More thoughts on recovery

Recovery stands against maintenance as a way of supporting people with mental health issues. Traditionally services have been provided from a maintenance framework which believes that a person has a mental illness, they are always going to have it and you have to provide services to help them in their situation. A recovery approach says you can recover from this. There may still be symptoms and you may still have times when things aren't they way they were before, but you can recover. We are going to be there for you to help you in that journey.

Service providers that work from a maintenance framework generally focus on the organisation and ensure that its procedures are followed, a range of programmes are established and are offered to the client, and risks are kept to a minimum. A recovery focussed organisation will put the individual first, will try to find opportunities to develop as a person, rather than having to fit into specific programmes and will be prepared to take risks for the good of recovery.

How often I see the church falling into the same maintenance approach. We establish programmes and structures and people to have to fit into them. Our purpose is to reach the goals and strategies of the church and individuals have to fit into that. If people's gifts, abilities and experiences don't fit with the model, it's just too bad.

Wouldn't it be great to see church become focussed on individuals, helping people to see their God given abilities, to help them find God's dream for them, and helping them to discover opportunities to use their gifts, abilities and experiences to serve Jesus Christ.

Recovery

I'm into the second day of a workshop on the process of recovery as it relates to mental illness. There are a lot of challenges to current thinking. I'm already seeing how the principles relate to so many areas of life. Just as people with mental illness don't want to be stuck with a service provider that is simply trying to force them into some service delivery mould, but to treat them as real people who have a right to move forward into a new life, so people going to a church have the right to deserve something more than a service delivery approach to church life. I'll develop that thought sometime in the future.

Church Marketing

I've been thinking a bit about church marketing. There is quite often criticism of this, but the problem as I see it is not with the existence of church marketing but more to do with its mis-use or even the lack of good marketing.

As I see it, a church that conducts good marketing will have a very clear picture of the neighbourhood in which it is situated, understanding the type of people that live nearby, their interests, their employment types, family types and social status. A church that knows who it is trying to reach will then look at the way it operates and will plan its activities appropriately. I have lived around Western Australia and am aware that it is not a case of simply recognising differences between rural and metropolitan, or between low or medium socio-economic areas. A rural farming town where the population has been relatively stable for decades can be very different from a similar sized town that has been established around mining and the population changes on an annual for even six-monthly basis. A suburban church in a university suburb can be vastly different from a suburban church in an industrial area.

Where the problem with church marketing occurs is when a church has done it's marketing well, and developed a successful approach to ministry, then has effectively packaged its model and sold it on to churches all over the world who think they can implement it wherever they are. So churches take hold of models like Hillsong and Willow Creek and attempt to cut and paste them into their own situation without having first identified if that model actually fits their local needs and demographics. I don't want to criticise Hillsong and Willow Creek, but want to warn churches that try to clone them. They did their marketing and what they did worked for them, but it should not necessarily be assumed that what they did will work anywhere else.

Churches need to do good marketing, not simply purchasing off-the-shelf models that they hope will fit their situation.

Hoon Traps

Headline in my local paper today: "Hoons in Plague Proportions". I'm wondering if that means we should set up hoon traps, or perhaps get some kind of spray. If they are that bad, perhaps a helitanker could go along the highway with hoonspray. I might go down to K Mart and see if I can buy a hoon guard for my car.