Personal Resilience for Well-being

Chaplains lead at Annual Gathering 2019

Personal Resilience for Well-being

Workshop and Plenary Session at Annual Gathering 2019

Three chaplains help Christian healthcare workers address moral injury, personal resilience, and spiritual care at Annual Gathering 2019, June 21-23, at Laurelville Mennonite Church Center in Pennsylvania. Please join us!

This year’s Annual Gathering looks at the overall theme, “Well-being for All: Developing Resilience in Healthcare.” The focus on well-being is not only for patients and clients but for us as workers in an increasingly stressful healthcare system that often prioritizes investor and tax dollars at the expense of personal care for hurting people. To address these issues, this year’s program features three Anabaptist, theologically-oriented chaplains/pastoral care leaders with diverse backgrounds and skills. They are

Clair Hochstetler, MDiv, Cincinnati, Ohio
Charlene Epp, MDiv, Denver, Colorado
Susan Lanford, MDiv, Vancouver, Washington

Workshop

The chaplains will lead a Saturday workshop entitled “Personal Resilience and Spiritual Care.” They will share personal models for managing or preventing stress and maintaining personal resilience with spiritual vitality. The reality is that a barrier to maintaining resilience in healthcare professions is the notion that “this is what I trained for; it doesn’t bother me; I don’t let it get to me.” But it always does. Thus self-care is a commitment and a skill which every person, regardless of age or profession, needs in order to survive and thrive. The focus will be on becoming aware of and drawing upon one’s personal and spiritual strengths in negotiating typical challenges in current healthcare practice.

Sunday Worship/Plenary Session

On Sunday, in the closing worship and plenary session, this team will lead a group experience in “Addressing Moral Injury With Spiritual Strength.” They describe the time as a spiritual “symphony” in three movements:

Listening/Learning from research regarding Moral Injury and its mitigation.
Remembering/Responding to an incident in each of our own experiences which had a profound moral/spiritual, psychological, or physical impact in our life, and
Commitment/Communion as we share the Lord’s Supper together.

Descriptions for all of the plenary session presentations as well as all of the workshops are on the MHF website. Visit the Annual Gathering 2019 web page or any of the sub-pages listed below. .