Resilience

By Church Publishing

In difficult circumstances, conflicts, and life-changing events, we often need inspiration and support to move forward.

The root of the word resilience means “to rebound” or “to bounce back,” which implies something happened that was out of our control and required us to recover. Drawing from a variety of sources, this Little Book looks at how we learn to recover and how we can lead others to do the same.

This series of Little Books of Leadership is designed to foster conversations within congregations around certain principles and practices that nurture community and growth in the ongoing life of the church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781640654051

Church Publishing

Church Publishing Incorporated, founded in 1918, is a publisher of trade books for general readers (inspiration, leadership, financial wellness, social justice), academic works, and professional church resources, including a suite of electronic products. It publishes The Book of Common Prayer, The Hymnal 1982, and content used in the liturgy, faith formation, and mission of The Episcopal Church.

Book preview

1 Defining Resilience

Resilience is the human capacity to live through things: to experience adversity, failure, or other traumatic events, and then live beyond them. It is doing the difficult work of repunctuating life and putting a comma or a semicolon where it feels like life has come to a full stop. Resilience is not just a quality leaders have that enables them to cope with disruptive changes and adapt; it is also their capacity to cultivate the same spirit in their congregations. As researchers from the Seattle School of Theology note:

Another name for it might be resurrection.

Jesus’s experience leading up to and on the cross is perhaps the epitome of traumatic events. He experiences betrayal from his disciple, condemnation from his religious leaders, brutality at the hands of the government authorities. He is sexually humiliated, physically abused, and spiritually forsaken; then he dies.

Days later, he resurrects. When he first sees the disciples, he says peace be with you and shows them his wounds. Through Jeremiah, God condemns prophets and priests who dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace, they say, when there is no peace.’ We would expect that Jesus, who has just suffered the trauma of his own death, might know that there is no peace—and yet that’s exactly the benediction he opens with.

The resurrected Christ models truth about wounds and peace. He shows, without shame, the wounds of the worst thing that ever happened to him. He allows the meaning of the wounds to be manifest in his resurrected life: that transformation can happen after trauma, that wounds do not preclude new life, that resurrection is the way to resilience.

Far from being an insufficient dressing on a serious wound, when Christ says Peace be with you, it is an offering of the possibility of peace even after having been wounded. Post-traumatic growth, the coexistence of peace and woundedness, requires the flexibility to develop new resilience skills—coping strategies—through the new challenges we face.

As children and adolescents, people find ways to cope with difficulties through whatever means they can; those coping strategies help people to survive that context. But sometimes the context changes and the coping strategies don’t, undermining our ability to thrive. We need flexibility to allow meaning to come from our hardships, to listen to our pasts, and to be open to where God is leading us into the future.¹

We usually think of resilience as the ability to recover from an adverse experience and pick up our lives where we left off. It is that, but there are times when adversity permanently changes our reality and we can’t go back to the way things were. We can’t do the things we used to do that were part of our identity—the things that gave meaning and purpose to our lives, that gave us a reason to live. It feels as though our quality of life has been smashed to pieces and is gone forever. Fear for our future wrenches our insides. We don’t know what we’ll