Pastor John. Brian N. Tebbutt

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      Our fellowship is foreshadowed by the intimate relationships portrayed in the text, between men and women, insiders and outsiders, searchers and believers, unbelievers and followers, and the leader. The trust (belief) of which we read is practiced by us. So the golden thread that holds the tapestry of interaction together is the practice and awareness of personal sharing. All the other elements are important in their turn and are given reality by the encounter between persons that is taking place. Sharing takes place throughout, but especially in response to the bidding, “Share how you feel . . .” So we need to be quite clear what it involves.

What is new in the experience is a “new way of being oneself and being with others”33 and being prepared to entrust our joy and suffering to the other. We shall live (even if briefly) in liminality, on the border between, in the space between, parts of ourselves, and between ourselves and others. Others will hear that “I am.” And I will hear them saying, “I am.” This is what “I am.” And that is a very Johannine expression!

      Sharing is a distinct activity. It involves talking about oneself. It is not discussion of ideas. It is a specific discipline, easily learnt but hard to practice consistently, needing constant watchfulness over oneself, one’s thought about oneself and the language to express it. That sounds pretty bleak, but it is the richest form of communication. It is vastly more than the cerebral communication of ideas, though precision in ideas is not discounted. It is full of affect. It is the royal road to truth and comfort in the truth.

      I started my first “Care and Share Group” in 1973, long before banks became “listening” and co-ops (a series of grocery and bank cooperatives in the UK) became “caring-sharing”! Training in Clinical Theology Association workshops and growth groups alerted me to a different style of meeting. I was the minister of a large Methodist church of over five hundred members; I was attending a lot of meetings, but began to feel I was not “meeting” people. I was usefully busy, leading a hectic life, with much pastoral visiting, and realized that there was no way I could care for everyone. People had to care for each other and be trained for it. The more insight and skill they had, the better. So I began to offer pastoral training courses, and continued to do so throughout my ministry! The core of the training was a new way of talking and listening to each other.

      I was due to lead a house group one night and simply had had no time to prepare a talk. I nervously asked the members to share how they felt about their relationship to the church at the moment. After a long silence, one person said, “Well, I’m scared.” She had just been made president of the Young Wives Club, a large fellowship of fifty or so members, and she felt the weight of responsibility. After a long pause, one by one, each shared what they felt. Just that! It was a most moving occasion. I realized the agenda was in the people. It was my “conversion to a life of dialogue” (Buber). It was a different style of ministry—open, trusting, intimate, moving, real, creative of deep relationships, healing of felt inadequacies—which also trained people in their own style of deep pastoral care. If you can talk about yourself in a mutually caring group, you can listen to others, you are empowered to offer the ministry you have received and receive the ministry you have offered. It was a breakthrough.

      6. The Need for a Model or Models

Our practice of reading and sharing will need a model or models so that we have understanding of what we read, say, hear, and feel. Models are keys to understanding that illuminate and give shape to what goes from us and comes into us. They are maps, not the territory itself. The first map, called “The Babylonian Map of the World,” from about 500 BC, “presents an abstraction of terrestrial reality”; a map presents “an imaginative representation of an unknowable object (the world).”34 Models draw elements out of a dimly perceived reality and through the imagination offer a synthesis, eclectic in a non-compulsive way, whereby we have tools for hewing meaning out of multifarious input and output. They will make sense of our journey through the stages of life, of the qualities a carer needs, of the nature of personal distress, of the development of personality, of the relationship between helper and the person being helped, and of the nature of the writing we read and of the way it abides in us.

In particular, what is useful is a dynamic model of personality. “What particularly distinguishes the term ‘psychodynamic’ is that the activity of the psyche is not confined to relating to people, or to objects outside of the self . . . Activity also takes place within the psyche, in relation to itself.” So if I say, “I don’t like half of what is inside myself,” I am being both subject and object. I am observing myself. “We can just as easily love, hate of fear parts of ourselves as we can other people.”35 We understand the different elements in us when we realize the power of the connection between our infancy and childhood experience and the development of our personality. So my comments and analogies are meant not to be definitive, but suggestive, of viewpoints into text and person.

      I am using the basic model created by a deeply committed Christian, Dr. Frank Lake (1914–1982), a former parasitologist and medical missionary, who faced the clamant needs of the human psyche and trained and practiced as a psychiatrist. He was a key pioneer of pastoral counseling in the UK. He developed what he called “Clinical Theology,” the basic insights of which we use because they are invariably helpful. He founded the Clinical Theology Association in 1962 (now the Bridge Pastoral Foundation). His aim was to train people in the churches to exercise fine, skilled pastoral care to each other and in small groups. An understanding of personality, its strengths and weaknesses, was essential and was held in the Christian experience.

The approach was eclectic, or in today’s terms, integrative, built on the foundational works of the key thinkers in the psychodynamic field, and particularly influenced by the Object Relations school.36 Lake and helpers offered training seminars in pastoral care and counseling, which he began in 1958. His large tome of nearly 1,300 pages, Clinical Theology, was published in 1966. It was abridged in 1986 by Martin Yeomans, a Methodist minister, and a reader was produced in 1991 by Carol Christian—both excellent introductions. My brief summary and application is a million miles from the depth and extent of his insight. Frank Lake wanted a combined base for both thought and praxis, namely, theology rooted in the love and power of God, but also pastoral care rooted in a careful and adventurous observance of the sound practice of psychiatry, psychotherapy, and group work.37

One of the difficulties for some is that his mind and his writing and his practice slipped seamlessly across the two disciplines of therapy and theology. For others it brought a great healing and window opening reconciliation.38 Others have since crossed disciplines with approbation; for instance, Cox and Theilgaard crossing the disciplines of literature and therapy. Murray Cox was responsible for bringing William Shakespeare into Broadmoor, the secure psychiatric prison. We apply their words to our theme: “Definition becomes sharper when one discipline immerses itself in the other and thereby discovers its own nature with greater certainty.” “[T]he topic of inter-disciplinary transfusion is relevant.” A nice phrase is “the mingling of contraries.” “Our intention is to show how each sphere has much that can nourish its neighbour, without either discipline being reduced or diluted in any way.” The boundaries between disciplines are important but permeable, or even porous, certainly not watertight (a metaphor John could approve of). In contemplating the hope and heartache of the human condition intrapsychically (within the person), and interpsychically (between persons), in the light of theological conviction and psychodynamic insight, it can be argued that “both modes of descriptive language are necessary.” “[P]roviding vital inter-disciplinary boundaries are strongly guarded, each has much to give the other. So much so, that without their mutual gaze, both would be losers.”39 And Cox is quite precise in a Frank Lake memorial lecture delivered to the Clinical Theology Association: “We owe Frank Lake a very great deal, because he made us take seriously this interwovenness of things clinical and things theological.” That was my note at the time, though it is not, I think, in the printed text of the lecture, Transferring the Untransferable (1993). There we do have: “Frank Lake was a tireless herald who kept high the banner which had clinical embroidered on one side and theology on СКАЧАТЬ