are put into practice?

The Church we do not want to be
+ Museum style …where you only go as a spectator.
+ Hairdresser style …where they split every hair four ways.
+ Service station style …where you go to get filled up.
+ Sleeping car style …where the passengers don’t want to be disturbed.
+ Refrigerator style …where the icy chill drives out any new arrivals.
(United Church, Ontario, Canada.)

Consider the above descriptions and see how many of them apply to your parish.

(Spotted on a bulletin board in the Mayo Clinic.)
Cancer is limited
It cannot cripple love.
It cannot shatter hope
It cannot corrode hope.
It cannot eat away peace.
It cannot destroy confidence.
It cannot kill friendship.
It cannot shut out memories.
It cannot silence courage.
It cannot invade the soul.
It cannot reduce eternal life.
It cannot quench the Spirit.
It cannot lesson the power of the resurrection.

BEATITUDES FOR THE SPASTIC CHILD.
Blessed are you who take time to listen to spastic speech; for you help us to know that if we persevere we can be understood.
Blessed are you who walk with us in public places, and ignore the stares of strangers; for in your companionship we find havens of relaxation.
Blessed are you who never bid us ‘hurry up’, and more blessed, you who do not snatch our tasks from us and do them for us; for often we need time rather than help.
Blessed are you who stand beside us as we enter new and untried ventures; for our failures will be outweighed by the times when we surprise ourselves and you.
Blessed are you who ask our help; for our greatest need is to be needed.
Blessed are you who give us your time and money;
For it is you who make possible the right of our inheritance - a chance in life.
Blessed are you when by all these things, you assure us that the thing that makes us individuals is not in our peculiar muscles, not in our wounded nervous systems, but in the God given self which no infirmity can confine.