Changes after an Educational Intervention to Teach about and Promote Forgiveness among Seminarians and Practicing Clergy

Abstract

Many studies of forgiveness have found that relatively short psychosocial interventions aimed at promoting forgiveness can result in noticeable increases in participants’ decisional and emotional forgiveness in their day-to-day lives. However, most of those interventions involve engagement in short psychoeducational experiential activities and participants want to forgive something. Less is known about a purely educational forgiveness intervention’s effects on participants’ subsequent knowledge and self-efficacy to promote forgiveness in their communities. This is important because educational lectures (without active engagement exercises) are often used in schools, seminars, sermons, and Christian education programs. Given the central focus of forgiveness in Christian religion and spiritual practice, we examined whether a 12-hour knowledge-based forgiveness intervention would predict increases to clergy members’ forgiveness knowledge and self-efficacy to preach about or promote forgiveness in their congregation. Intervention participants reported increased personal forgiveness, forgiveness knowledge, and intentions to make congregational forgiveness interventions in their future role as pastor. Confidence in forgiveness knowledge predicted greater intention to discuss and promote forgiveness in the congregation. Although tentative, our results suggest that providing knowledge about forgiveness might result in some personal forgiveness and increase future intentions to use forgiveness.