LIFE BUILDER TRAINING COURSES
Life Builder Training is a four part series of courses to equip Christian men and women to deliver Christ-like pastoral care that is relevant to the people who are already "within arm's reach." Each course is delivered in 2-1/2 hour classes on a weeknight for four weeks in a row. To keep informed of our class schedule signup for our newsletter, or email us at admin@centerforboldaction.info
HAND to HAND
Connecting that Cares
Course Description: Understand other people so you can show them how to improve their lives. You can have high levels of influence and persuasion with other people only when you have the skills of high-quality communication--the process that regulates everything you in relationship with other people. Isn't that almost everything that's imp[ortant, period?
This course will help you learn skills of active listening, gaining and sharing empathy, giving information and direct help, and being assertive. It shows you how to connect meaningfully with other persons no matter how different their life experiences may be from yours. With a bond of rapport and insight into their motivations, you can build strong personal friendships, become more effective in administrative or other workplace relationships, or be useful as a life skills mentor or as a guide in the resolution of personal distress.
Topics
God's call to be in community
Lifestyle options: inactive, reactive, proactive
Communication and its barriers: the Verbal Villains
How relationships are built
Remembering names; door openers and closers
Triage: How to decide what to do first
Communication skills
Mirroring
I-statements
Attending skills
Responding to anger or to inappropriate communication
Giving and receiving compliments
Activities for Practical Learning
This is a course to build skills. Teaching methods include reading, listening to audio demonstrations and interactive PowerPoint exercises that are part of the text, reporting your use of skills in "your real world," and receiving coaching based on those reports.
Textbook for students on the Certification Track
BOLD ANSWERS
for BIG QUESTIONS
Avoiding and Resolving
Life's Common Confusions
Course Description: How to understand mistaken thinking that creates problems and the mistaken worldviews they come from. (A worldview is a set of beliefs about the nature of the world and one's place within it. It guides everything a person does). After learning how the traditional Christian worldview compares with the central elements of seven other common worldviews, you can more fully and successfully understand and care for people whose worldviews differ from yours. This is rewarding because Christianity is about relationships and the church is fully alive only when, in the spirit of Christ, it finds and cares for those who are unable or unwilling to reach toward it. The course also examines how distorted theological beliefs create emotional distress. These "dogmagenic disorders" mimic problems that arise from psychological dysfuntion but that are resistant to psychological treatment. A spiritual problem is not resolved by a psychological methiod.
Topics
Ten worldview blunders
How each blunder is rooted in a mistaken worldview
A comparison of mistaken worldviews and Christianity
Epistemology: How to separate truth from error
Dogmagenic disorders (problems rooted in doctrinal errors)
How off-center beliefs take people off the road of life
Remedies for common dogmagenic disorders
Action plans for personal growth, intimacy with God, and growing in community
Activities and Peractical Learning
This course is about damage from mistaken beliefs. Students who are using skills of earlier courses will see these harmful effects and can lead people to amazing life chamges and healing when destructive beliefs are replaced by God's truth and power.
Textbooks for students on the Certification Track
The OddSquad Blunders: Worldview Errors That Will Blow Up Your Life
HEAVEN to HEART
Transformation 6:10
Course Description: You know that each person in the world is different, yet you realize that people are more alike than different. This course discusses why, showing how personalities develop and where problems come from.
The course will help you learn a system of counseling based upon biblical principles. This will help you comprehend your own motivations and actions and provide the foundation upon which you can learn and use coaching strategies to help other people become more like Christ. You can learn how to apply biblical principles to help others resolve ordinary cognitive and emotional conflicts or habits that lower their quality of life.
It does not prepare you to engage in mental health counseling, licensed or otherwise.
Topics
Essential elements in the equipping of a Life Builder
The quest for harmony: A theory of personality
How quests are disrupted
A biblically-consistent theory of how life gets messed up
Recognizing conditions that need immediate professional help
Popular theories of behavior change
The Isaiah 6:10 Transformation Track
Practical methodologies
Support and guidance into effective living
The Diagnostic Diamond
Resolution of guilt and shame
Receiving and accepting forgiveness; how to forgive others
Ethical issues; Referral
Activities for Practical Learning
This course offers Christian explanations of human nature and the origin of distress, and describes transforming power available by God's mercy and the work of Christ. It guides students into use of what has been learned in Hand to Hand, with coaching on building transformative relationships in "the real world" of another person.
Textbook for students on the Certification Track
GROWING GOLDEN
Confident Caring in Late Life Ministries
Course Description: Feel secure when you respond to people in grief; find joy in visiting the ill or those confined at home or in a care facility; be confident when you talk with people who are near death or face a long-tem incurable condition. The number of elderly in our society is growing rapidly. With that comes an even larger number of spouses and children who are affected by circumstances occuring in the aging person. This course describes changes that typically take place during aging and offers practical information and strategies for effective visitation, worship, and evangelism with the elderly.
Grief and loss, which arise from a multitude of life experiences-- aging, job change, retirement, or death of a loved one--create the need for pastoral care. The spiritual and physical phenomena of death and dying are examined so that you learn how to provide meaningful comfort and support in ways consistent with the spirit of Christ. The course will also help you understand your own responses to loss, grief, and death so that those experiences support, rather than interfere with, your caring for others. Materials for visitation and evangelism to residents in long-term care are provided at no charge with the course.
Topics
Biblical principles and prevalent Christian traditions relevant to late life
Typical physical, psychological, and spiritual adjustments during
aging
Spiritual adjustments and developments in later life
How to respond effectively to persons who are grieving , have
terminal illness, or are near death
Spiritual care of persons with special conditions (are hospitalized,
live in a long-term care center, have dementia)
Death and dying
Activities and Practical Learning
Demonstrations on DVD
Application of the topics in "your real world," with coaching
feedback
Textbooks for students on the Certification Track
Remembering the Life of Jesus (multi-sensory Bible study)
Growing Golden: Successful Aging and Elder Care