Author: glenn.myers

The one-size-fits-all guaranteed easy to use popular Christian talk

Coming to a church near you

Here’s what you do.

  1. Read a Bible story at some length, always picking something that involves a miraculous transformation. There are plenty of these available, enough for a whole year’s preaching or more.
  2. Here’s your main point: someone in the story met Jesus, or God if it’s the Old Testament, and their life was transformed. Tell this story with as much drama as you can muster.
  3. Salt your story with promises plucked from elsewhere in scripture, again, plenty to choose from.
  4. Tell some stories about yourself or your children that vaguely illustrate the same point.
  5. Repeat (that’s a sermon series). Or write down (that’s a book).
  6. Change the theme slightly, and repeat again. So instead of ‘secrets of healing’, you could branch into ‘living a life of victory’ or ‘total financial freedom’ or ‘being a person of power and authority’.
  7. On you go. Same talk. It’s a career.

There are consequences to this Christian populism.

  1. You are pointing people to Jesus, perhaps the best thing you can do for anyone.
  2. Unfortunately the Jesus you are pointing them to is a one-shot wonder worker, a stripped-down version of the real thing.
  3. You’re missing the slow. We not finished, in both senses. We are still being patched up, and we are still pressing on in our incomplete state. Blessed are those at the end of their rope, broken, mourning, hungering, thirsting. Every day we search our minds and hearts to conform them to God’s will. Through faith and patience we inherit the promises. Suffering produces character produces hope. Not a charge to victory, methinks, a patient plod.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #4

A final (for now…) post on the interesting shifts of culture and practice that might get state-supported health care and the church’s role at the heart of local communities finding common cause and networking together.

It could be a (quiet, slow) revolution in healthcare and it would not be the first time that church initiatives have altered the national landscape.

  1. The probation service was started by a pair of Anglican missionaries in the early twentieth century, and eventually nationalised.
  2. Educating the working classes was a job pioneered by the Christian churches, with both Catholic and Protestant examples. In the UK, Sunday Schools were teaching literacy and numeracy (and Bible literacy) to a quarter of the eligible British population of children by 1831. 1. (Schools until then were largely private, fee-paying and for the upper class and middle class boys.) In 1870 came the Education Act which made state education compulsory and a state responsibility.
  3. The hospice movement which had earlier (and largely Christian) precedents but in its modern form was established by the devout Christian Dame Cicely Saunders. So far the UK’s 220 or so hospices have escaped being swallowed by the NHS but at Dame Cicely’s death in 2005 were caring for 60,000 people in hospices and 120,000 people in their homes in the UK 2. Eight thousand other hospices followed her model around the world; part of the landscape for the dying. (Interestingly, Dame Cicely was a passionate opponent of assisted dying.)
  4. Possibly, hospitals themselves, invented early in the first millennium by St Basil and his fellow Cappadocian Fathers.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #3

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

So I have to request you be patient for a little longer. Here’s a third take on the changes intended for the National Health Service and how these changes take it into the arms of the Christian church, and how they can help re-establish the church in its centuries-old role as centre-piece of the good in a local community.

A newspaper report in April 25 said this:

The NHS is attempting to ease the pressure on GPs and A&E by sending a new type of health worker door to door in deprived areas to help detect illnesses before people need urgent care.

Community health and wellbeing workers (CHWW) are already deployed in 12 areas of England, with 13 others to follow, in an attempt to improve poor and vulnerable people’s access to care.

Each worker is responsible for 120-150 households, usually on a council estate, which they visit once a month to help residents with money, isolation and housing problems, as well as their health.

Wes Streeting, the heath secretary, is examining the scheme as he pulls together ideas to help “fix” the NHS that may be included in the forthcoming 10-year health plan. 3 The article points out these CHWWs ‘are not clinically trained staff, like doctors, nurses and health visitors. They are mostly recruited from the communities they work in and trained up for the role.’

It quotes the program managed of the National Association of Primary Care as follows:

‘CHWWs are supporting residents to access earlier and more appropriate forms of care, often in community settings.

‘They’re also helping to address wider determinants of health – like housing, finances and loneliness – which are frequently the root cause of escalating health issues that end up in A&E.

‘Their job is to build relationships with the people in their households and with health professionals and NHS services locally.’

Nothing in the article mentions the church. But what a nice job for someone as a CHWW, with formal or informal links to faith communities.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing #2

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

So last week we saw that the UK National Health Service, groping its way to being a Neighbourhood Health Service, is seeing the value of directing people from GP surgeries to community groups. Faith groups–and especially in the UK, Christian churches–are the main source of community groups, and they are everywhere.

In a report about all this, the Theos thinktank notes that some GP practices employ social prescribing link workers (SPLWs, because the world needs more acronyms) to make and maintain these connections. So far so good. But the people at Theos make these observations:

  1. Where there’s a high turnover of SPLWs, many of the links are lost.
  2. When SPLWs merely ‘signpost’ people to things a lot of the potency of social prescribing is lost. (This is true generally with the dread word ‘signposting’. People are often refused help by one agency or another and ‘signposted’ elsewhere. This is fine for the people who are turning people away, but not so good for the people who are being turned away). It’s much better when SPLWs get to know groups personally and also take people along to them. The personal relationships matter much more than a listing of providers.

As the report said:

..We found a number of challenges … There are communication challenges because faith and health communities use different language to talk about very similar things. It is challenging for faith groups to connect and maintain relationships with the ever-changing social prescribing system. Similarly, link workers and local health practicioners don’t kow where to go to connect with local faith groups. Furthermore, there are administrative challenges that slow processes down and a lack of funding to keep activities running. (p15)

Further, ‘one explanation for poor integration between faith groups and healthcare workers … is stretched capacity in the NHS’ (p61).

But social prescribing is a ‘thing’ and the NHS has a long term plan for every person in England to access social prescribing through their GP eventually. 4

3. While there are relatively many hospital chaplains, there are relatively few ‘GP chaplains’ and this is a missed opportunity. N0t only so, but a qualification in social prescribing takes about 5 months’ study 5. No doubt lots of people have thought of this, but a GP chaplain who was also a trained social prescriber could make themselves very useful; if they were funded by a collaboration of churches, they would be less dependent on the vicissitudes of government provision.

Bridging the gap between healthcare and wellbeing

Sometimes you read something and it feels like you’ve swallowed a lit firework.

This happened to me recently, when I was reading a report from those good people at the Theos thinktank. I found myself catching myself to hold back the tears.

This is the report:https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/research/2025/01/27/creating-a-neighbourhood-health-service-the-role-of-churches-and-faith-groups-in-social-prescribing

And I recommend you waste half an hour of your working day to read it. It’ll be time much better spent than doomscrolling.

The idea is simple and one that I’ve touched on before in this blog. Here I found myself lifting the curtain and seeing a whole landscape of people who have not just already thought of this but are integrating into their practice, and researching the problems, and finding ways forward, actual doers doing it. In other words, a bandwaggon, and this is me jumping on.

  1. Health care providers see the need for ‘social prescribing’ (involving people in caring communities) as a necessary supplement to their medical work. Indeed many people visit their doctors because their sickness is actually a mask for other ills, like grief or loneliness.
  2. Churches have been working for the common good for centuries.
  3. Why not put them together?

Here’s what our current Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, said about the report:

Faith groups are continuing a beautiful, centuries–old tradition of caring for your neighbour. They are delivering front line activities that will play a key role in shifting the focus of our health service from hospital to community, and sickness to prevention in the coming years. I welcome this report from Theos, which asks the right questions about how we can link faith groups into the system to provide partnership and support.” – Wes Streeting MP, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom

Or or a past president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Clare Gerada:

I wholeheartedly endorse the invaluable role of faith groups in the social prescribing framework, as outlined in this report. By fostering trusted relationships and providing holistic support, faith communities are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between healthcare and wellbeing, offering a preventative approach that prioritizes connection, care and community.

From the foreword:

Social prescribing utilises community offerings as non-clinical remedies in recognition that some things can be treated both more effectively and more cheaply this way. The particular genius of this is that in doing so, people know each other better; relationships between statutory and community groups are formed and become well-trodden; and when moments of crisis arrive, not only are communities healthier at local level, but more resilient.

In one sense, none of this is new; in another it is a confluence of trends in medicine, society and church that suddenly opens a vast horizon of opportunity.

  • Health care people know how vital is the social stuff surrounding a person’s health. We have an epidemic of mental ill-health (or possibly an epidemic of mental ill-health diagnoses) and we have another cluster of people with the too-much-stress illnesses caused by their bodies running hot with anxiety.
  • Many people are lonely and isolated, propped up by benefits.
  • Churches are caring for the common good in practically every community.

It seems there is within the NHS a job role called a Social Prescribing Link Worker whose job is to connect patients at GP practices to local community groups. It can be that on a single street, next door even, a GP practice can exist in one silo and a church with its community cafe or craft group in another silo. The SPLW’s role, paid for by the taxpayer, is to link people across silos.

Imagine if this were common: every GP practice, every faith community, personally linked together and held together by a network of relationships. Imagine the creativity, the imagination, the good and the healing that could flow.

Finally, though this is a branching-out for the NHS, they are branching out into something churches are already doing. My own little church has basically missed every trend that has passed through the Christian community in the past 40 years, with the possible exceptions of minor brushes with charismatic Christianity, the Alpha course, and worship songs that were contemporary twenty years ago.

But we haven’t missed community groups for the common good because it’s what we do: a community cafe, food supplies, separate men’s and women’s breakfasts, a carpet-bowling club, a craft cafe. We do this all the time for the common good and also because, further in, people may find the glowing Rock at our centre and a framework, indeed a Person, around whom to construct a good life and a good death. They may find worship. They may find they can step back from the daily routine and glimpse eternity. We’ve done these community things, as have so many churches, because that is what we do, because it fits the grain of who we are.

Harmless as doves

Sneaky but effective

Photo by Shubhankar Bhowmick on Unsplash

I was struck recently by the phrase ‘Wise as serpents, harmless as doves’. I must admit that I think the ‘wise as serpents’ bit comes a lot more easily to me (wily, crafty, political) than the ‘harmless as doves’ word.

It means that at a certain point, after you have done all your wise-as-serpent stuff, you are defenceless. You are approaching people with innocence. You are choosing to believe that somewhere inside them, nestled among the faults you see, is a shred of decency. Somewhere deep inside is a concern for the welfare of others. And we are to approach them, or when not actually approaching them but just thinking and talking about them, we are to treat them is if that shred of decency really was inside them, and can be awakened by someone who believes against the odds that it is there.

The Lord Jesus, I think, had the childlike innocence when threatened. Pilate: ‘Are you the King of the Jews’? Jesus: ‘Your words.’ Or after being hit in the face when being questioned by the High Priest: ‘If I spoke evil, show me. If I didn’t, why did you hit me?’ Both times, I think, he’s probing inside the other person to justify what they just said or did, not slandering or insulting them; his innocence is disarming and unnerving.

It feels weak. But in fact it is a deadly infusion of grace that they may not know how to handle. They are used to fighting, being opposed, lobbing ordinance from their trench. They are not used to being told, by someone who opposes them, that they have a difficult job and perhaps they could be doing it better.

I am with you

Whether you like it or not

A welcome guest post from my friend Colin Bearup.

Doesn’t work. Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

Perhaps one of the most treasured sentences in the Bible is ‘I am with you’. It occurs many times and is often preceded by ‘Do not be afraid’. In times of anxiety, crisis, challenge and, well, life in general, to know that the Lord, the capable and wise, is with us is reassuring. However, I came across it the other way round: I (human being) am with you (Lord). That simply must have a different vibe to it. The Lord doesn’t need us to reassure him.

Psalm 139:15 says “When I awake, I am still with you.” I don’t know about everyone else, but at the prompting of my bladder, I get up in the morning, feel around for my slippers, put on my dressing gown and go to the bathroom. Then I go to the kitchen, make myself some tea, get some cereal and then sit down. When I have eaten, I consider myself to be sufficiently awake. Then I compose myself and reach for my Bible. It is like the shopkeeper, entering the shop, opening the cash register, unlocking the front door and saying “OK you can come in. I am ready”. Or even “the doctor will see you now”.

The unarguable reality is that the Lord does not show up when or because we are ready. He is already there. It is just that we have not given him our attention. Personally, I have always read Psalm 139 as the story of a journey. David goes from pondering how fully God knows him and slides into a sense of near panic – he cannot get away, he is never private, never alone, always exposed. We human beings, generally want to manage how exposed we are. We like to have some say in the matter. Finally he arrives at a place of trust and willing surrender.

I suspect that many of us rub along with God, keeping him at a manageable distance, imagining that we go into his presence and come out again at our convenience. Then one day we realise, like David, how utterly open to his view we are. We need to pass through that discomfort of realisation and emerge on the other side into a place of total trust. We become just a little bit like a small child, who wakes up in the parental home, at ease in the presence of apparently all-knowing parents.

Although nothing is hidden, David concludes with the invitation “search me and know me,” a full and cooperative acceptance of the Lord’s overwhelming knowledge of him with a view to being purged of all that is displeasing and being led in the way everlasting. Living with this perspective, one of sure and trusting knowledge that absolutely everything we do and say is known to our loving father God, that knowing we are in his presence whether we are aware of him or not, must lead to a very different way of living. Whether we attain it, is largely up to us. The story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, does not end with the hug and the party. No, it concludes with the father speaking to the miserable elder brother and saying, “You are always with me, everything I have is yours.”

A trellis to grow your life on

A word to the battered and weary.

I keep reading of people who quite tired of figuring out what’s right, what’s wrong, what a good life, what it’s all about. Dating is a minefield. Success is a mirage, celebrity is depressing, freedom is enslaving, hope turns sour, dreams disappoint.

Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash

Some of these battered and weary people are becoming Christians or if you like, Christian-adjacent, seeing the ancient Christian values as useful signposts even if they are tentative about going the whole hog, or perhaps, the whole dogma.

There’s a lot to this.

For one thing, creaking though it maybe, Christianity is ancient and it has infused our culture and spawned many good lives like nothing else. A couple of hundred yards from our home is a church that was founded in the ninth century. (As I have mentioned before and often think about.) The fields around it had been harvested for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years already by then. But still: for the last one thousand, one hundred years Christian worship, Christian faith and Christian values have been seeping into village and national life and collective memory and ancestry.

For a second thing: Christianity is mainly and mostly about the heart. It isn’t a programme for national prosperity, or preventative health care, or political reorganization. Primarily it pins us like collected butterflies down to one main things: Above all, guard your heart. Blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning, the peace-making, the pure in heart, the hungry for justice. And the test of these reformed and reforming hearts is not the mystic poetry they write about the experience (for example), or great revolutionary or counter-revolutionary acts (for another example), but the practical outworking of goodness and faith in their daily lives.

Which can lead to any number of different, interesting, varied, full lives.

No wonder it’s inspired lives across 50 generations, has experienced ups to match its downs, and may yet catch on widely again.

How to transform every community in the West

Nothing too ambitious….

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
  1. Start with a worshipping community of Christians
  2. It has to use some energy maintaining itself but
  3. It has spare energy to use outside itself so
  4. Do some theology. Christians are heralds of a new world where God and people are together. We can’t make that new world, but we can be a sign of it, an instrument of it. A portent of it, if you like.
  5. Do some Bible study. Around Ash Wednesday (not so far from when I’m writing this) the great passage in Isaiah 58 defines what ‘fasting’ looks like:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
    and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
    and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8 Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
    and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
    and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
9 Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
    you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

(Isaiah 58:6-9

6. Understand the times. We are not, in the West, surrounded by masses of starving people. But think of all the lonely people.

7. Think of one of the fruits of the covid pandemic. In the UK, local authorities started trusting churches to do community things decently and well. It has always been happening to an extent (it isn’t new) but covid was a kind of crash course for the nation.

8. Think of the need in our day for social prescribing. How many doctor’s surgeries are plagued by the lonely? How many ills (mental ill-health but much else also) can respond to the balm of community? In how many ways can community complement all that the state attempts to provide (housing, cash, healthcare)? Why can’t GP surgeries prescribe community in the same breath as they’d like to prescribe exercise and diet? Why are their options limited to applying chemicals or knives to human bodies?

9 Churches have premises, a certain facility with tea-pots, and a tolerance for the misfitting people whom every congregation anyway hosts.

10. Community heals. Humans are a herding species. Churches have the plant, the location, the resources, the opportunity and — best of all — the moment. We can built the connections. Every community in the West. Think of it.

Worship. Aaah.

Sometimes it’s the only thing that will do.

Ely Cathedral
Image by Diego Echeverry from Pixabay

It isn’t controversial to think that politics or the World Situation or whatever are disturbing right now. I don’t have enough of a historical perspective to see exactly how disturbing. (Remember the 1970s: petrol ration coupons, IMF loans for the UK, so many strikes that you couldn’t bury your dead? But I was young and shielded from all that.)

The true patient revolutionary still has somewhere to turn. We can do our small acts of grace but it isn’t all we have. There’s someone else on our side, the true master of history.

This is why we worship. This is why places of worship, often situated on good land that could be sold and cleared for social housing, do and should dot our cityscapes.

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne;
    love and faithfulness go before you.
15 Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you,
    who walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
16 They rejoice in your name all day long;
    they celebrate your righteousness. (Psalm 89:14-16)

Never mind that the context of this 89th psalm is defeat, retreat, discouragement and loss. The truths are still true. We can step back from the news cycle, and make ourselves small, and adore, and hope.