If you have been following our work for a long time it is obvious to you that we have had a variety of names and outreaches. We started out as the Teleios Ministry at College Hill Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. I developed the center after doing my doctorate on integrating psychology and scripture. It was designed as a place to build people up in grace, mercy and truth that kept them healthy and relating better to God and others. It worked.
In 1987 the Elders asked me to oversee the equipping and discipleship focus of CHPC. That gave me more experience in developing overall systems of health and growth for a mega-church. It was very rewarding.
In 1978 we started training Pastors and Lay Leaders from other churches how to set up systems to "Equip the people to do the work of the ministry". The Elders decided that we should actually register our ministry separately from the church and gave us the total freedom to operate it financially and organizationally.
We took over another Para-church organization with which I had been involved and it was called, The Christian Information Committee. We later changed the name to Equipping Ministries International or EMI.
From my dissertation and wrote several training manuals from its content. The first was Apples of Gold after the passage in Proverbs 25:11: A word properly spoken is like apples of gold on a tray of silver. Alice Petersen joined us in 1979 and she led us to integrate cognitive therapy with scripture and we wrote Rational Christian Thinking in 1983.
The Lord opened many doors for us to teach Pastors and Lay Leaders around the USA and even into South Africa and Norway. I had met Jens-Petter Jorgensen in Kenya in a 1983 trip and he immediately asked me to come to teach their leaders how to integrate scripture, psychology, love and healing. Larry Chrouch, Steve Griebling, Hal Schell and I traveled to the North of Europe in 1986 where we ministered to several hundred Leaders. We later gave everything to the Scandinavians who set up Teleios Centers in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
The Lord called me to leave CHPC in 1989. I thought it was to minister full time internationally as a Consultant/ Coach in the area of Pastoral Care and Counseling as well as setting up healthy systems for church growth.
But, the Lord also had a surprise for me. He instructed me to open an in patient psychiatric hospital unit that integrated everything I had ever learned.
We did open such a place and we integrated psychology, psychiatry, prayer, medicine, love, Rational Christian Thinking, family systems and group dynamics. I treated it like a small church because we trained the residents to assist each other as a healing community. Why is every church not a healing community?
It is simple but hard to do and the instructions are in the Bible. If you want to know how, contact me at gsweeten@lifewaycenters.com
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