Fellow Travellers: Reflections on my journey with CWF
By Jenny Richardson
Looking back to write this piece, I am in awe of how God works to weave together the threads of life into a rich whole. When I first encountered the CWF in 2006, I was working as a GP and studying a Master of Counselling. That conference introduced me to John Warlow and others who were using CWF in their work in Brisbane and gave me a vision for how I could integrate my Christian faith with work as a counsellor. A subsequent conference in 2015 provided both an introduction to some of the international family involved in CWF, and enough understanding to use the circles in practice to locate, link, and generally find a new degree of clarity in my counselling practice.
In 2017 two events came together which opened unexpected doors for us in retirement. Peter, my husband, and I were planning to visit Bangladesh where we had lived through the 1980s and early 90s. David was helping to organise the 2017 ACCA conference and asked us if we knew anyone involved in counselling in Bangladesh. We put him in touch with our friends Alvin and Shanta. During our visit to Bangladesh, we visited CCTB (College of Christian Theology Bangladesh), where we had lived and worked, and had a lovely reunion with Alvin and Shanta who subsequently attended the ACCA conference in 2017. They were delighted to discover the CWF, and invited David and Susanne to visit Bangladesh to introduce CWF there, which they did in 2018. Peter and I did some teaching and facilitating at the first PACT in 2018, and following that, I began supervising PACT participants and some LWTP graduates. This all broadened the community with whom we were relating, enriching our lives and our understanding of CWF.
These small developments really snowballed from 2020: In January, following PACT, a team of us taught CWF to 140 pastors and others in Bangladesh, and over the next 6 months conducted online training for 20 of those participants. At the same time, I was invited to join a team to teach John Warlow’s God-centred Transformation and God-centred Relationships courses at Brisbane School of Theology. Getting to know students, preparing lessons, role plays, worksheets and PowerPoints, always as part of a community of teachers, was a wonderful, stretching experience for me, and a great way for a retired person to be occupied and stimulated during the COVID lockdowns! All the time I was getting to know, love and value members of the community from a range of countries, and to pray for them, and so to keep a wide vision of what God is doing in the world.
Zoom had opened a whole new way of doing things, and in 2021 a team of us taught CWF-based pastoral care to a combined group of Master of Divinity/MA Theol students from Nepal Theological College and CCTB online over 2 weeks. The deepening relationship with CCTB prompted them to ask LW to provide a TEE course in pastoral care for their diploma students. Peter had worked in TEE for many years at the college and knew how to write courses for this unique method. The result was that for the whole of 2022, we spent many hours working together to write the God-centred Relationships counselling foundations course. Just this year, a group of Bangladeshi PACT graduates and participants have trained the first group of TEE tutors to facilitate this course. After 8 years of hard work by many people, we are so thankful that in Bangladesh the team of people trained in CWF is growing and those people in turn are bringing it to a diverse range of people and ministries and discovering the joy of working together as a team. To have had a part in that is a privilege and joy that is God’s loving gift to Peter and me. CWF continues to provide a blessed resource for me in understanding my life and relationships with God and others, a community who are not afraid to go deep, and the stimulation and joy of encouraging the next generation (and even he one after that) to grow in their TASK, constantly relying on God for the impossible and delighted by what he does.