The Wayne E. Oates Institute is a Connected Learning Community exploring spirituality and health as a way to advance integrative care for the whole person. The Oates Institute is a non-profit educational organization made up of caregivers from the medical, spiritual and counseling communities providing a forum for joining together as an interdisciplinary dialogue toward understanding the relationship between spirituality and the healing process.

Since those actively engaged in ministry are not immune to the experience of depression or anxiety, the Wayne E. Oates Insitute is offering an online seminar April 12-30 specifically designed to assist with addressing these issues. This seminar will provide pastors, chaplains, and pastoral counselors the opportunity to acquire information through several featured presentations and will provide a safe environment for shared reflection with the presenter and other participants through asynchronous email discussion.

With Spring just around the corner for those of us in the northern hemisphere--and Fall for those in the southern--April is a great month for connecting with colleagues around the country for continuing education opportunities.  Whether you log in from your neighborhood coffee shop, your office, or the beach on Spring break, connect with others for a peer learning experience around pastoral care, ethics, counseling, or ministry in these changing times. From April 12-30, 2010, the Oates Institute is offering a wide selection of lifelong learning for ministry opportunities that you may participate in according to your schedule from anywhere you have Internet access.

Registration is now open for the April online seminars. Seven seminars will be offered, each beginning on Monday, April 12, and continuing through Friday, April 30. The seminars will offer presented resources, which may be read or viewed at your convenience, and peer group conversation reflecting on these resources and providing the opportunity to learn from each other, also according to your schedule.

Wayne E. Oates Institute board members gathered February 11 and 12 for our first ever national board meeting. Board members living primarily in Louisville, Kentucky, joined new board members in San Antonio, Texas, for this historic meeting.

As a result of this time together in San Antonio, WEOI Board Chair Jan Shockley said, "The bonding that happened as a result of our being together for an extended time was invigorating and exciting!  The freedom to brainstorm as we looked to the future brought fresh ideas and approaches.  The new board members brought great energy as they shared their ideas.  All of these points reinforced our decision to expand our board to the Texas area."

Compassion Fatigue: Caring for the Caregivers is the topic for this year's annual online conference at the Oates Institute. The dates for the conference, which will combine online presentations with real time as well as asynchronous discussions, will be November 10-19, 2010.

On Thursday, April 8, 2010, 12:00 – 1:30 pm at St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky (3515 Grandview Avenue), Dr. Jane Thibault will be the keynote speaker at the Caroline Lynch Forum on Healing. Dr. Thibault's presentation is entitled Activating Spiritual Resources in a Time of Cancer. As an author, trained spiritual director, and professor in the Department of Family and Geriatric Medicine at the University Of Louisville School Of Medicine, Dr. Thibault is a very popular presenter.

Pauline Rhodes Oates, First Lady of the Wayne E. Oates Institute, passed quietly Sunday evening, January 31, 2010 at the age of 90.

Pauline was born in North Carolina at Mays Crossing.  As a young woman she met Wayne E. Oates at Peachtree Baptist Church where he was the pastor and they were married May 30, 1942.

• Exploring Celtic Spirituality

In today’s culture there is a renewed interest in Celtic Spirituality. Popular forms of music, art, and spirituality are attracted to and seeking conversation with this ancient religious and cultural tradition. Is there something that Celtic Christian spirituality possesses that a modern approach to life and faith lack? Why are people drawn to the Celtic tradition and how can it play a purposeful part in informing and fulfilling the spiritual lives of those who are seeking greater wholeness and sensitivity to creation and the world around us?

• Art as Centering Prayer (Explorations for Non-Artists and Artists)

Before we human beings had words, we had images and symbols. We were (and still are) moved by sunsets, mountains, rain and our own reflections in still water. Many of us – including many who don’t know it – are visual learners, better able to receive wisdom when it comes in the form of images and symbols.

Art as Centering Prayer is a seminar for non-artists and artists alike. We will use both familiar and unfamiliar images, including images drawn from the great works of the Divine Artist in whose art we are free to walk, sit, and stand every day of our lives.  Each of these explorations will open up ways of drawing us into our own spiritual center, drawing us closer to God and deepening our awareness that God is at hand.

• Hope and Wholeness

We have learned that hope can contribute significantly to one's sense of wholeness and well-being. Myron Madden writes:

Hope lifts the human frame to tiptoe in expectation. It sets the imagination ablaze with anticipation. It stretches the mind to conjure up manifold possibilities. It crowds out the negative feelings of dread, fear and anxiety. Hope chooses light over darkness, order over confusion, health over sickness, peace over conflict.

This seminar provides the opportunity to participate in an interdisciplinary collaborative learning experience. Using email, members of the seminar group explore the role of hope through reflective dialogue around presentations by Myron Madden, Howard Clinebell, and Kay Shurden in light of their own experience and context. Through this process the group benefits by learning from one another as well as from the presentations.

• Care of Self: The Care Giver's Mental Health

In the process of giving care to others, care givers often overlook tending to their own self-care. For example, in the face of a growing concern about clergy health -- physical, emotional, social, and spiritual -- recent research shows that while clergy depression is only slightly higher than the general population, there is a significantly higher percentage reporting periods when they feel depressed and "worn out" some or most of the time.

Registration is open for February seminars. Six seminars will be offered February 8-26, 2010.

• Art as Centering Prayer

• Care of Self: The Care Giver's Mental Health

• Exploring Celtic Spirituality

• Fighting the Tiger: The Psychological and Spiritual Effects of Emotional Trauma

• Hope and Wholeness

• Spiritual Assessment: It's a SNAP