« Back to Issue 52

Personhood & Christianity in Psychodynamic & Corporate Perspective

Author:	Oliver Forshaw
Published By:	Lutterworth Press (Cambridge)
Pages:	311
Price:	£25.00
ISBN:	978 0 7188 9229 6

Reviewed by Chris Skilton.

The cover of this book is optimistic, describing it as being of interest to all involved in Christian leadership and in the caring services of Church and society generally. It is one of the first books to draw on the thinking and writing of Dr Frank Lake’s Clinical Theology and demands a least a passing knowledge and understanding of his work.

This book is written by a retired parish priest who has led Clinical Theology seminars and had experience of setting up a counselling and community work project in inner-city Manchester. He therefore writes with experience of practical ministry.

The focus of the book is on what promotes well-being and what diminishes living well in the presence of God. It sees the primacy of personal encounter with God as fundamental to humanity whilst recognising that that life will always be lived in encounter with others. The heart of this is set out in an important section of “Five Proposals” concerning the relationship of persons to God in the world (pages 55-64).

The second section draws most extensively on Lake’s work and is probably the least accessible to the ordinary working pastor. Yet its focus on a Trinitarian understanding of what it means for individuals and individuals in community to be re-made and renewed on their journey towards spiritual maturity is worth sticking with and repays repeated reading.

The third and fourth sections seek to draw out implications for the life, faith and traditions of the church as a healing and renewing community. The challenge of the following paragraph is typical of the book and salutary to read:

“God goes on challenging people to listen and to allow themselves to be changed...In present practice, church worship is often interspersed so much with words directed in keeping the congregation cheerful, with their anxieties allayed, that the words succeed only in being a distraction from this listening” (p.233).

I suspect and fear that the price of the book and the density of the writing may dissuade a good many from picking it up, and Clinical Theology is not flavour of the month. However for those who are willing to persevere there is gold to be mined here.