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.
- 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.
- Churches have been working for the common good for centuries.
- 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.