Imagining Change: The Theology and Practice of Motivational Interviewing for Christian Health Care Professionals
For the past three decades, psychologists and healthcare professionals have helped people change through motivational interviewing. There is a mountain of clinical evidence to indicate that care grounded in patience, empathy, and acceptance produces positive outcomes, but only recently have scholars begun to explore the healing power of faith, hope, and love. In particular, healthcare professionals have begun to ask whether agape, selfless and sacrificial love, might hold the key to transforming the lives of their clients and patients. [See Miller, “Rediscovering Fire: Small Interventions, Large Effects,” Psychology of Addictive Behaviors 14:1 (2000): 6–18]
Faith, hope, and love are Christian virtues. As a result, Christian healthcare professionals are in a unique position to connect motivational interviewing techniques to the theological resources of Christian faith. Christians believe that God created and then redeemed the world out of agape (John 1–3). This means that love lies at the heart of creation, including the physical bodies and mental faculties of human beings. If this is true—if sacrificial love is the rhyme and reason by which creation is organized—how would our work as healthcare professionals change? What would it mean to practice our profession as a divine vocation? What would it look like for the Gospel to transform our thinking about patient care?
In this interactive workshop, Matthew Allen, DDS, and Ryan Tafilowski, PhD, will explore these questions related to the theology of work, as well as provide a platform for experiencing both the spirit and the core skills of motivational interviewing viewed through this shared Christian perspective.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
· Practice of motivational interviewing: A basic working knowledge of the style and substance of motivational interviewing
· Theology of work: An understanding of how the Christian faith can reorient our daily work from a job into a vocation
· Connecting our theology to our practice of motivational interviewing: exploring ways to apply the resources of Christian faith to the everyday practice of patient care
