What does Christian wholeness look like? 5 steps

Christian wholeness involves a journeying and relating with others. So often, relating with family, friends, in small groups, in churches, as well as at work just falls over. It does not feel safe. Taking these five steps is a simple way of finding out where relationships are wrong and how to prevent that from happening. These are five steps, one built on another.

• Each one relies on the one before it remaining present as a solid step.
• They are not like rungs in a ladder, where once you have got past one step, you don't need it any more.
• While walking the steps, a preceding step can start to crumble. When this happens, it is critical to go back announced at before continuing where you were.
• Thus the longest step is the first one and the second longest step is understanding.
• Normally we want to rush on to the response step, in order to fix the problem, but then this step breaks down as there is not enough connection or understanding to support this third step.
• If people were just to spend time more on the first two steps, relationships would go a lot further and become a lot safer.

So what are the five steps?

1. Connect with others,

Connection is the foundation for any relationship, ranging from the casual censure)
to a professional therapeutic working alliance. Without this connection, relating
becomes unsafe. What makes up the "safety" in relating? Check these essentials to
safe relating in your own situations:

• Size of number of people present. It is much easier and safer to relate with smaller number of people than with a larger group. Thus it is safer to share with others in this order:

i. 2’s and 3’s: meeting with one or two others
ii. small group, say from 6 to 12 people
iii. small church, and then a bigger one

• Attitudes. Safe attitudes, essential for relating are:

i. Care. This includes words like “love”, "kind" and “trust”
ii. Respect. This includes respecting the other as a person and their
boundaries. This sort of respect is able to keep what belongs to that
person, private and confidential.
iii. Choice. This does not force another. It is gentle. Choice does not
go beyond the other persons consent.

• Facing challenges. Safe relationships can face problems rather than cope with difficulties in more unhelpful ways such as:

i. fighting over them in anger,
ii. “flighting" from them (avoiding it as bad as anger)
iii. "freaking" out about the problems (anxiety is as bad as anger and
avoidance!)
iv. "Flopping” in a mound of despair such that nothing gets done.
v. Faking that things are going well when they are not (something
which Christians can be excellent and doing).

• Empathy. Empathy is being able to get inside the other persons shoes, legs,(their journey) heart, mind and eyes. Self-centredness kills empathy.
• Time. Relationships cannot function without both quality time and quantity time. In a group setting, if people do not turn up or if those who come change all the time, the total amount of time built up between the same people is less, and this makes it harder to have a safe relationship.
• “You questions”. There is a surprising. difficult skill in being able to ask open-ended non-leading questions. It is not easy to be able to ask, "How are you?", "Where are you at?", “What is that like for you?"

2. Understand the other.

This is one of the hardest steps to stay on and to fall back onto, when problems arise
in relationships. It is like the first set of a game of tennis. This is why a whole
chapter is devoted on communication.

3. Respond to them.

This is the easiest step to get onto, and the easiest one to destroy.

• Men in particular just want to get onto the second set of the game of tennis even before playing the first one.
• Counsellors often want to try and sort out the problem, but often go wrong because they have not understood the whole picture. It is as if they have not got all the jigsaw pieces together to make the whole picture. They do not fully understand how the picture came to be and how the picture might change depending on what happens to the person.

4. Engage other help.

It is often so hard to admit to one's own limitations.

If family and friends and those in the small group could say, "well this is as far as I can go let us go and seek other help" there would be so much more safety in the relationships.
If professional counsellors could say to their patients and clients, "I cannot do this all by myself," and encourage the patient to be in a small group or at least connect with one of two others, then the person would improve so much quicker. If someone seeing a professional counsellor could be connected with family and friends, one or two other people and join a people helper group, change would be accelerated.

5. evaluation

of how the steps have gone allows for more growth. This is the shortest step, but an important one. It allows for the relationship to grow further in the main steps of connection, understanding and response.

What does Christian Wholeness look like? 5 Shapes

The Triangle	The Square	The Circle	The Cross	The Pyramid

So what is Christian wholeness? Christian wholeness is walking the journey of the five steps with another person. It is illustrated and facilitated by speaking the language of the five shapes. The more people walking these five steps and the more people talking these five shapes, the more likelihood there is for us all to move towards Christian wholeness. As we do this, these five steps and five shapes may provide ligaments as it were to the body of Christ. They may provide that connection such that as each part speaks the truth in love to each other, it will grow more into becoming the functional body of Christ. (Ephesians 4: 15, 16)