About the campaign
IMPORTANT UPDATE
FOR DONATIONS RECEIVED BY JUNE 30 A GENEROUS DONOR WILL MATCH FUNDS 1:1 UP TO AUD$12000.
Living Wholeness (LW’s) work continues to expand. We need your help to increase training in Asia and now Africa.
LW’s focus is to strategically train and equip Christian Counsellors, Pastors, and Leaders, strengthening the rapidly growing church of Asia. The church recognise they need to grow in pastoral care and discipleship.
LW teaches people the Christian Wholeness Framework, offering a Biblically based education focusing on Transformation Attitudes Skills and Knowledge within safe community. Wholistic discipleship. Powerful and impactive for the Gospel. Cross Culturally relevant. Students love it because they can apply it to themselves and their spheres of influence. At higher levels they are trained to train others in their own language and cultural settings.
We are excited to see a movement impacting individuals, churches, and communities across Asia and new opportunities in Africa specifically Uganda and surrounding nations.
We are seeking partnership support for 3 major courses in June 2025.
PACT
Course: Pastoral & Advanced Counsellor Training
Time: 500+ hours
Purpose: Equip Pastoral and Advanced Counsellors especially to train others
Audience: Pastors and Professional Counsellors and Trainers
Amount required: $18,000
LAMP Living Wholeness Accelerated Multiplication of Pastors and Professionals
Time: 120 hrs
Purpose: Equip educators to train pastors and counsellors
Audience: Educators
Amount required: $5,000
Uganda Training
Time: 30 hrs
Purpose: Equips senior pastors and counsellors to train others
Audience: Senior Pastors Counsellors and Educators
Amount required: $8,000
Background Information
The Situation
Mental Illness in Asia/Africa is a massive and largely ignored problem. Many factors combine to exacerbate the already complex issues.
- Attachment and relationship challenges – parents frequently living separated for work reasons, poor parenting, neglect or abuse of children, many orphans, street and trafficked children and teens, marital conflict, violence, divorce.
- Poor nutrition and underlying concomitant disease.
- Trauma from frequent natural and manmade disasters, wars, genocide, oppression.
- Poverty in itself (the constant stress of living without adequate finance) and its many implications as below.
- Limited access to reasonable care, including trained personnel, medications, client and family support, and commonly inability to pay even if there were services or medicines. With mental illness many people need medicines long term which becomes unaffordable compared to say a course of antibiotics to cure a pneumonia.
- Strong stigma/labelling of such people so frequently a reluctance to present for help until the situation is dire. Less access to care means people with conditions which might have been more easily managed present in end or chronic phase meaning treatment is less effective. Many communities don’t practice confidentiality so sharing of personal struggles is a rare option because of the high risk of public shame.
The Objectives
Living Wholeness seeks to work by invitation from local people within a society who are aware of this situation and see the essential need for counselling training to strengthen and preserve this sector of society.
The project is currently operative in Mongolia, Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia. Upon their request we are adding Uganda.
The project operates across these domains:
- Training of local counsellors at various levels (volunteer to professional level including educators) then supported as they train their own people groups in their own language with materials translated into that language.
- Resource Development so training is undergirded with books and materials to supplement the educational process. These need translation into the local languages.
- Research and evaluation is vital to assess how relevant and effective such training and resources are, both on the ground in each location and on a wider scale, evaluating the whole intervention, and fine tuning as required.
- Community is integral to this project in that those trained continue to be able to access support, professional supervision and professional development.
Comments Questions Suggestions can be sent to Living Wholeness CEO Dr. David Nikles. Contact us here at Admin@livingwholeness.org
Living Wholeness Website: www.livingwholeness.org
Living Wholeness Courses: www.livingwholeness.org/training/
LW 2024 Annual Report: admin@livingwholeness.org
Contact us: admin@livingwholeness.org
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