By James Friesen, E. James Wilder, Anne Bierling, Rick Koepcke, & Maribeth Poole
The Life Model is a unifying approach to ministries of counseling, recovery, pastoral care, prayer ministry, deliverance, inner healing, child rearing, body life and health.
Substance abuse recovery programs internationally are guided by the Life Model’s five principles. Because the Life Model develops strong maturity, it is widely used as a church model, particularly where people must face suffering. Missions have adopted the Life Model for restoring hurt missionary children. Almost every major ministry dealing with trauma and abuse in the USA uses the Life Model as part of their teaching.
The five factors identified in this book that help people change are: having a place to belong, receiving and giving life, learning to recover from things that go wrong, maturing and getting to know our hearts. These five became known as the “five to thrive.” The staff decided to write as condensed a book on these five factors as they could manage. It was also decided that the book would be aimed at the communities who were trying to make a difference in people’s lives rather than an academic audience. This caused one contributor who was in academia to leave the project. It also resulted in a book with few footnotes and as culturally flexible a message as possible. Wilder was raised in South America while Poole grew up in Africa so a cross-cultural perspective was part of the fabric of their thoughts. Koepcke became so convinced of the centrality of community that he soon moved out of counseling and into pastoral ministry.
Living From The Heart Jesus Gave You is not a book on theology and, in fact, it does not say much about the topics Christians generally debate with each other. This book is about being fully alive and, for that reason, Christians from many different doctrinal convictions have been able to use our model. This book is now in several languages and being translated into new languages by a wide assortment of groups that do not usually share much in common – certainly not the same books. Unlike the usual Christian book, this one contains more than one idea and has a lot of content on most pages. It is short but not a quick to read book. You will need to stop and think a few times. (Publisher’s description)
Available from Elijah House