Review of Michael Paterson Sustaining the Spirit for Service: Christian Perspectives on Supervision (The Changing Face of Professional and Pastoral Supervision No. 5) IPSRP, 2025.

 Dear Michael,

You have written a gift for your Australian colleagues. It seems only right that an Australian colleague should say thank you.

As is your way, you make space: space to explore, space to reflect, space to grow and space to be. Thank you for inviting us into your world, to your professional and your inner space: Through your professional supervision world to your depths of spiritual discovery.

Those of us stretched thin, you invite to explore the “thin spaces” of Sabbath and rest: beyond busyness to the true business of attending to life. (Thank you for the CS Lewis Perelandra quote (p19): “We humans are infinitely necessary and infinitely superfluous”.) You helps us, in this mystery, to discover more of the fulness of our value.

Thank you for the call to unity: to unity with ourselves, with each other and to God in God’s world. It is a holy and a timely call. You are a loving midwife of joy.

Your book has some truly awe-full sections, calling us to the edge—of ourselves and of insight; opening us to contemplative inquiry; to digging deeper; to being probed and tested, strengthened and empowered. You call us to listen and draw us to attend to all that is, and to see more of what might be. To feel, with feet naked and hearts open, who God is for us.

Your book is something of an act of your own “pre-transference”, drawing us closer to your heart and your mind—the mind Christ has put in you and which draws us close. Thank you for being our “cue-catcher”. Your bubbling well of joy and wisdom draws us in—invites us to see, to perceive, to understand, to be known, to be loved: To be better supervisors by being better people. In the bravery of the labyrinth—both of supervision and of the spiritual journey—with all the twisting and turning, you inspire us to first and then next steps of faith, of hope, of terror and of joy. You call us out of “shoddy practice and inattentive presence” (p80) to being blessed by the depth of the lives of discipleship we witness.

Thank you for helping us hold, grasp, clutch, treasure images of resurrection: hope, new life, possibility. Your “attentive hospitality” (p98) welcomes and fills us as guests and equips us better as hosts of new banquets, and harbingers of braver shades of hope.

I hope others will also appreciate the depth and simplicity, insight and practicality that this little volume offers. Your own poetry and reflections are engaging. You have drawn on some splendid works of others—well know and obscure. This is a book worthy of reflection, revisiting and cherishing. May it refresh many supervisors and through them the manifold practitioners they supervise and the clients and communities they in turn serve and support.

Rev’d Assoc Prof John Mark Capper is an Australian ordained Anglican and Vice-President of the Australasian Association of Supervision.