What We Do

Our mission is to awaken kindness through God's transformative power of love.

Through the Center to Awaken Kindness, Penny Taylor and Bill Ressl create contemplative self-care tools and practices in the form of online courses, podcasts, videos, and other resources. Each is designed to enhance personal growth and deep human experiences while encouraging the exploration of life as a prayer-filled sacramental journey.

We create contemporary tools and practices to encourage inner and relational new realities. Every creation is in the service of awakening love and kindness in the world. Each item we create is rooted in historic Christian meditative traditions and grounded in a progressive theological lens. Specifically, each design is informed by our knowledge base resting in Paul Tillich's systematic theological frame and integrated with evidence-based contemplative practices from mindfulness, positive psychology, and understandings of gratitude together with an awareness of the richness that Bowen Family Systems Theory and Carl Jung's psychoanalytic thought offers.

We see that the need to awaken, nurture, and empower kindness individually and in the world is more important than ever. We believe kindness that is made visible through the love of Jesus Christ, made know through the stories of scripture, is very much needed here and now throughout the world. It is not the religiosity of yesteryear grounded in a Jesus of institutional religious definitions, but a personal, Spiritual participation with the Spiritual Presence manifesting as a New Reality here and now. All our contemplative self-care tools and practices encourage you to reflect on and define your personal theology of kindness (your God talk) so that you can make it visible in the world (your God walk).

A-FACT ... Foundational Methodology

The A-FACT process was first defined by Penny Taylor in her PhD dissertation at the Chicago Theological Seminary: She Reached Out In Faith: A Pastoral Theology Interpretation of Anxiety (2015). A-FACT is grounded in her pastoral theological ethnographic focus on Veronica from the Bible defined through an integrative paradigm grounded in the thought of systematic theology of Paul Tillich, Murray Bowen's family systems thinking, and various Liberation Theologians. Over the years, Penny and Bill have refined and expanded the integrative paradigm through additional theological constructs, neo-Jungian thought, Bowen Family Systems Theory, Mindfulness, Positive Psychology, understandings of Gratitude, and theories from clinical social work.

Examining transformative processes from various historic methodologies, the A-FACT Process is a powerful tool supporting re-newal. It is a five step interactive system that includes:
 
+ Reflecting on one’s story of life (Awareness).
+ Being guided by the Spirit to see the possible (Freedom).
+ Enhancing the practice of living a devotionally grounded prayer-filled mindful existence (Acceptance).
+ Living into life as prayer (Courage).
+ Reframing life spiritually to discover life as prayer, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” Deuteronomy 6:5 (Transformation).

The A-FACT Process is the foundational methodology utilized by the Center to Awaken Kindness.