Theos Report on Creating a Neighbourhood Health Service

The latest report from Theos has recently been published:

Marianne Rozario with contribution from Esther Platt, Creating a Neighbourhood Health Service: The Role of Churches and Faith Groups in Social Prescribing (London: Theos, 2025).

Here’s a quick summary:

‘The NHS and social care services in England are stretched to breaking point, grappling with record-high demand for GP appointments and secondary care services. Yet, one in five GP appointments are not for medical reasons, but rather requests for help with issues like loneliness, housing, or debt.

‘Lord Darzi’s 2024 report paints a stark picture of the NHS’s current state but also offers a vision for its future: a shift towards neighbourhood-level care, preventing ill-health and tackling health inequalities, a vision echoed by Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP’s ambition to turn the NHS into a “neighbourhood health service.”

‘Social prescribing – connecting people to community-based activities to benefit their wellbeing – can be part of that preventative solution. Churches and faith groups not only contribute significantly to social prescribing offering networks and resources, but with their focus on community, relationship and holistic wellbeing, they can play a foundational role in preventative healthcare.

‘Our research found that faith groups across the country already host a wealth of friendly, welcoming, and “referrable” activities. These groups act as “anchors of the community” with the ability to network and convene, provide resources, buildings and volunteers, and offer pastoral and spiritual care.

‘However, there are barriers preventing a more integrated approach between faith and health including communication and administrative challenges. Therefore, this report outlines a model of relationship-building through active networking, engaged collaboration, and forward planning, unlocking the full potential of faith-based support.

‘Ultimately, this report highlights the contribution of faith groups in social prescribing and puts forward recommendations for proactive collaboration between faith groups, the NHS and wider healthcare networks at the level of “neighbourhoods”, “places” and “systems”.

A summary blog of the report can be found here.

A pdf of the full report is available here.

A guide for faith leaders looking to engage more deeply with social prescribing, and especially looking to build connections with social prescribing link workers is available here.

A guide for Social Prescribing Link Workers looking to work more effectively with churches and faith groups in order to support the wellbeing of individual is available here.

Mission Frontiers 44, 5 (September–October 2022)

The September–October 2022 issue of Mission Frontiers, published by the U.S. Center for World Mission, contains a number of articles devoted to ‘Healers and Preachers: Coming Together to Foster Movements in All Peoples’.

Here is the issue blurb, which sets the scene:

‘One thing is very clear from the ministry of Jesus. He not only cared for the spiritual needs of people but also their physical needs. Wherever He went, He healed the sick, cast out demons and proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom. If Jesus is our model for the ongoing mission of the Church, then we have no excuse for not seeking to heal the sick as well. Not only did Jesus model a ministry of caring for physical needs, He told His disciples to go and do likewise. As movements to Jesus spread to all the unreached peoples, so also should a reproducible and scalable system of indigenous health care, hygiene and nutritional training. This issue is all about overlapping healers and preachers. If we can finally strike the right balance and employ a holistic approach to fostering movements that involves ministry to the whole person, mind, body and spirit; it could be exactly what we need to fuel movements to Jesus in every tribe, tongue, people and nation.’

The issue is available here, from where individual articles can be downloaded, and the entire issue can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Theos Report on Christianity and Mental Health

For any of the three or four readers of this blog who may be interested, this is my 2000th post, which feels like something of a milestone. Thanks for checking in.

The latest report from Theos has just been published:

Ben Ryan, Christianity and Mental Health: Theology, Activities, Potential (London: Theos, 2017).

Here are the opening paragraphs from the Executive Summary (the bold text is original):

‘This report follows on from the findings of the Theos report Religion and Wellbeing: Assessing the Evidence. That report looked at 140 academic studies and sought to analyse the underlying relationship between religion and wellbeing. This report, by contrast, looks more specifically at Christianity and is an attempt to assess what Christians are actually contributing to society in terms of addressing mental health needs.

‘It should be read as a scoping study, an initial foray into the field which is looking to suggest a research agenda, rather than presenting any firm conclusions. It draws on 15 informal interviews with Christian experts and practitioners within the field, representing a range of denominations, theologies, and particular engagements with mental health.

‘The report provides a brief overview of the mental health situation in the UK today, suggests some Christian principles on which an authentic Christian response could be built, makes a preliminary effort to map such services as already exist, and finally looks to establish how effective those services are and how they could be improved.

‘Throughout, the report returns to “what next?” questions, outlining a programme of research that is needed to encourage, inform, shape and amplify the Christian response to current mental health problems.’

A pdf of the full report is available here.

Centre for Public Christianity (July 2014)

This month, among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity offers a video interview with Professor John Swinton (Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at Aberdeen University) about dementia, ‘the challenge it poses to Western ideas about identity and the importance of community for those who suffer from dementia’.

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

I contributed this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Society has become ‘supremely arrogant’ in ignoring the importance of sleep, claim leading researchers, who warn that cutting sleep is leading to ‘serious health problems’.

We are getting between one and two hours less sleep a night than we were 60 years ago, according to Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at Oxford University. As reported this week by the BBC, Foster and other experts note that the 24-hour society means increasing numbers of people are ‘living against’ their body clocks with damaging consequences for health and wellbeing.

We’re already familiar with the elongation of the day in the opening hours of pubs and supermarkets. Increasingly, though, modern technology is keeping us up later, it being more difficult to ‘switch off’. Even if we’re not lying awake waiting for someone to reply to our last text, evidence suggests that the light from smartphones, tablets and computers disrupts the body clock. For others, the pressure to ‘achieve’ requires more hours on the go, with lack of sleep becoming something of a virtue.

Yet, the rhythm of day and night, light and darkness, is part of God’s good design for creation and for human beings. A variety of words used in the Bible match our own experience of different stages of sleep, ranging from drowsy sleep through to deep sleep. Scripture knows about the sound sleep of the one who has worked hard, the damaging sleeplessness of the one who is overly anxious, the excessive sleep of the one who is lazy, the broken sleep of the one getting on in years.

In the light of this week’s report, though, perhaps Psalm 127:2 is most apposite: ‘In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat – for he grants sleep to those he loves.’ More than just about resting sufficiently so we can be more productive when awake, sleeping well is a daily reminder of the gifts of his hand and a gesture of resistance to the assumption that we need to be on the go 24-7. Sleep involves surrender and trust, a way of acknowledging God’s presence in our lives at all times, in all places, even during a big chunk of the night.

Although we might struggle with it for different reasons, sleep is a sign of our creatureliness and vulnerability, an expression of our dependence on God in this area of life as in everything else.

George Pitcher on Assisted Suicide

Yesterday (18 October 2011) LICC and Theos co-hosted an evening event with George Pitcher on assisted suicide under the title ‘Don’t Put Yourself Down’.

George Pitcher is the author of A Time To Live: The Case against Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide (excerpt here). He is a journalist by background and has worked as an award-winning Industrial Editor of The Observer and as Religion Editor of The Daily Telegraph, before spending a year as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary for Public Affairs.

In the LICC blurb for the event, he was billed as being ‘one of the most outspoken critics of attempts by lobbyists to have assisted suicide legalised in the UK’, who ‘believes that no proper case can be made in law, medical practice or theology for the establishment of a two-tier system of human life in which some lives are considered of less value than others’.

George also contributed a ‘Connecting with Culture’ piece on the topic for LICC some weeks back, which can be viewed here, and which gives a flavour of his perspective and style.

Beyond the obvious ‘life and death’ issue itself, a topic like assisted suicide provides a way of exploring how various underlying cultural currents shape our moral convictions – currents like autonomy, rights, and consumerism. Thus, engaging with it requires formulating a Christian understanding not just of assisted suicide but broader issues related to lifestyle and choice, suffering, sickness and death.

Of the many stimulating things that George said during the evening, his comments about ‘dependence’ stuck out for me. Human life, he reminded us, has been turned into a commodity – where we worship at the altar of ‘choice’, and where a ‘lifestyle’ can be bought. So, if we can buy the life we live, why not also the death we die? But this way of thinking and living, said George, takes no account of ‘dependency’ – our dependence on God, on others, and even on the created order – where dependency is a healthy and honourable estate, where we rightly take care of babies, of those who are sick, of the old, infirm, and dying.

We’ve grown afraid of such dependency, George argued, privileging the heroic loners and those trampling over others to get to the top of the pile in The Apprentice, assuming that ‘autonomy’ is a right of life. But this, according to George, is absurd –from a theological and philosophical perspective, as well as in legal terms. Thus, we should seek to recover our capacity for, and human requirement of, mutual dependence – in the issue of assisted suicide as anywhere else.

Christian History Magazine 101

The latest issue of Christian History Magazine is now out – this one devoted to ‘Healthcare and Hospitals in the Mission of the Church’.

The whole magazine is available as a 32.2 MB pdf here.