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Teaching Congregations
How To Forgive

Teaching Forgiveness

Teaching Forgiveness

  • Practical Processes to Teach People How to Forgive
  • Five Sermon Outlines
  • Five Adult Forums with Exercise Protocols and Scripts

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Restoring Hope

Restoring Hope

Practical Appreciative Inquiry based strategies to effectively resolve grief and resentment.

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Restoring Hope Video

Restoring Hope

Watch author Rob Voyle help a client resolve traumatic grief using the strategies outlined in his book: Restoring Hope.

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Teaching
the Art of
Forgiveness

Teach Your Congregation How to Forgive

  • Let Go of Resentment this Lent!
  • Practical Processes to Teach People How to Forgive
  • Five Sermon Outlines
  • Five Adult Forums with Exercise Protocols and Scripts
     Subscribe to Teaching Forgiveness Program 

Teach Your Congregation How to Forgive and Live in Love

If you are tired of living in a world that:

  • Is saturated by resentment
  • Places a huge value on revenge
  • Confuses revenge and punishment with justice
  • Doesn't know how to find the freedom of forgiveness

Then learn to teach the people you care about how to forgive and live in love with one another.

"Jesus told us we need to forgive but he never taught us how." - Steve Andreas

The reason people don't forgive is simple:

  • They don't know what forgiveness really is and often confuse it with reconciliation or forgetting
  • They don't know how to forgive
  • Something inside of them resists the idea of forgiving

The solution is also simple:

  • Teach people what forgiveness really is and what it is not
  • Teach people how to forgive
  • Resolve the internal resistance, which often occurs naturally when they learn what forgiveness really is what it is not

In this teaching series you will not only teach people to forgive, but also to live in love with:

  • God
  • Their Neighbor
  • Themselves

Program Foundation

This teaching program is developed from material in Rob Voyle's book Restoring Hope: Appreciative Strategies to Resolve Grief and Resentment and includes:

Program leaders will need familarity with the first two sections in Restoring Hope

  • Introduction to the Apprecaitive Way
  • Core Processes and Resources

And then Section five:

  • Forgiveness and the Art of Resolving Resentment

Teaching Forgiveness Materials and Session Outlines

  • Five Sermon Outlines
    You will need to "warm them up" with your own experience and spirituality
  • Five Adult Forums with Exercise Protocols and Scripts
    These could be conducted at an adult education forum on Sundays or at a midweek soup supper.

Week 1: Living in Unconditional Love: Not All Gods are Created Equal

Sermon: Not All Gods are Created Equal

  • Living in the Presence of the God of Love
    The Only One Worthy of Your, Time, and Love

Forum Conversation and Practical Exercises

  • Crazy God's Make People Crazy
  • Cleaning The Temple of Crazy God's
  • Metaphors of Unconditional Love

Week 2: Discovering the Golden Thread of Life Within Your Life

Sermon: The Golden Thread of Life

  • Discovering the eternal life-giving qualities in the temporal things we love
  • Doing what you love to do as a follower of Jesus

Forum Conversation and Practical Exercises

  • The golden thread of life
  • Resolving "I know it in my head but I need to know it in my heart."
  • Wanting: the root cause of misery and how to gloriously fail at it.

Week 3: The Three Faces of Compassion: Tenderness, Fierceness, and Mischievousness

Sermon: Compassion as the temporal manifestation of Eternal Loving Kindness in the world

  • Compassion as the agent of transformation
  • Compassion is more than one thing
  • Loving your enemies as an act of compassion

Forum Conversation and Practical Exercises

  • Discovering how Jesus was tender, fierce, and mischievous
  • Discovering our own way of being tender, fierce, and mischievous
  • Discerning when to be tender, fierce, and mischievous as an agent of transformation

Week 4: Forgiving Others

Sermon: Discovering the Freedom of Forgiveness

  • What do you have to do to be resentful
  • Clarifying what forgiveness is and what it is not
  • The stupidity of forgiving and forgetting
  • Surrendering others into the realm of God's love

Forum Conversation and Practical Exercises

  • Satisfying objections to forgiving
  • Practical, sustainable, forgiveness: converting demands into preferences

Week 5: Forgiving Self

Sermon: If God forgives you why shouldn't you?

  • Guilt as an act of arrogance
  • Shame as a toxic affliction of the soul
  • Living in the light of Love rather than the darkness of condemnation

Forum Conversation and Practical Exercises

  • Creating a robust, realistic, reliable, self-image
  • Rebuilding our self-image after we have failed

Program Cost

There is no specific cost for this program. We ask that you make a donation, perhaps a $1 per person for your average Sunday attendance.

Here is a question: What would it be worth to you and your congregation to be free from resentment, and perhaps more importantly to be in a community that lives in the reality of Love and is Compassionate to One Another and the World?

At that rate you probably couldn't afford it, so somewhere between that figure and zero will be fine.

 Subscribe to Teaching Forgiveness Program 

Restoring Hope Tutorials and Webinars

We provide 6 week tutorials for people who have purchased Restoring Hope or attended a training program and want to receive just-in-time consultation as they develop their practical expertise.

 Register for Restoring Hope Webinar