Faith-Based Facilitation

Learning how to build deeper relationships is important for everyone. Relationships often come under great pressure and can become fragile. Sometimes they break. Relationships with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues can always be better. Relationships can always be deeper.

Faith-Based Facilitation (FBF) is a way of helping people think, talk, explore and respond to their issues in the light of faith. It results in the development of healthier people and communities who enjoy deeper relationships. Faith-Based Facilitation is not a theory or a project - it is a way of working. It's not a new idea, but it needs to practised, remembered and implemented. It needs to become a habit.

Giving this process a name and linking it with a set of tools and theological resources will be new for some people. FBF will help you look at every day issues and events more objectively and find ways of responding to particular situations in the light of faith. People can be trained in these relationship-building skills and become faith-based facilitators. They can then form teams (or use the skills in their everyday personal relationships) to improve the relationships in their communities. Such an approach is not separate to normal Salvation Army processes but should become an integral part of its structure and way of working.

Our FBF booklet has now been translated into eight languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Indonesian, Chinese, Swahili and Urdu. 

You may also be interested in Keeping Faith in Faith-based Institutions - a practical theology for faithful practice.

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Acknowledgements

The development of this resource was co-funded by The Salvation Army, NORAD and Tearfund. It was produced by The Salvation Army's International Headquarters in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Ecclesiology and Practical Theology.

Judith Thompson, a theologian, educator and author, contributed the original text. This was reviewed, redrafted and new material contributed by experienced Salvationists from around the world who use Faith-Based Facilitation in corps, centres, community development, health ministry, divisional, territorial and international headquarters.