Six months of renovation, 32 construction workers and guidance from the Holy Spirit is what it took to transform Douglas Gresham’s 12-bedroom Irish castle into a home for victims of child abuse.
Gresham is becoming a household name to many because of his recent work as co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which released in theaters December 9. But there is more to this stepson of C.S. Lewis than the world of Narnia.
Beyond his careers as a broadcaster, cattleman and now the creative and artistic director for the C.S. Lewis Company, Gresham is husband to his wife Merrie, father of five, grandfather of nine and counselor to many. Most importantly, he is a Christian who has dedicated the last 13 years of his life to a ministry that blossomed from the halls of his own home after he and his family moved from Tasmania to Ireland in 1993.
“I suppose if you’re going to move, you might as well do it properly,” Gresham told AFA Journal. “I don’t think you can move any further than that and stay on the planet.”
When the Greshams moved to Ireland, they were looking for a four- or five-bedroom house since all of the children, except for two, had left home. But the Lord had a different plan for them.
“We wound up with a house with 12 bedrooms, [so] we prayed and said, ‘What do we do now?'” Gresham explained. “The Lord said, ‘Get the house ready.’ We hadn’t the faintest idea for what so we just launched into the renovation of this place ….”
The Birth of a Ministry
The restoration of the new Gresham home was completed just in time for a training seminar that marked the beginning of Rathvinden Ministries, “a general non-denominational Christian ministry [of] healing and helping — healing for the hurting and helping for the helpless.
“Having committed one’s life to Christ, you sort of go where you are sent,” Gresham said. “And I suppose the best way of describing it is to say that the Lord intervened in our lives, in a whole lot of different areas, to demonstrate to us that He had work for us on this side of the planet ….”
The work of Gresham and his wife through Rathvinden Ministries is two-fold. One facet of the ministry is for victims of child abuse; the other for full-time ministers.
“We administer something called the Hope Alive counseling [method], which is devised by a Christian psychiatrist in Canada named Dr. Philip Ney,” Gresham said. “[It] is designed to help people whose problems are the results of having been abused as children [through] any one of the many forms of child abuse.”
He explained how people instantly think of child abuse as a sexual or violent act, but he contends that the worst kind of child abuse is emotional neglect or rejection. “Because those children will spend the rest of their lives trying to prove they exist as an entity unto themselves,” Gresham added. “It just destroys them.”
Therefore, the Greshams were trained by Ney’s organization to treat patients who have problems resulting from various forms of child abuse. “In addition to that, of course, the therapy is also designed to [teach ways of] coping [to] … people who have lost pregnancies and whose emotional makeup is falling apart as a result,” Gresham explained.
This includes ministering to mothers who lost children through forced adoption, stillbirth, cot death or abortion. Gresham said post-abortion syndrome problems are more prevalent among women now than ever before in the ministry’s history.
“So that was the start of the ministry,” he explained, “but it was merely a matter of the ethos of the ministry, as it’s up to the Holy Spirit of God to bring the ministry to the people He wants to have come here and keep away the people He doesn’t.”
As a result, “we get all kinds of weird problems coming to the door,” he added. But that doesn’t keep the couple from following the lead of the Holy Spirit. In fact, they go beyond the counseling aspect of the ministry by opening the doors of their home as a vacation get-away for full-time ministers of Christ, regardless of church denomination.
“Because one of our unwritten rules is that as you walk through the doors of Rathvinden, your denomination stays on the doormat with the rest of the rubbish, and your Christianity comes in with you,” Gresham said.
“So people who work in full-time ministry of any sort — missionaries, ministers, pastors, priests, whoever — who can’t afford … to take a vacation … can come and have a vacation at our ministry, cost-free.”
[Read the rest at Agape Press]
