Healthy Boundaries

Faith Trust Institute: Healthy Boundaries 101 - Fundamentals: A Course for Clergy and Spiritual Teachers (Seattle, WA: Faith Trust Institute) 2012


Healthy Boundaries 101 - Fundamentals
I have been an advocate for regular and recurrent boundary training for all clergy and church leaders for most of my career, so I am pleased at each opportunity to receive training myself. I took time to read and work my way through the workbook as well as attend the sessions of the course. This book is a very good basic course for those unfamiliar with boundary training. However, since I've been taking these classes for a quarter of a century or more, I long for something that goes beyond the fundamentals. It is good to be reminded of the reasons for healthy boundaries and to engage in self-care plans to make sure that one respects those boundaries, but there are some very nuanced and perhaps more in-depth ethical discussions that might be more interesting than just the "introduction to" material that is presented in this course and in the other recurrent trainings that I have attended.

Perhaps an extra discussion could be added that would focus on some of the areas where we clergy have less experience such as the ethics and boundaries of retirement or healthy boundaries in political discussions and election-year preaching. I think that if I were given time, I could find quite a few areas of ethical discussion that would be meaningful and worthy of consideration.

Nonetheless, the book is well done and should be required reading for all clergy, not just those of us who serve in mainline denominations.