Services

Adult learning and training services

Alastair designs and leads adult learning and training covering the following subjects:

  • Handling and transforming conflict, including communicating more effectively
  • Understanding oneself better
  • Understanding emotional process, drawing on family systems theory
  • Developing process skills, including:
    • Facilitating better meetings
    • Making group decisions more effectively
    • Leading informal mediation process

Clergy support

Alastair provides work consultancy for individual church ministers, and ministry teams, to enable leaders to function sustainably and at their best. His approach draws on:

  • Family systems theory, developed by Murray Bowen
  • A coaching framework, having trained with 3D Coaching
  • A profiling tool, the Friendly Style Profile
  • Conflict theory and understanding, including power dynamics

Those Alastair typically works with are:

  • Ministers stepping up to more senior roles
  • Ministers experiencing a time of transition or a new stage of ministry
  • Ministers facing a challenging or conflicted church context
  • Ministers who want to reflect self-critically and continue growing
  • Ministry teams which want to function more effectively as a group

Team-building and group facilitation

Alastair leads team-building workshops for ministry teams and leadership groups. The process involves each member of the team completing a profiling tool, the Friendly Style Profile, in advance. The workshop enables team members to affirm, appreciate and understand one another better, and to function more effectively as a team.

Alastair also facilitates meetings for groups and teams in situations where:

  • A difficult conversation is needed
  • A decision is needed, arrived at through a fair process to increase the chance of a wise outcome

Being White

Alastair has co-developed, with Carey Haslam, a learning programme called Being White to assist white people in church leadership to address their white advantages, become more actively anti-racist and enable their churches to be more welcoming places for people of all ethnicities.  The Being White programme has now been incorporated into the offerings of Reconciliation Initiatives, and aims:

  • To develop participants' understanding of the systemic nature of racism, and their grasp of key concepts;
  • To increase participants' fluency in discussing issues of race;
  • To raise greater awareness among white church leaders, so that they can encourage others to this work; and
  • To resource participants to hold conversations about race and white privilege inside their churches.

Contact Alastair for more information