 at the Midnight Biblical Seminary. I'm glad you're able to join us today. During our time together, I invite you to think about what God is calling you to do. Is AMBS a place that will help you fulfill that call? I'm Mary Ann Weber, the Director of Enrollment here at AMBS. I will share a little bit later this evening. But first, we'll hear from some others who will help you become better acquainted with the AMBS learning community. I'm delighted that Dr. Leah Thomas, the Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care, will share with us this evening. And she'll give you an idea of what it would be like to be in one of her classes. And following Leah's presentation, Ian Funk, a student who lives in British Columbia, will share about his experiences at AMBS. Following that, I will share, and then, the AMBS president, Dr. David Beauchart, will share parting words with us. And now, at this time, Leah, I invite you to share with us. Well, I'm just delighted to be here. Thank you all for being here tonight. If this is afternoon for you, thank you for being here this afternoon. As Mary Ann mentioned, I'm the Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care. So I'm going to talk a little bit about Pastoral Caregiving today. And in particular, I'm going to talk about being attentive to some of the things that we've walked through recently, which involves being attentive to the dynamic of trauma that really exists in our world and what it might look like to adopt a model of trauma-informed caregiving. So I'm actually going to share my screen for a second here. I'm hoping that all of you can see that. So today we're going to talk a little bit about trauma and the particular ways that trauma manifests religiously as well, and also what it means to approach Pastoral Caregiving or spiritual care through a trauma-informed lens. So before we get going today, I want to walk you through what we're going to do. I want to say I actually taught a whole class on this topic. Ian, the funk who's going to speak with you later, was in that class. And so doing this overview in 20 minutes is a little bit challenging. So you will likely have a fair amount of questions. And that is absolutely fine. We're going to do this briefly. It's going to be in broad strokes. I urge you to follow up with me if you have any questions about anything I've said. But I just wanted to put that out there for you if you have questions and say, why isn't she going deeper on some of this? And before we begin today, I also, if you look at the schedule, we're going to do an opening orienting exercise together. So basically, given the topic of today, I want to just recognize that even talking about trauma can impact us in ways we might not anticipate. It activates our nervous systems. And so we're going to take just a few minutes of this time to orient to our senses, to orient to God, to the divine. So at any point while I'm talking, you feel yourself, your energy rising or becoming activated, know that you can come back to any of that, any of these things we're going to do together. You can even disengage if that is appropriate for you. So I just invite you at this time before we begin talking about the issue of trauma, we're just going to take a few moments to orient together. So I invite you, just if you're seated, that's wonderful. I invite you just to notice yourself seated in your chair and just take a few moments to drop into your body and feel your feet if they're grounding into the floor, feel any sensations you might have in your feet. And I invite you to take your attention to the backs of your legs as they ground into the seat. And maybe even feel your back if your back is touching the chair. And just take a few moments to just notice that the chair is supporting you. And can you allow yourself to simply accept the support of the chair? And if it feels OK, you can just gently close your eyes or you can keep them soft. And just, again, allowing yourself to receive this support that the chair and the ground offer. And I'm just going to invite you if you have your eyes closed. Maybe you just want to gently open them when it feels OK to you. And just let yourself explore your environment. So just notice what you are drawn to look at. And when you find something in your environment that you're drawn to look at, I invite you just to let your eyes linger. And just allow yourself to take in whatever it is that you are enjoying looking at. And as your eyes settle, just notice what happens inside of you. If you sense any deeper breath, more or less presence in the moment, just drop in and see what might be happening for you. I'm just going to gently invite you to direct your attention to any sounds you might be hearing. So if it feels OK for you to keep your eyes open, that's fine. Or you can gently close them. But just explore the space around you through sound. So maybe notice what sounds you might be hearing inside your room or inside the building you're in. Just take a few moments to just notice the sounds around you. And even notice sounds perhaps outside of your building. As you hear these, think about how you might describe them. What do they bring up in you? And notice what happens inside yourself as you are tuning into these sounds. Do you sense any tightness or tension or maybe expansiveness or groundedness? Just notice. I'm just going to invite you to orient yourself through relationship. And we're actually going to use our relationship with the divine, with God tonight. So you can keep your eyes open or closed, whatever feels appropriate to you. But I invite you to bring into your mind's eye just the compassion of God. This could be connected to a figure like Jesus. It could take the form of a spirit or energy. Or it could be something entirely else. But just take a few moments to bring into your mind's eye, God's freely given compassion that extends towards yourself and to all beings. And I invite you just to take a moment to welcome that compassion. And I'm going to just read the following verse from Philippians. And I invite you to just allow that verse to kind of seep into you and just recognize if there's a word or phrase that stays with you. And just allow yourself to be with that word or phrase. So do not worry about anything. But in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. So just take a few moments to either sit with a word or phrase or if you would like to sit with this compassion and just tune in to what happens inside of yourself as you sit with this scripture or as you sit with the compassion of God. And I invite you whenever you feel ready to simply, if you have your eyes closed, you can just open them and to sort of just ask yourself, which way gave you the most relationship to the here and now, right? To being in the present, to being present, right? And so if at any time, at any point in this presentation or even outside of this presentation, you feel your activation level rising, you know that you can come back to that, whether that be grounding, whether it be sight, whether it be sound, whether it be sitting with God's compassion or sitting with a particular text or word or phrase that you know that that resource is there for you and it helps your nervous system to deactivate. So again, I'm going to now turn to our topic to talk a little bit about trauma and trauma-informed care. And we're going to start by just asking, what is trauma? And if you were in my classroom, I wouldn't just put the definition up there, I would say, tell me what you think it is, right? How would you define it? And I'm going to throw a couple of definitions up on the screen to sort of help us orient, basically, that's an experience and an event or series of events or set of conditions in which an individual's or community's ability to integrate their emotional, and I would say also spiritual and otherwise experience is overwhelmed. So what do I mean by overwhelmed? When we are overwhelmed, we have a loss of an ability to stay present, to understand what's happening, to tolerate feelings or even to comprehend the horror of events that are unfolding. And many times, events which are experienced as traumatic are seen as a threat to life, to bodily integrity or sanity. And that's the way that they're experienced by us. So I'm just gonna put a couple of quotes up here by people who are known scholars in the field to talk about that traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they rarely occur, but because they overwhelm human adaptations to life. Other people who talk about trauma talk about it as disruption to connection, which we know is at the heart of spirituality. I also put a quote up here by a First Nation woman who talks about it as a disconnection between the self and the spirit, that somehow the spirit has left the body and that we need to bring the spirit back. I urge you to think about how you would define trauma, right? You've heard a lot about trauma likely. How would you define it? And how would you define it even in terms of the way it relates to spirituality? Now, if we're going to talk about caregiving that is attentive to trauma, we have to spend a few moments asking how pervasive trauma actually is. So I'm gonna go through this quickly and just put up a few statistics to say that we know that more than two thirds of children, two thirds report at least one traumatic event before the age of 16 or by the age of 16. We also know that an estimated 70% of adults in the United States have experienced at least one traumatic event in their lives. I also want to highlight something you are probably very aware of that we have and are still walking through a global pandemic where we have experienced unprecedented losses at family and communal levels. Losses in work, vocation, living situation, financial, loss of physical health, we have seen death happen. There has been disruption in normal lament and grieving rituals. We had losses at the communal level. We've had losses in terms of medical establishments, businesses, workplaces, heightened fear, anxiety, suspicion, a loss of the sense of security, predictability and even a sense of self and a sense that we can rely on one another and are connected to one another. So I invite you as I put up a few of those losses even to think about losses in your own communities, maybe your own church communities, other types of communities and how would you name and talk about some of these losses and to think about whether you would consider these losses to be overwhelming in some way, shape or form. Now I want to throw up here just the definition of trauma-informed care. That trauma-informed care has to realize, first of all, the widespread impact of trauma and understand potential path for recovery, at least to then recognize signs and symptoms of trauma in families and communities and then respond by integrating this knowledge into policies, procedures and practices and then hopefully seek to actively resist re-traumatization. So if we're going to, we just kind of had a snapshot of the widespread impact of trauma, you might be able to name that in your own community. And I want to just briefly kind of put up a few of the signs and symptoms of trauma that you might be seeing maybe in yourself or your own communities or families as we have walked through and are continuing to walk through these unprecedented times. So I want to first highlight that we talk about the three E's of trauma, the event itself, the experience of that event and then ultimately the effect of that event. And we like to talk about trauma-genic events. What do I mean by trauma-genic? So an event in itself is not actually traumatic, right? Some events though are kind of like, can cause trauma or have a heightened sort of incidence of causing trauma. And there are certain events, and I put up the characteristic of these events that are more likely to cause trauma. And these are events that involve a threat to our lives or body that produce terror or feelings of helplessness, that overwhelm and ability to respond to the threat that lead to a loss of control. And then that challenge a person or group sense that life is meaningful or orderly. Now, but what's really important is that while an event in itself could be more likely to cause trauma, it is actually how the individual or community assigns meaning to and or is disrupted physically and psychologically and spiritually by an event that will contribute to whether or not it's experienced as traumatic. So we want to recognize that certain variables can create conditions that make events more likely to be experienced as traumatic. So if we've had trauma in our lives and trauma can be brought on by being of certain race or culture that is oppressed in society, it can be brought on by developmental stage, it can be brought on by conditions of poverty, by our families, right? If we have experienced a number of traumas in our life, that actually creates conditions when we are more likely to experience a current event as traumatic. So I want to just highlight the fact that it's really in the meaning making that we kind of can talk about whether or not an event that we experience an event as traumatic. It's also really important to recognize that this overwhelm affects us on every level. So it's physical, it's emotional, it's social and it's also spiritual. And so I'm going to just throw this up there again where you don't have time to walk through all of these, you can read through these, but that Trump has very particular effects on individuals which really impact their ability to people's ability to connect with one another relationally. People will have difficulty with memory, attention, regulating emotion. There's many times intrusive or distressing images or flashbacks. But I want to actually look at these last three that Trump really impacts of meaning making. There's a difficulty in making meaning of this event that has overwhelmed us. And because of that, there can be a loss of connection with spirituality and hope and also the sense of being abandoned by God in these times. When we look towards impacts on communities, we recognize that it can also rupture those same systems of meanings that govern communities. It can fracture social resources. It can create barriers to communication. It can erase any road notions of safety and trust and solidarity. And so as you look at some of these effects of trauma on communities, we also see a decrease in an ability to express empathy for one another, to connect with one another. And that can lead to a desire for revenge or some type of violence. Oh, excuse me. So what, as you, as you're hearing all this, you might be thinking, well, what kind of, how does this in particular impact people religiously? And there's been a number of sort of studies that have been done on religion. And the fact that when we're honest, religion can be a source of trauma. Some forms of religion that are based in law or fear that promote violence can actually be a source of trauma. But also that religion and spirituality can be the antidote through community, through ritual and through spiritual practices. And that's why it's so really important to study religion and spirituality and its impact on the healing of trauma. Because first of all, trauma can create a variety of types of struggles, right? So there are spiritual struggles that come with these emotional and social and psychological. They're struggles that are interpersonal. So it can involve conflicts with family and friends, conflicts and congregations when trauma isn't recognized and people are saying, well, what's wrong with that person, right? Rather than what happened to that person that is causing them perhaps to act in these ways, right? Trauma can cause intrapersonal struggles. So spiritual struggles, questions and doubts and uncertainties about spiritual matters, about one's ultimate purpose in life, right? And trauma can also pose a threat to views of God and the divine as an all loving, omnipotent being who ensures that good things will happen to people. As we said earlier, trauma can leave people feeling abandoned by God, anger towards God or feeling punished by God. And because all of this touches on the deepest dimension of life, these struggles can be especially painful. So I want to sort of turn to, okay, well, given all of this, right? What can we do, particularly in religious communities to start to foster conditions of healing? And so I want to turn to Judith Herman. Some of you might have heard of her. She wrote a seminal work entitled Trauma and Recovery and she outlined three phases of trauma healing that we still sort of consider the framework for healing today. And I want to highlight these because I think we do these well in some cases in religious communities and then there's other cases in which we need to work on how we do these steps, right? But she talks about the importance of establishing safety, of remembrance and mourning and of reconnection. And so I want you to think about what happens in religious communities and in congregations, how do we go about creating safe spaces? How do we go about not only physical safety, though physical safety is important, having absence of violence is absolutely important. We're recognizing that many trauma survivors don't feel safe in their own bodies, right? So what would it take for us to create spaces, to create communities where people feel safe, right? And we're finding that when we can create communities of consistency, of support, of choice, right? That groups can be a way that we foster that safety, that we bring that safety, we start to rebuild that safety. The second phase that Herman talks about is remembrance and mourning. I think this is really important because at some point we need to revisit the trauma, but it needs to be done in a very titrated ways that can be tolerated with support of trusted others, right? At some point though, the trauma itself, this horrible event that overwhelmed needs to be mourned and lamented. And while there's a variety of therapeutic ways to do this mourning and remembrance, acts of grieving, ritual, lament, other mourning customs, right? They're so important. Those rituals that we employ in religious settings can be useful tools to help survivors reclaim, remember, and also to begin to mourn these types of events in the context of supportive communities. And then finally, reconnection. That reconnection with others, with self, and ultimately with God is very important in trauma healing. And we know that this reconnection and healing comes through relationships, right? And so I want you to sort of think about the kinds of relationships that we foster, relationships with one another, trusting authentic relationships where trust can be rebuilt, and also relationships with God. And how do we create spaces, ways of caring, ways of doing pastoral care that really foster this sense of reconnection with the self, reconnection with others, and ultimately reconnection with God. So I'm just, I'm out of time. That 20 minutes went really fast. I'm gonna just put this slide up very briefly. I urge you, if you are interested in this, we offer a class that is entitled Understanding Trauma in Peacebuilding and in Ministry. And we had many auditors, even if you decide that you want to sort of audit the class to try it out, we definitely had some people do that. But I'm happy to talk more with you and also to recommend any resources. If this is an area that you're interested in, particularly as it concerns caregiving and religious communities, please know I'm a resource and I look forward to hopefully meeting many of you and speaking with you more. So thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you, Leah. Wow, packed it in there. That was great. Thanks for the review. Thanks for the review. That was great. It really is a terrific course. I got an immense amount of learning out of it. And yeah, only scratching the surface, of course. So yeah, my name's Ian and I'm at the end of my tenure at AMBS. I've been a part of the Masters of Divinity Connect program where most of the study is remote and we just come into campus. For me, it's flying into campus from BC. I think I did it around eight or nine times over the course of six to seven years. And yeah, it worked really well for me to do it that way. So rewinding seven years in 2015, I was a letter carrier for Canada Post by day. That was my day job. And in the evening, I was a singer with Vancouver Opera. And but in that year, everything changed because I took a call from my own home church to be my church's pastor at Langley Mennonite Fellowship. So this singing postie had to get some skills and get some skills quick. Well, not quick. It's been a gracious group. So I've been able to gradually build my skills so that I can equip myself to be a good and effective pastor, I hope. And so I started my studies at a local university. Fantastic school. Started studying towards my Master's of Divinity there. There's Anglican Canadian or United Church of Canada, which is Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist institution. There were Pentecostal people there. One of the faculty members is a rabbi. There was a Buddhist. There was some Eastern Orthodox Christians in my cohort. And it was very exciting. And I was hoping this approach, well, I'm certain this approach was a good one too, to gather in a collectivism from such a diverse community. I think I'd like to try that again sometime. But for me, what I found in this, it was actually happened in the second course that I took. The first was called Pastoral Identity and Practice. And so I found myself in this room as being the only Mennonite there and I was being taught what my identity would be as a pastor and what work would look like for me as a pastor. And things weren't lining up for me because I felt that what I experienced in the Mennonite church was different from what an Anglican was experienced or a Presbyterian or a Pentecostal Christian in a church setting. So as extraordinary as that education was, I found that this was a moment of clarity for me that not only was I learning to be a pastor, but I was learning to be an Anabaptist pastor. And it was important to my identity that I was a part of an Anabaptist community. My community was very tied in with my identity and also how my community did things was also very important for me in learning. What kind of pastor I was, that was the sort of the little switch that I had to make was that I was no longer studying to be a good pastor but I was studying to become the pastor who I was and who I wanted to be. And so I came to AMBS and I was welcomed at AMBS with open arms. I was very encouraged. In fact, at AMBS I felt like there I was sharing a common practice to show a common church experience and understanding of how we gather together and experience church, a sense of communal worship and communal discernment. And this is what was familiar to me and it was important for me to learn and grow out of this context. I would grow out of a place that makes sense to me, out of a place that mattered to me, a place that was very warm and welcoming, supportive, encouraging and AMBS was all of that or continues to be all of that. But it wasn't all familiar to me. AMBS, Elkhart's a long ways from British Columbia. AMBS has its own culture, its own rhythms and yet at the same time it's a very diverse community. So there's while there are steady rhythms and some steady rootedness happening, there's also a very, very broad and diverse community there. Just to illustrate that the last time I came to AMBS I walked through the guest house where I was staying and I was greeted by one man. I didn't really know him all that well. We had some encounter online through some of our courses and he greeted me like I was an old friend and as he was greeting me other people were just emerged from their own bedrooms and within like three minutes the table was filled with a fellow from, who grew up in Belize but was living in the Bronx. A fellow, a Thai person who came down from Kitchener that day and Nigerian who came from Los Angeles. Another young fellow from Pennsylvania and another guy from Kansas was on his way and he was already on the phone with everybody. So already there was a real diverse sense of family and community, certainly family by the end of the week. And we spoke about things that were important and meaningful for us. We prayed together, we ate together. We played games together. And yeah, we shared a life for a week and that hasn't been my experience every time I've gone but it doesn't surprise me that that was precisely my experience when I was there on the last time. So not only, but in that diverse experience not only was I learning in a place where I felt some strong rootedness from strong sense of common experience. I was also learning by contrast with all of the Mennonites around me. And that was just as important even as I was sort of refining who I was as a pastor by learning more and getting more deep into those things those traditions that I was a part of. I was also refining that by noticing how everyone was doing things differently. And it really helped me tune into the way I wanted to operate as a pastor. And I know this sounds all very vocationally oriented. Yes, it was a lot about becoming the pastor I wanted to be, but it's also as a very personal venture as well because it is important to approach this vocation with integrity and with a feeling of commitment and investment. So it was wonderful to learn through these commonalities and contrast and connections. And that was around the table and that was over coffee but then you enter into the classroom and you have that same sort of broad conversation of refining what your convictions are, who you are in the forum of talking about the Bible about talking about theology, Christian formation, spirituality talking about pastoral care and trauma. We shared our experiences of trauma and so many other things the way churches organize and all of these things really integrated well and I feel that they are very naturally formed a very solid education for me. And of course I'm still learning and we'll learn continuously. Every course I took gave me a tremendous amount and I'm deeply grateful for it. I'm grateful for AMBS for my learning there and also for the learning community there. Yes, it has been a very important thing for me to be at AMBS and it will certainly have a lasting effect. Thank you. Thank you, Leah and Ian for your words. Sometimes people think that a seminary education means that you want to be a pastor and yes, there are many seminary graduates who go on to pastoral ministry in a congregation but that's not all that seminary graduates do. AMBS graduates have gone on to be leaders in other areas as well including areas such as teaching and faith formation, spiritual direction, chaplains, leaders and staff of nonprofit organizations. Some have gone on to further academic study and these are just some of the possibilities for seminarians to pursue. And of course, there is always plenty of students who feel led to seminary even though they're not quite sure what they will do after their studies and that's okay too. AMBS is a great place for discernment and for questioning what God is calling you to do, what will come next in your life. As a graduate school, we often offer several master of arts, the master of divinity degrees as well as graduate certificate programs. I'll share a little bit about these options. AMBS offers programming both on campus and online. As Ian mentioned, he was part of the MDiv Connect program in which students earn most of their credits through online studies but are on campus for intensive weeks as he explained. We do have two master's programs that are completely online. I'm sorry, one program completely online, the master of arts theology and global anabaptism and also the graduate certificate programs and theological studies or spiritual direction. So you could do those online and take the advantage of these allows you to remain in your home communities, working in your ministries as you study part-time. These study options are important to people around the world. So if you do join one of these programs, you'll experience a global classroom. And if you can move to campus, that's great. We welcome you to our learning community. There are more options for people who study on campus than online, both our master's degrees, our graduate certificates, our master of divinity degrees are online as well. We have concentrations and peace study options, including an environmental sustainability leadership program. And these are just excellent programs as we consider our care of God's world and of God's creation. We do offer scholarships and financial aid, but just to alert you that the application deadline for scholarships is March 15. And so that's two months from now. So if you are interested in that option, you won't need to have applied for admission prior to then. And you can read more about this on our website, ambs.edu. Maybe you aren't quite sure if graduate studies are for you. And to that I say, try it out. You are welcome to take up to six credits as a guest student prior to going through the admission application process. So you could take one of Leah's pastoral care classes as a guest student, if you would like. Now, I know this is a quick overview of the academic programs that AMBS offers. And I invite you to go to our website for more information. But in the next several days, I will also email you a summary of study options and the things that I just spoke about. Also, if you have questions or comments for Dr. Thomas about her presentation, I invite you to respond to my email with your thoughts and I'll pass those along to her. As our time together comes to an end, I want to express my thanks to you for joining us. I also want to give a special thanks to one of our students, Janet McGeary, for providing the technical support for this webinar. And now I invite our president, Dr. David Boshart, to lead us in closing words and following his words, the webinar is over. You may consider yourselves dismissed. David? Thank you. Excuse me, thank you, Mary Ann. And thank you all for joining us tonight. It's been a pleasure to have you on this webinar and thank you for giving us the opportunity to introduce you and give you just a taste of what seminary life is like. During my tenure as president here at AMBS, I've adopted a theme for my office and that is seeking wisdom. And I think that summarizes very well what we're doing at seminary. We are seeking wisdom. At seminary, we ask the big questions of life that get to the bottom of everything. What is really real? And who is this God who is revealing God's self to us and the person of Jesus? And how does that, those understandings, what does that bring to bear on the deep human experiences of life that we're having, the very kinds of things that Dr. Thomas was talking about tonight. When life gets hard and when life is, when we're searching for meaning in life, we're trying to understand what our purpose here in life is. So I invite you to come to AMBS to seek wisdom with us. At AMBS, we do this through a cycle of knowing, doing and being. We learn information, we practice with that information applying it to our understanding of life and then we reflect on how that shapes our very being as God's creatures. I think back to my own seminary experience many years ago now and I remember what a challenging work it was and also what a gift it was. I am constantly grateful for how that intense season of study in my own seminary education laid a foundation for the past 36 years of my life and in ministry, there is reward for the effort for those who attend seminary. Thank you again for joining us. We hope to see you at AMBS either on campus or online. Please consider enrolling as a student here. I know it will enrich your life. Blessings.