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Book Description:
This book represents a significant departure from most contemporary writing about spiritual direction. While most writers focus on long-term relationships of guidance, specifically envisioning long listening sessions, Bidwell changes focus. Spiritual direction, he insists, typically requires intervention in a specific crisis or situation or question, is not formal, lasts fewer than five sessions, and must be actively and intentionally focused on the person's growth. Bidwell's work shows what spiritual directors can learn from the short-term therapy model, especially about enabling people briefly but effectively to 'learn to listen on their own and with others for God's presence.' Focusing on how God is already active in the directee's life allows the participants to identify God's action and respond in ways that collaborate with that identified movement of the Spirit.
An integrative view of spiritual guidance:
Duane Bidwell has done an excellent job in identifying the realistic albeit challenging notion that spiritual care giving is necessarily short-term in duration. As a result, he identifies a clearly short term model, namely, solution focused brief therapy (SFBT), and adopts it for this type of pastoral care. The result is a richly thought out corrective to SFBT especially through insights from Philippians 2 or what is known as the Christ hymn. Bidwell develops the idea of respect as a central domain for integrating SFBT and pastoral guidance. Second, he provides excellent examples of pastoral work that provide the reader with concrete application of the model. He also provides an outline for the processes involved in this model. I highly recommend this work.
| Author: | Duane R., Ph.D. Bidwell | | Binding: | Kindle Edition | | Dewey Decimal Number: | 253.5 | | Format: | Kindle Book | | Number Of Pages: | 129 | | Publication Date: | 2004-02 |
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