World Impact partners with the Trauma Healing Institute (THI) to present their proven, Bible-based trauma healing approach.
Are You Looking for Training to Serve Adults and Teens in Their Healing Journeys?
Using a participatory model, groups of people are brought together in safe, supportive environments to help one another heal.
Healing groups are facilitated by trained leaders who guide participants through biblically grounded lessons, creating space to share their pain, listen to others, and experience God’s comfort and the encouragement of a caring community.
Trauma is a deep wound of the heart and mind. It can hinder spiritual growth, strain relationships, and weaken communities.
Across the U.S., and around the world, people are carrying deep emotional wounds from violence, abandonment, systemic injustice, abuse, loss, disasters, or other painful events. Trauma affects how individuals see themselves, others, and God.
Without healing, trauma can hinder spiritual growth, strain relationships, and weaken communities. Trauma healing strengthens both individuals and congregations, aligning with World Impact’s mission to see healthier churches in communities experiencing poverty, domestically and internationally.
Trauma healing supports this mission by restoring broken hearts, equipping and empowering leaders, partnering with local churches, and creating resilient Christ-centered communities.
These shorter, stand-alone sessions address specific trauma-related needs and may also incorporate one or more of the six core lessons for targeted learning. These 90-minute to 3-hour sessions are great for introductory settings or one-day events. Current offerings include:
Healing groups can meet in several formats: multiple days in a row, in a retreat format, or once a week over several months. The minimum time for a healing group is 12 hours. Optional lessons range from 1.5 to just over 2 hours.
A small group (6–12 people) meeting for 12–15 hours to engage in Scripture and the six core lessons in a safe, supportive space.
Six Core Lessons:
A Trauma Healing Hub is a safe and sacred space within a church, ministry, or local organization where trained trauma healing facilitators offer Bible-based healing groups to help individuals process and recover from emotional, spiritual, and psychological wounds.
These hubs serve both church members and the broader community—bringing hope, healing, and restoration through God’s Word.
Each Trauma Healing Hub follows a six-step process designed to ensure quality, consistency, and sustainability:
Step 1: Appoint a Site Coordinator
A pastor-approved ministry representative is selected to serve as the Trauma Healing Hub’s site coordinator and the primary liaison with World Impact Trauma Healing.
Step 2: Apply and Build a Core Team
The site coordinator completes the application process and forms a team of at least two individuals committed to being trained as facilitators.
Step 3: Schedule Training
Once approved, the site coordinator collaborates with World Impact Trauma Healing staff to schedule local or regional training sessions.
Step 4: Participate in Training & Practicum
The site coordinator and team attend foundational training and complete practicum requirements by co-facilitating trauma healing groups.
Step 5: Submit Reports & Evaluate Progress
The site coordinator submits group reports and feedback to World Impact, ensuring proper tracking, support, and growth.
Step 6: Advance to Certification
The team attends advanced training to become certified trauma healing facilitators, equipped to lead ongoing groups effectively.
Ongoing Support: Continuing Education
To ensure long-term impact and growth, World Impact provides continuing education sessions throughout the year. These sessions are designed to:
Now is the time to take the first step toward creating a Trauma Healing Hub in your community.
Partner with World Impact Trauma Healing to:
When churches embrace trauma healing, they become powerful agents of transformation.
Become a beacon of hope and healing in your city. Let your church or organization be the place where transformation begins.
Contact us to request an application or schedule an interest meeting.
If you still have a question after reading through these FAQs, please get in touch.
U.S. Context
Global Context
When churches embrace trauma healing, they become powerful agents of transformation.
Trauma healing strengthens both the church and the broader community by:
As individuals heal, families are restored. As families are restored, communities are transformed. Churches become places of healing, creating lasting spiritual and social impact.
A Healing Group is a safe, confidential, small group (6-12 people) where participants go through a series of trauma healing lessons (12-15 hours) led by trained facilitators.
These sessions include biblical teaching, honest storytelling, group discussion, creative expression, and guided activities to help participants process their pain, bring it to the cross, and begin healing.
We are actively expanding our Spanish-language trauma healing offerings, including training, materials, and facilitator development, to serve Spanish-speaking communities better both locally and abroad. Please contact us to learn more or participate.
Trainings are offered in online, in-person, and hybrid formats to meet the needs of diverse ministry contexts. This flexibility ensures that urban, rural, and global partners can be equipped without limitations of location, travel, or resources.
Our train-the-trainer model is ideal for:
(Book costs not included)
We use curriculum from the Trauma Healing Institute and other supplementary resources. Each material is designed to meet specific needs and ministry contexts.
Current Offerings:
Church leaders need to participate in the trauma healing training before offering it to their congregation.
By first experiencing the content themselves, leaders:
When leaders are trained first, they help establish trauma healing as a vital and sustainable ministry in their church, setting a tone of care, confidentiality, and Christ-centered restoration.
An introduction for pastors and ministry leaders to experience and understand the trauma healing model, its biblical foundation, and practical applications for ministry.
A training designed to prepare participants to lead healing groups. Conducted in three steps: Initial Equipping, a Practicum, and Advanced Equipping. Some participants are later invited to serve as Training Facilitators or Master Facilitators.
A network of facilitators gathering for peer support, collaboration, professional growth, and prayer.
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.
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.
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.
Trauma Healing Partners
STORY
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.
To help more people like Raffi and Majd through trauma healing training programs, click below to give now.