Church Well Collective
Community, development, and opportunity
for helping professionals with pastoral ministry backgrounds
who are serving the Church.
There are a growing number of helping professionals (counselors, spiritual directors, coaches, etc.) who enter the field following a season in pastoral ministry, or in conjunction with their pastoral expression. Professionals who desire to have an impact on the Church, on its culture, on its leadership, and on the experiences each community has.
Professionals who desire to use their gifts to bring healing and flourishing to the Church.
Yet for those who sit at the intersection of what can feel like two worlds, there can be an isolation and loneliness that emerges.
How do we honor and engage the dual roles our callings can take? How do we think deeply and ethically about the challenges of engaging the specific cultural contexts of the Church? How do we find opportunity to lean into these expressions in professional and ministry spaces?And sometimes even more deeply: who we do engage in this wrestling with?
The Church Well Collective is our community for those who engage the intersection of ministry and a helping profession.
CW Collective is a membership-based community that provides community, development, and opportunity.
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The heartbeat of all we do at Church Well Co is creating and engaging spaces of brave relationship. This is true for the pastors we work with. This is true for the professionals in the CW Collective that we collaborate with.
For CWCollective, the central place for engaging in brave relationship is the SLOW Community. CWCollective is organized in groups of 8 practitioners who meet monthly in their own SLOW Community.
Each monthly call orients around Church Well Co’s 4 SLOW practices: Survey, Lament, Own, and Welcome.
Survey allows us to find ourselves in our own story and acknowledge that place.
Lament opens space for hope in ways that unspoken pain cannot hold. We lament and grieve the weight that is carried, the wounds that have been picked up along the way, and the loss we have encountered.
Ownership is a healing balm for our souls, given to us by God.
Welcome invites a sacred healing in moments when our pain, our failures, our struggles are seen by both God and others, and we are not rejected or less than because of them.
These practices give space for pain to not only be painful, but to become useful and even transformative. We reflect on our experiences, what the Spirit is teaching us and inviting us into, and invite (as appropriate) others’ experiences and perspectives into that space.
And we do this together as the apostle Paul directed the Church in Galatia, “bear[ing] one another’s burdens, and so fulfill[ing] the law of Christ.”
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As relationship forms and connection is deepened through the SLOW Community, there is invitation and encouragement to expand relationships beyond the SLOW Community itself with other practitioners.
It is the hope of CWCollective that the relationships formed in SLOW Communities and the Collective become supportive both professionally and personal personally. Companions on parallel journeys.
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On the 1st Thursday of each month the CW Collective meets as one group to engage deeply around issues and topics relevant to the context, culture, and work that is being engaged. CWCollective is comprised of helping professionals from a variety of disciplines and areas of expertise. As such, these conversations are intended to be mutual learning experiences that lean into the diversity of thought and expression and provide opportunity for inter-disciplinary engagement.
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In addition to the inter-disciplinary learning and engagement of the Collective Conversations, there will be opportunity for practitioners to meet with others within their specific field to process experiences, theory, and challenges and sharpen their professional skills together.
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Church Well Co facilitates Pastoral Care Groups and SLOW Communities for pastors and ministers across the nation and internationally. Each group is facilitated by a Guide from CWCollective.
For those who are interested, opportunity will be given for all members of CWCollective to facilitate PCGs and SLOW Communities as there is need.
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Beyond PCGs and SLOW Communities, Church Well Co often receives requests for individual support or community training. The members of CWCollective are the initial resource for meeting those needs.