Trauma Healing

Trauma healing certification can change communities

Our Trauma Healing program, made possible through our partnership with American Bible Society’s Trauma Healing Institute, equips urban ministry workers and leaders to facilitate Bible-based healing groups. Participants can then choose to become certified to lead their own healing groups, which multiplies the ministry.

To ensure healthy churches, we must create a space for people to heal from trauma.

  • Trauma can create barriers to people engaging with Scripture
  • Trauma overwhelms human coping mechanisms
  • Trauma is difficult to express
  • Trauma shatters dignity
  • Trauma destroys choice

When our urban church leaders encounter neighbors suffering from trauma, they need to be equipped to provide basic trauma care so that every barrier to engaging with God is removed.

Trauma healing equips urban church leaders with basic mental health & Biblical principles

When you partner with World Impact, you ensure urban leaders can help others heal from trauma and hear the good news. When this happens, their churches are healthier, and individuals, families, and neighborhoods can flourish through their local ministry.

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Trauma Healing Partners

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Trauma Healing Trainers

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Trauma Healing Workers

STORY

Trauma healing training empowers pastors with practical skills to extend hope

In Canada, “refugees” are called “protected persons,” and there are a lot of them. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada defines a protected person as “a person who has reason to fear persecution in his or her country of origin due to race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political opinion.” 

Since 2011, millions of Syrians have fled the civil war that has ravaged their homes and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Since 2015, there have been about 45,000 Syrians who have been resettled throughout Canada, compared with the ~21,000 welcomed by the United States during the same time.

A vision for healing

Raffi, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was confronted with this overwhelming migration of traumatized Syrian families. He started to search online for ways to address severe trauma from war. He found World Impact’s Trauma Healing training and decided to attend a training group in Wichita.

Upon returning to Canada, he worked with his colleague, Majd, at Canadian Bible Society to translate World Impact’s Trauma Healing material into Arabic. He hosted two healing groups, came back for the advanced training, and moved his ministry even further ahead. Today, World Impact partners with Canadian Bible Society to offer healing groups in all their outreach to newcomers.

Trauma healing is transformative

Not only are Raffi and Majd using healing groups with newcomers, but they are also hosting training for psychologists, psychiatrists, Christian counselors, and more. The influence of the training is from coast to coast and extends to everyone, and about half of those trained are in “diaspora churches,” which are churches established by refugees. 

Majd recounts a recent Facebook message he received from a pastor (Lee) of a diaspora church from a Southeast Asian country. The pastor got a phone call from a church member who was planning suicide. “He had even prepared a suicide letter,” Lee explained. Lee, who had recently gone through trauma healing training, reported that he could use some of the tools he had gained to extend hope to the person on the other end of the phone. Because of the hope extended to him, the person decided he wanted to live.

This is the power of healing from trauma and helping others do the same.

Healing is possible because of your generosity

To help more people like Raffi and Majd through trauma healing training programs, click below to give now.