Families Flourishing Workshops

current series

Healthy Boundaries, Healthy Belonging in the New Year

Featured Speaker: Dr. Elizabeth Powell, Journeys Counseling Ministry

As we step into a new year, many of us want more than a fresh set of habits. We want real growth in Christ-likeness that shows up in our relationships, our decisions, and our peace.

Do you tend to give and appease until you’re depleted, anxious, and quietly resentful? Or do you pull back so far that you end up feeling isolated and disconnected? Sometimes we confuse people-pleasing with love or emotional distance with healthy boundaries. And we can even baptize these patterns with “Christian scripts,” telling ourselves we’re simply loving as Christ loved or guarding our hearts and redeeming the time. If any of this resonates, you’re not alone, and this workshop is for you.

This Families Flourishing workshop is a practical, hope-filled guide to becoming a more emotionally and relationally mature adult: someone who can live from a clear, God-given identity and values while staying meaningfully connected to those around you. Topics covered are:

  • How to respond instead of react
  • How to set healthy boundaries without guilt or shutdown (especially “Christian” guilt!)
  • How to stay “you” in the middle of pressure, conflict, or criticism

We don’t have to be perfect to grow. Let’s all just take this next step together. Join us!

To view the slides, click here.

Previous series

Loving Our Aging Parents (Without Losing Our Minds)

Over these two evenings, the trusted team from Oak Health Foundation will help us prepare for the upcoming holiday season, a time when family gatherings can bring both joy and strain. Together, we’ll explore:  How to navigate generational, cultural, and faith differences with greater grace and peace.  How to honor God by honoring and loving our parents, while maintaining healthy, culturally respectful boundaries  How to understand the overlapping emotional and relational dynamics that arise when spending time with our parents.

Loving Our Aging Parents Well Part 1

Loving Our Aging Parents Well Part 2

Previous series

Youth & Adolescence

We all come from a biological family. The Bible teaches that God designed the family as a safe and secure place where His covenant promises are passed down and where His ways are both taught and caught by the next generation. But Scripture—and our own stories—also show that families can be messy, imperfect places where wounds, confusion, and unmet needs take root.

Do you long for insight and practical tools to help the young people in your life grow in emotional, relational, and spiritual health? Are you walking with a young person who feels lost, anxious, or unsure of who they are? Do you ever wonder if healing is possible for the gaps in your own upbringing?

Join us for Families Flourishing: Youth & Adolescence, a four-part, faith-integrated workshop series led by youth mental health expert, April Twenhafel, LMFT, and our team.

This week, we'll explore the following topics:
-Parenting from Love
-Creating an Atmosphere to be Known
-Building a Relationship to Speak Truth
-Cultivating Identity Rooted in Truth

To view the slides, click here. 

This week, we'll explore the following topics:
-Psychosocial Stages of Development
-Active Participants in Cultivating Identity
-Integrating a Biblical Perspective 

To view the slides, click here.

This week, we'll explore the following topics:
-Discover how your emotional regulation impacts your child’s ability to emotionally regulate
-Understand your child’s emotional responses by looking at how their brain is made
-Discover how being attuned to your child’s emotions can impact the dynamic of your parent-child relationship

To view the slides, click here.

This week, we'll explore the following topics:
-Identify signs and symptoms of depression and anxiety in youth and teens.
-Explore how your child’s emotions impact their brain.
-Discuss strategies for creating emotional connections with your children in the midst of their suffering.
-Discover how being attuned to your child’s emotions can impact the dynamic of your parent-child relationship

To view the slides, click here. 

Previous series

Thriving Beyond the Grind

Is there more to modern life and relationships than an endless litany of landmines to avoid, responsibilities, activity, achievement, and pressure? How can I actually experience meaning and fulfillment in my relationships with myself, friends, my family of origin or creation, and God? Why do I struggle with feeling hollow and disconnected, or like I'm never going to be enough?

At New Life, we want to see lives changed and families flourish in the power of the Gospel. We've partnered with Oak Health Foundation, a Christian nonprofit counseling center, to help us understand how we are designed for connection, and how to begin understanding and overcoming common obstacles to healthy relationships. You'll gain practical paradigms, approaches, and skills to cultivate relationships in the image of God's secure love.

Our upbringing, family culture and attachment styles definitely can influence our outlook on our image of God, and our level of enjoyment in this relationship with God.

The second workshop, called Relationships IRL, explores how relational styles show up in our work, marriage, parent, and faith, as well as the intervening factors of trauma, culture, ethnicity, and our local performance-driven culture. 

The third and last workshop, called Building the Bonds of Secure Attachment, will be taught by Dr. Mijin Park. She’ll delve further into practices that we as individuals and as a community can build into our daily interactions and rhythms to foster secure relationships with God, ourselves, and those around us.