Emotional Awareness and the Place for Silence with Dave and Kathy Thurston

Dave & Kathy Thurston have been married for over 40 years and have three grown up children. They have been in ministry in one form or another for nearly forty years. Five and a half years ago Dave and Kathy Thurston left Sydney and parish ministry to work in the Presbyterian Church of Queensland. Their brief was mentoring pastors and their wives, training other to be mentors, develop a post college training program as well as various other ventures. Six months ago, they returned to their three adult children and wider family but not to the inner west. They now live in Blackheath on two acres where God willing they will build a Christian Retreat centre. 

They love working with their brothers and sisters in Christian ministry to be healthy and fruitful followers of Jesus. 

They continue to train people to be mentors through Mentor Equipping Queensland

 In this episode they share their story, their journey and they deepest longings for ministry to be joyful and sustainable. They share their wisdom on how mentoring, combined with spiritual development and health, plays a critical role in ministry. The episode takes a deep look into the importance of emotional awareness, spiritual maturity, and understanding our emotions under the guidance of Jesus for effective leadership.

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Podcast Disclaimer:

Please be aware that the opinions and viewpoints shared on this podcast are personal to me and my guests, and do not represent the stance of any institution. This podcast aims to present findings for open discussion and dialogue, inviting listeners to engage critically and draw their own conclusions. While the content serves informational purposes, it is not a substitute for professional advice. Thank you for joining me on this journey of exploration and conversation!

Chapters

• 0:05 Mentoring and Emotional Awareness in Ministry
• 16:23 Prioritizing Relationship With God and Others
• 34:08 Mental and Spiritual Health in Ministry
• 46:27 Prayer for Renewal and Outreach

Transcript

Valerie Ling: 0:05

Hey, it's Valerie Ling. I'm a clinical psychologist and I'm your host for the clergy well-being Down Under podcast. I'm looking forward to interviewing an expert today to take you through my findings from my research where I asked 200 pastors down under how they were doing. Don't forget to subscribe, like and share. Buckle up, and here we go. Welcome to another episode of the clergy well-being Down Under podcast. I have David and Kathy Thurston with me. Welcome, thank you. I'll let you introduce yourselves.

David Thurston: 0:49

My name is David and Kathy and I have been married for 41 years. We have been doing ministry together for nearly 40 years, so it's been a partnership of considerable length.

Kathy Thurston: 1:06

Yeah, so we've loved a long time in pastoral ministry and we've, during that time, had a lot of theological students come through our churches which we've loved spending time with, and that's led to what we're doing now and what are you doing now? Well, we have a mentoring ministry, so we now live in Blackheath and we've taken that from a non-nominational role now into private role and we still work for the presides in Queensland.

David Thurston: 1:39

So look, can I just say we have three children as well, and if they ever saw this they'd be probably offended if we did that Three grown up children, very mature children. So what we're doing is we're involved in training people, in mentoring, so we do that, constructing a course for post college, being involved in bringing about some consultancy training for churches up in Queensland. So we're doing that sort of material and hopefully we can pass that on. That's our aim in the next few years and then we'll sort of finish up with that sort of work. Yeah.

Valerie Ling: 2:22

And how would you define mentoring?

David Thurston: 2:25

Well, that's a very good question, isn't it? That's, yeah, you can die a thousand times on that one. Well, look. So for me, in terms of mentoring people in ministry, I combine a bit of coaching and mentoring, and when I'm doing the coaching, which tends to be in skills, I try and bring that into. How does that shape? How's that shaped by your spirituality, by your work with Christ? And then when I'm talking about the relationship with Christ and maturity there, I want to try and bring it into the skills. So it sort of combines the spiritual development and health with the skills in ministry as well, and that's, from my perspective, what I do.

Valerie Ling: 3:09

Yeah, and so I'm really catching you. We're recording from. You're about to do a workshop at the Oxygen conference. What is your workshop? Called Cassie.

Kathy Thurston: 3:20

Okay, so it's about the importance of emotional awareness in spiritual maturity. So that's something that we are not experts in, but have found through our own life story how important that's been for us to grow in our relationship with God, to understand what God has been wanting to teach us about ourselves through the various ups and downs of our lives and our ministry. And he invites us into that space. Where are we going to think about that more deeply and have that shape, how we see God, how we understand our relationship with him, and that's, for me, that is critical to us growing up in Christ. And so that invitation is everyone has Christ is when you have them, are you going to enter into what God wants to do through that?

Valerie Ling: 4:23

emotional awareness like do you have a working definition for God or how do you conceptualize that?

Kathy Thurston: 4:30

We start with Daniel Goldman's stuff on ESI emotional and social intelligence. So he's talking about self-awareness and self-regulation and then he talks about being socially aware of others and then being able to manage others. So that's just a place to start getting familiar with the emotions that we feel and using them as a helpful guide to what is going on inside of us.

David Thurston: 5:02

No, I think Kath covered it pretty well. So I think, for guys especially, it's not that we don't have emotions, it's that we tend not to be able to name them and be able to describe them. And if you can't do that, it's very hard to regulate them. It's very hard then to understand where they're pushing you to, and then it's incredibly hard, if you're a leader of a Christian group, to help the group to regulate their emotions as well and be healthy. So the Bible's full of emotions and it's full of suggestions that we need to not let our emotions run away with us, but to bring them under the control of Jesus so that we might be able to lead well and be healthy in all of our relationships.

Valerie Ling: 5:57

For 40 years in ministry. Was there something that you learnt that you were quite intentional about reflecting on when you started ministry?

Kathy Thurston: 6:11

No avoidance would have been my default position, and I think I avoided until I could not avoid anymore.

David Thurston: 6:22

So yeah.

Kathy Thurston: 6:24

I think God was probably yelling at me through Dave, through others, through things that happened to us, and I was very keen to ignore that for many years.

David Thurston: 6:38

Our families do conflict very differently, so my family does cold war extremely well. So basically, the way we dealt with conflict was we ignored it and I do, my family does hot war.

David Thurston: 6:53

Absolutely everybody knows the launch codes and they're willing to press them, and so you can imagine. For us, when we first got married, just the differences in our families meant that I'm reversing, sort of I've got the big, big, big of the truck backing up very quickly and cats advancing not wondering what's wrong with me being able to engage. We had to learn how to engage with differences because there were so many differences and the way we handled them it wasn't the healthiest way. So I call marriage the difficult, delightful discipline of marriage. It can be delightful. It's always going to be a challenge, but it's a discipleship that you're involved in and we were not doing too well early on.

Valerie Ling: 7:43

I can imagine, though, Cathy, if you're advancing, you must be feeling things. So when you're saying that you avoided your emotions when you were pursuing the conflict, were you aware of things that you felt like you mean sort of just not aware and then processing that emotion.

Kathy Thurston: 8:02

Well, it's just, it's about controlling my things, so they control me. So anger is my primary emotion and so it's not very helpful when you pursue someone angry and are out of control with that.

Valerie Ling: 8:18

And so how did you get to the point where you've got this idea, a concept we've got to work on being more aware? How did that come about?

David Thurston: 8:33

Do you want to start that? Look, I think things had to get really bad before they got better. And when our children become teenagers, some of the patterns of the way that we related no longer worked. And it was a tough time. We loved each other, we were committed to the marriage, but I don't know if we liked each other very much at times and it ended up with one of our children leaving home and that that was really a trigger, for we actually need to do something about this. Because, you know, I was saying I didn't want. I didn't want this to happen anymore, and Kathy wanted to happen anymore either. But we're just locked as a family into a way of behaving.

David Thurston: 9:41

So we decided to get some counselling. We eventually ended up with some family systems counselling, which I was really happy with. The first counseling we went to because the lady just wanted to work with Kathy and I thought that was terrific. I love that idea. But you can't do that with family counselling. And all of a sudden, my passivity came out in terms of part of the problem, in terms of we were related. So it we went and got help and we were committed to getting the help because we were committed to our marriage and we're committed to being better parents. Yeah, so that's what we did, and we started learning about those sorts of things and started I started getting mentoring and we started seeing that there was ways of behavior and there were skills that you could learn, that God could use to bring about real change. Yeah, so that's what happened.

Kathy Thurston: 10:45

Yeah, I think that it started with changes in our marriage and in our family. But what was really clear to me was that what's that behind that? That was just a flaw in the way I related to God. And so this is where this we have this choice to face things because from that we're going to actually grow deep in our relationship with God if we're willing to take on that hard work. And so my relating to him was you know, I was Christian. I'd become a Christian when I was 15. But it was very transactional, so there were expectations I had of God that if I fulfilled my part of the bargain, then it was his job to give me what I wanted and said needed yeah. So from doing this work here, it changes our relationship with God and then it changes the way we do church actually so there was that flow on to what you saw.

Kathy Thurston: 12:02

Your role is how you wanted to, the sense of what you wanted church to be and how you were going to lead. So, that was. You know it's always flow on. That comes from that. That's really important.

Valerie Ling: 12:16

Yeah, I'd love to know what that tangibly looked like, that transformation that you went within yourself in your marriage, flowing on to your leading church.

David Thurston: 12:28

Probably the most significant. So basically we were involved in a church plant in the early 90s and God bless that in a lot of ways. And then it went horribly wrong and I burned it out and I had four months off and I just thought. Then I went and found another job, so I don't have time to go into all that. I didn't think we would ever church plant again. So we got to do my national job for three years and then something happened. I thought I'd really like to do church planning again. So we went to plant Central Sydney.

David Thurston: 13:14

But what I did was I said this time what happened before will never happen again. So I'm going to fill, proof this, but I'm a pretty big fill so I can manage to stuff things up. So I made all of the objectives, all of the values which nobody else had any input into. It implied that what I got done for previously couldn't happen again. And after about two years of doing church again, I was asking really basically basic questions like what is church, what is ministry? Even what am I doing when I preach and I read some museum papers and under the unpredictable plant which I really loved but it's sort of just mucked around with all of that, and so two things sort of happened as a result of that.

David Thurston: 14:12

One is I threw out the big sort of goals, objectives thing and I said we're going to need to work this out ourselves as a church. So I sort of relinquished what was my protection and a fair bit later what we did was we went through that whole process again and we went through a process where I did a draft of a lot of those things and then there are a number of people who would have the power to redraft that and that was going to be the churches, and I was out of control. And that was one of those things where I thought right, this is where this is God's church, this is not my church, and I think that that created a pretty big shift in things. But when you go through this sort of stuff, the way you preach becomes different as well, and what you see in the scriptures becomes different. So there's a lot of changes that went on just in relationships and how we handled what you get upset about and what you don't.

Valerie Ling: 15:28

That's a caveat. As you're going through this process, then, with a deeper understanding of self and your emotions and being your marriage, was that different for you as well?

Kathy Thurston: 15:37

Well, I was a long way behind here so, but I sort of caught up and interestingly I would for me. I just remember the acceptance, that of what was important in my relationship with God and that just it means you let go of the control thing is a really big thing for me. I would say so, what I was demanding of God, that wasn't turning out how I wanted you give up on that because it's not important.

Kathy Thurston: 16:19

So, Philippians 3 has been really important for me and just that. Where Paul is desire is to know Christ, everything else is stripped away of the things he brings, and I just remember the freedom found in that. For me, that's all that God wanted me to do is to commit myself to knowing him more and then being his person in whatever way that I was, and that was a very different attitude to for me in parish and still relating to people, and you know it came from a different attitude to writing to the kids.

David Thurston: 17:09

And it impacted our relationship with our kids enormously. So, yeah, there's a lot of fractures that just took time in a different way of behaving and trusting God in that and the estrangement was mended and we have a good relationship with our kids now.

Kathy Thurston: 17:33

So realising God's. I had a, just a commitment to him shaping me to be the person that he saved me to be, and that is about my personality, it's about my family origin, it's about the experiences he's given me, and yet he knows me and has a role for me to play, and that's really, really important for me now in my role in ministry, and I find that really exciting. But it means that, yeah, accepting that we are just God's people and that's OK. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't have to. You know, I don't have to be perfect, neither does anybody else. And, yeah, that was a real change for me in both my relationship with God and others.

David Thurston: 18:33

Yeah, I'd say there's a number of things that I look at current church culture and ministry culture. I would say that one of the things that changed was I didn't have a sense of urgency. This is God's Kingdom, it's God's church. Now. I'm 65 now. So when you're 65, you've got to go OK. So if something big is going to happen, it's probably not going to happen now and I'm not going to be playing football for Australia. That's pretty clear by now. But God's Kingdom is so much bigger and the things that along for in terms of a healthy church, healthy ministry, that's going to be generational work. But what we can do and what we're wanting to do is to invest in people. Who will invest in people? Who will invest in people and it may well be two, three generations and what we will see from our heavenly perspective is a wonderfully healthy church, healthier than what we have, that we've contributed to. But we will never be able to see on this earth now what that will look like. But we're investing in the future.

Valerie Ling: 20:06

This is the midpoint break for the podcast. If you want to put a pause and walk away and come back with it, make sure you do check out the description for all the various downloads that we have for you, including my full report, research and reflections. You might also want to remember to like, share and subscribe. So stop now or keep going. And so one of the things that my survey found was that burnout was related to levels of it's almost like emotional suppression, like we've got to put on a particular facade. You know it's a very similar thing that you find with customer service staff like always look happy, all the stuff that's going on in your hair, just kind of buried. That was related to burnout and clergy you surprised do you find this as well.

David Thurston: 21:02

No, no, and I think that's because it's a suppression about humanity. Yeah, so God's made us. You know, we are flesh and spirit, so we sit between the animals who are flesh and the angels who are spirit, and we are the image of God. So we've been made and our bodies are fundamental to that, and so our humanity is an expression of how we learn to mirror God and God has. God is a God who loves, and God is a God who is indignant and angry at sin, a God who is gracious and merciful, all of those things.

David Thurston: 21:52

But if we're suppressing, so yeah, if we're suppressing after the fall and we're just gritting our teeth, we're not learned, we're not grown, we're not receiving grace. Where faking it till we're making it is should never be on the lips of a Christian. I think you know repentance, forgiveness will be a good thing. Being curious as to why I do and feel the way I do and where that comes from, that would be great. But I think suppressing, ignoring, is just going to mean you get tighter and tighter and tighter and somewhere that just busts and you don't learn anything. You do on the other side, if you allow God to teach you something.

Valerie Ling: 22:43

Well, that was the other thing that we found was that lower levels of self insight were related to that sort of suppression and also burnout. But how do you practically do that? Because if you're needing a church and someone's really giving you know, it is really telling you some things that are causing you to feel some things. You know, in my job I would use this phrase of going when I hear you say that I've noticed that I feel this and therefore I think we need to do this Now. I don't know that that goes down so well. It just what does it?

David Thurston: 23:22

Well, I haven't done that. That says I have a very good phrase.

Kathy Thurston: 23:26

I was going to say. I feel like we've ended up with a culture like you described, in terms of people putting on a facade. We've ended up with that sort of culture with leaders because we've created that. So we have had expectations of our leaders to be certain sorts of people and we've wanted them to be that. So we've actually encouraged them to, even if they weren't that, to pretend that they were.

Kathy Thurston: 23:55

So, if we're going to break that down. Actually, we talked about this this morning asking open questions where we really want to hear about people and their lives and whatever, and giving honest answers, because that is the way to break that sort of thing down, and people in leadership need to be thoughtful about how they do that. For sure, because there's not appropriate places or people to share your deepest things with, but there is lots of room in between for honesty.

Valerie Ling: 24:34

So it's almost like building up some relational and trust capital when we're having these sorts of conversations, so that when we do have to have hard conversations and express hard feelings or process hard feelings, we're not starting from ground zero. Is that?

David Thurston: 24:48

sort of yeah, yeah, and part of that is in a church is a leader has to model that.

David Thurston: 24:54

So ministry is much more than just teaching accurately and if that's all it was, ministry is a very expensive way of doing that and you probably could just buy a lot of tinder cometaries and give it to everybody and they can read that on a weekend. But if you're going to do something different, then the relationship is fundamental to that and part of that is allowing people to see how emotions and life and trouble and suffering and joy and delight are being expressed in your life and in your marriage. And all of that Paul says you know. He says, imitate me over and over again, paul, of everybody in the first century, we know more about his inner life than anybody else in the first century and I think that's the model. Now I don't think we have to pour out every bit of trouble, but people have to know what it means to be human, what it is to have emotions, the struggle of actually controlling them, the joy and the progress. And Paul says Timothy, lets people see your progress. And that takes time. That's the other thing.

Kathy Thurston: 26:21

Urgency get rid of urgency, it takes time and the church is the perfect place to be doing that if you, if it's, you have a time yes, and you have these specific group of relationships that you can be building on week by week.

Valerie Ling: 26:40

So I mean, it's just a church is a wonderful community where you can be exploring that with one another. I've noticed as I've returned to a little bit of clinical work after the sabbatical, is that after the pandemic and ministers diaries are so packed and he tasks that are flipping on one another so they could be meeting with, you know, an entity like a group, and then having staff meeting and then going to do a visitation and then short dinner and then they're out for youth group again. I'm just noticing how packed it is. There's another lot of space. Well, as you said, time or yeah, space silence, solitude.

David Thurston: 27:25

So why do you?

Kathy Thurston: 27:26

think that is. I'd love to explore. Why have we gone back to that post COVID? When was it were those people's diaries always like that? Because I mean, obviously I think church is a suffering from both people not returning to church but also not returning to service in church. So, um, um, voluntary serving and that sort of thing. So clergy feeling like they need to fill the gaps in those sorts of things. Uh yeah, I think that's a great question.

Valerie Ling: 28:02

I think that's a great question and probably even the way that we could use our emotions is to is to actually ask ourselves it. So I'll use myself as an example. I've similarly caught up in I call it post pandemic plug. But we've just packed on all this stuff to survive through those difficult times and, you know, I'm feeling incompetent because I can't keep up with all those things anymore. I'm feeling more and more alone because all of those compliance things I can't share with my team yeah, my sole responsibility, or it feels like that. And then you, you start to really feel that the mode, the negative self-emotions, right, you feel ashamed, you feel like a failure to be disappointing people.

David Thurston: 28:57

that's the point. Do you think if you allowed yourself the space, you might actually get the negative emotions coming up? But if we keep on being busy, maybe they won't yeah so it's suppressing those, and but where did I go, well? Well, I don't get less.

Kathy Thurston: 29:17

It just, it just ferments unhelpfully below the surface until something happens, and then it's whoosh, yeah, and that's burnout so, in order to process those things, you need to allow time for those, and you also need more reflective life and you know, we keep saying to our kids you know, if you never stop to think about what's going on for you, you're actually never going to get any answers or any change.

Valerie Ling: 29:46

Yeah, I think we also need safe relationships because, you know, emotions aren't something that you just feel on your own, it's also in our interactions with one another. So one of the things the survey found was that, potentially, the level of conflict that um ministers are facing um, particularly if they're solo or doing a lot of things by themselves, it's not always safe to allow those emotions to come up, or you may not have what. What are your thoughts on that? What are your I reckon, ministries.

David Thurston: 30:16

So I've been doing ministry and I was a solo minister in the country since 1985. Ministry back then was incredibly simple compared to what it is well. What I mean by that is there wasn't all the compliance stuff to start off with. I mean, that's just getting more and more and more. The expectations on congregations weren't enough, weren't enormous. You know, if you've preached and you visited, that was you're doing well. And then we got personal computers and we started to desktop publishing and so all of a sudden there's all of this stuff that that gets added on to that. But there's also, there's also a certain competitive spirit that's going on in churches, church to church, and I think that's really unhealthy. Um, uh, we, we, we have such a consumer society and so ministers somehow been drawn into this thing of performance and there's there's no space for feeling depressed or anxious.

Valerie Ling: 31:35

I mean, that's that's for the week so it becomes in and of itself a performance measure it does, yeah, and so that's really unhealthy.

David Thurston: 31:44

Um, and you're right, I think, having having really good friends who understand the pressures of ministry and frequently it's only other ministers who really do understand that, or you know, clergy wives or something like that, and that's why I think the spiritual renewal groups are so important um, there's a level of being able to share with other people who know what it's like, and then there is a level of accountability, but it's healthier accountability and there's a degree of support it's not complete sort of support, but it would be one of the things I would say that is really important for good self-care and health. But outside of that, you want other friends. You can talk to them, just ring up on the phone and say I'm having a dog of a day, yeah, yeah.

Valerie Ling: 32:47

So sneak peek here. You're going off to your workshop very soon, so you do need to learn about that. You know, essentially what are you going to share about emotional awareness and what will be the takeaways from today's workshop.

Kathy Thurston: 33:01

I think it's where I started that. So we've heard a lot of stories this week about the different trajectories for people's ministry that God has interrupted and has then provided a challenge about. Am I just going to scramble to get back to where I was, or is there something new that God is wanting me to learn about myself? And so the big takeaway, I hope, is that in that moment, what are you going to do with that opportunity? And to take time to explore it, the emotions of it, where it's come from, who am I in that and why am I that person? So, background and personality stuff, but what is it wanting? What is God wanting to teach us about himself and our relationship with him? Because that is the thing that he's going to lead to spiritual maturity, and that's what we need for our field.

Kathy Thurston: 34:08

Can I read a lot of commentaries and do a couple of personality tests, because everybody's crisis and the way they come to it is going to be personal, it's going to be different, and it requires you, before God, to understand that and to work on it. So it actually takes, then, a whole change of your life to take that on and to continue to explore it.

David Thurston: 34:37

So one of the things that will get people to do is to think about what emotions they're experiencing, being able to identify them and what, but the thing is, where do they come from? What do those emotions push me to do? So what's my reactivity in terms of that? So think about the situation where that emotion arose. Where is it pushing you to stop? Is that what God wants you to do? What's unhealthy about that? How do you respond to that emotion? And to do it in a way that's Christ-like, christ-dependent, and begin a different conversation with people.

Valerie Ling: 35:23

Or maybe yourself.

David Thurston: 35:25

But you've got to be quite self-reflective and create space. You cannot microwave maturity. What that on a t-shirt? It's slow cooking. Maturity is long, takes time and you go forward, you fall back and it's okay. God's got us, he surrounds us with His love and he has no expectation that we read a book and within a month we've nailed it.

Valerie Ling: 36:00

So true, so true.

David Thurston: 36:04

So the cross gives us a place to stand where we can do some of the most unsafe places, unsafe things, and that means to look into our heart and our life and see how God wants to bring about Christ-like change within us, so that we love Him more and we love those around us.

Valerie Ling: 36:24

So I've got some final questions. If there was a pastor, or even a pastor's wife or sometimes they're also single but someone who's a leader in ministry and they've just tuned in and they've listened into our conversation, what's one thing you'd like them to walk away with? To either think or do.

David Thurston: 36:47

Face God honestly about themselves and start exploring what that means I'd say something very similar and I'll put it this way To actually sit down and be quiet. So the problem when we haven't practiced silence and silence isn't just a matter of doing lala, lala or alms in our head or something like that, but it's being God's presence. When we first do that. We don't like doing it because all the crap comes up and that's part of the reason why we do it. This is the way we identify the crap. We feel bad about this. We haven't done this. We're out of control. It's paying attention to that, writing it down and then asking God to make sense of the mess and being able to sit with that long enough to allow scripture to start speaking to us and talking to friends and talking to mentors.

Kathy Thurston: 37:58

And putting the support people around you to help you do that that word before God.

Valerie Ling: 38:06

Now there are some churches that have actually subscribed to the podcast. They've got their elders to subscribe or the puzzle care committees to subscribe, if there was such a group listening to us today a church who's really looking to see how they can care for their leaders. What's one thing you'd like them to walk away with from our conversation?

David Thurston: 38:27

I would say. One as a minister, you don't have to ask permission to be healthy. Two a church that is spiritually healthy is an incredibly rare thing and that would be a light shining in the darkness, and that would be a community who understood how they felt. So this is the work of a church. It might start with the pastor, it might start with some else and it should, it should start with the leaders, but if it grows into being a church, the witness of that will make evangelism very easy, because people are just becoming it and say what is it that you've got going on in your life? We want to be like you, and they might not like the answer, but that's getting back a little bit to what the New Testament was like being ready to give a reason for the hope that lies within you, because there's a church that's operating out of a different space, out of a space of the love of God that allows people to be transformed.

Kathy Thurston: 39:43

Yeah, I think I would say to them develop a real relationship with your minister. You're on the same side. You are a team working together to lead a church. You are not opposed to one another. So you need to get to know one another, and in a real relationship. So that requires time and listening to one another's stories and finding out from each other what we need in order to grow more healthy in Christ.

David Thurston: 40:16

So when do we start using the word volunteers for brothers and sisters in Christ?

Valerie Ling: 40:20

Interesting.

David Thurston: 40:22

So if the pastoring is transactional rather than volatial, there's something wrong. We can't love people transactionally. So what does that mean? That how church has to change.

Valerie Ling: 40:43

Yeah, and the final question is at a policy or denominational or even, you know, rather college level? You know it could be one thing you want sort of at the policy level. You know there's one thing you could say.

David Thurston: 41:03

Do you want to go?

Kathy Thurston: 41:04

first, lots, lots of things at each of those levels I'm excited.

Valerie Ling: 41:09

This is the one question that usually stops.

Kathy Thurston: 41:13

Well, you want to talk about college first or no, well, okay.

David Thurston: 41:20

So I had a good friend who was part of our church and is in the college electric college. He asked me to. He said, as people leave college, what do they need to know? What three things do they need to know? I said one. They need to know what Paul knew in one Timothy one, that Jesus Christ came into the world as a sinner and the chief. There is such a sense of grace and love and humility that Paul understands that he saved. We can't do anything but minister out of that. The second thing is here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance.

David Thurston: 42:26

Whoever desires to be an overseas desires a good thing, and here is the sort of life and character that somebody who wants to be a leader in the church has. They face their fears, they work on their relationships, they learn it. Theology doesn't do that unless it's applied deeply and what we do is we normally work out of somebody's appropriate for ministry if they can answer some tough theological questions. We don't. We don't wonder if they're humble, we don't wonder if they're loving, we don't wonder if anger is coursing through their veins as soon as they get opposition.

David Thurston: 43:09

The next thing is can we stop thinking that what happens on a Sunday is the total of God's hope, longing and purpose for church, that there is something so much more to be had and it will take ages and lifetimes to engage with that and undo some of the things. But we are called to be so different and we just keep on thinking that so many of those things are just optional extras that we go with tick and we get air conditioning along with the rest of our life because we're Christians. But church is not about being a volunteer, it's being a child, a slave of Christ. It's being about a life that is changed from the inside out, and so there's discipleship there as well, where we learn how to. We have conversations about how we deal with our anger, why we have addictions in our life, why we don't want to be hospitable, and that's the glory of the church Outside that, thank you Did, you want to add anything Tessa On a.

Kathy Thurston: 44:35

I think the denomination level. What we are trying to establish in the system in Queensland is surround clergy and their families with support and that should be just. And I'm not saying support is not needed for others incongruations Of course it is. But I think a denomination role is to be able to support their clergy in order for them to continue to minister in a healthy way and persevere for the long term is what we want to see. So yeah, having caring, supportive structures that they can depend on where we are building spiritual resilience and where we are supporting them in crisis, so having a network of things where that is just assumed as the norm.

Valerie Ling: 45:44

Yeah, so much. It takes less off you when you know you've got a safety net under you you take more risks.

Kathy Thurston: 45:51

Yeah, and a safe relationship where they are known and they are encouraged to call for help when they need it. So that again comes back to that knowing self and being willing to admit I need help and asking for it and it being there for you when you need it.

Valerie Ling: 46:11

Thank you. Thank you so much, david and Kathy Thurston. This has been so encouraging, and I've yet to do this on the podcast, but I was wondering if you'd close us in prayer so that those listening in with us might be able to join us as well. Would you do that?

David Thurston: 46:27

Yeah, Our gracious Father, we want to thank you that we have the privilege of calling you our Abba, our Father, and that's because of your grace and truth embodied in your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and we thank you that it's only by the Spirit of Sonship that we can do that and that you invite us into your family and we are rich in relationships and rich in a place where we can learn what it means to be human and the difficult job of loving others who are different to us, and learning to exercise patience and kindness and love and self-control and be dependent on your spirit for that. Father, you love your people and your church much more than we do, but we pray that you will bring renewal and new life through and in your people, that your people will be like salt in the world and will be like light shining out in the darkness and many, many more people will be drawn to know and to love the Lord Jesus. We ask this for your sake, amen, amen, amen.

Valerie Ling: 47:52

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