An inquest is just finishing in Sydney into the death of Rebekah Lawrence, who became highly distressed after attending a four day seminar run by a group known as Turning Point. During and for several days after her course, she displayed symptoms of psychosis. On her final day alive, she became abusive towards fellow workers, took off her clothes, and plunged to her death from an upper floor of her workplace.
Psychologists and psychiatrists in evidence before the inquest have been very critical of the techniques used by Turning Point, particularly when staff lacked training to deal with extreme reactions to the experience. It has also emerged that Mrs Lawrence is not the only person to have suffered an extreme reaction after a Turning Point seminar and end her life.
Adele Horin's article in the Sydney Morning Herald, You can't change habits of a lifetime in a weekend of self-help classes (22 August) contains a lot of wisdom about "self help" groups like Turning Point, but misses some important issues.
As T.S. Kuhn and several others have pointed out, most change does come through a crisis, often described in terms of conversion or paradigm shift; there is a period of confrontation with and resistance to the new, followed by a stage of brokenness where a person undergoes re-orientation, and then the person enters the new understanding and altered behaviour patterns.
As a born-again Christian (Goulburn Street Open Air Campaigners, 1962) I am well aware of how this works. Conversion may alter one's orientation in a flash, but the transformation may take a little longer. I suppose that the scientists who, in a crisis-type paradigm shift, abandoned the phlogiston theory of heat in favour of modern molecular energy theories still had to do a lot of work on what that actually means in practical terms.
Adele mentions the transformations which born-again Christians go through.
She writes, "To experience ''a permanent shift in the quality of your life'' as Landmark promises is theoretically possible after a single mind-blowing weekend, I suppose. After all, born-again Christians are transformed after an even briefer encounter session with Jesus. But real transformation, say from being an angry person into a calm and considered one, mostly takes years of committed effort, the acquisition of specific skills and self-understanding - and even then success is not assured."
What she does not pick up on is that, while groups like Turning Point have adopted many of the practices of American evangelism -- and it is clear that she is not attempting to draw comparisons here -- there are some very basic differences.
Most evangelical churches today have been influenced by psycholgical and sociological theories and have modified their practices accordingly. So I find it useful to think back to how things were around the time I was converted, when most every day, garden-variety Christians still saw psychology as anti-Christian mumbo-jumbo and hadn't even heard of sociology.
The little Baptist church which I began attending around the time I was converted did not have members with a highly analytical mindset. But we had some rough theories about conversion.
First, we were a little suspicious of the sudden convert. After all, Jesus said that the seed which springs up rapidly is most likely to die off rapidly, because it has no depth of soil. Yes, there were out-of-the-blue conversions which lasted, but they were rare.
On the other hand, we did expect fairly significant changes in a convert. If you were converted, then things must necessarily change. We relied on a mistranslated verse: If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature, the former things have passed away: everything has become new. A new convert was not just someone who had repented and believed, but was transformed into a new mode of existence. That had to show!
The reality is that this verse, accurately translated says something like, If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation... that is, it is not so much that I have changed my kind, but that I have begun living in a new realm, with all the attendant difficulties and adjustments which face anyone who moves to unfamiliar territory. Once again, a process.
We were also adept at noticing people "under conviction" -- going through a struggle about whether or not to commit to Christ. That is, we knew that the conversion experience was the culmination of a process.
The second thing is that we knew that even the dramatic, life changing conversion needed support. That support was not an endless round of evangelistic services, though the Sunday when someone did not come to a personal faith was rare. But much of church life revolved around getting together for a social night or the monthly fellowship tea, being part of the choir or spending Saturday in a working bee at the Protestant Homes. A changed lifestyle, a changed community and encouragement to look outward as well as self-assess all remain part of the healing process.
Also, we knew the value of one-on-one support. A weakness was an unwillingness to refer people to counselling outside the church (not that much was available); a strength was that we recognised that everyone struggles and needs a friend from time to time. Knowing that you are being prayed for and will probably be asked next week, "How are you going?" is a powerful incentive to keep on the path!
Sadly it seems that too many of these self-help groups lack the broader insights that have informed churches for centuries. And the result is too many Rebekah Lawrences.
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