Category: culture watch

Medicinal compound

Works every time

Photo by Fulvio Ciccolo on Unsplash

Imagine a bottle of special liquid. If you drink it regularly, it reduces your visits to A&E, improves your mental health, adds years to your life and makes you more likely to do well with chronic illness or trauma.

This same stuff, taken in group drinking sessions, speeds up development goals, getting people working together to address climate change, improve health and education, and provide decent work opportunities.

If two warring sides in a conflict both drink it, the prospects of peacemaking climb.

What is it? Hope. The UN declared a recent day (July 12) as ‘international day of hope’. They came up with a way of measuring hope. Then, having measured how much hope was in a person, they came up with what they claimed were research-backed findings on the effect of hope on all the things mentioned above. Their website offers some colourful graphs. I wasn’t myself greatly convinced by the graphs, but surely the direction is clear.

Here’s a further point though that, properly, the UN isn’t able to make: no-one is better at hope than the Christians. Because Christ is King, we hope for a transformed world to come when he returns; because Christ is king we expect, believe and work for a foretaste of the transformation here and now. (Otherwise why pray ‘Thy Kingdom come?’). We hope, and act, therefore, because Christ is King. It doesn’t matter that it’s slow. It matters that it’s in the right direction.

A superpower.

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Slow mission is taking a summer break and will be back in September. Thank you so much for reading.

If I get my act together, by September I will have moved the blog to Substack. This means my blog will be in company with others of its kind, –nice for it–and also opens options for me to add extra material, perhaps behind a paywall.

Because you’re a loyal subscriber I’ll stick you for free behind the paywall, so you won’t have to pay anything and you should continue to receive the blogs by email as you do now. Most of the blog will remain free to everyone, but I may put some extra stuff, perhaps my books or new books, behind the paywall.

I’m also launching a bookshop that contains all the books I’ve reviewed and loved over the years, all available outside the Amazon empire, and delivered to your house, usually at a discount to the retail price. A slice of the selling price goes to support independent bricks-and-mortar bookshops.

You can of course cancel, or indeed tell your friends to subscribe, any time you want.

I get more feedback from the blog than I’ve ever done from my books, and I’m really pleased if you find this stuff useful.

The title of the Substack will be ‘Patient Revolution’, but nothing much else will change.

See you in September!

Curiosity

It may have killed the cat, but its lack will finish all of us off.

Photo by Diego Sandino on Unsplash

I read the glad news yesterday that the UK’s largest independent bookshop is about to be created in the city of York.

I was even gladder when I learnt that it was a branch of Toppings, which I know from the city of Ely, near my home, and I think is the greatest bookshop in the East. It has winding stairs, knowledgeable staff, a warm welcome, and books everywhere. Sometimes it overflows into the nearby Ely Cathedral to hold author events, and when authors do tours, Toppings in Ely is often on the circuit.

It accepted an early copy of one of my novels with the promise that if they sold it, I would supply more. Alas…

I could mark my travels over the years with bookshops enjoyed:

  • In New York we all visited the Strand bookstore with its 18 miles of shelves, though perhaps like New York itself, a little too cramped to be entirely comfortable.
  • Best for me was the Massachusetts Institute of Techology bookshop in Boston in the US, a general bookstore but with a slant towards science and SF. The MIT bookstore would be my luxury if I had a choice to take one thing to a desert island.
  • In Romania I found a bookshop in a mall with a delicious selection of English works –just the curated best– along with a cafe, the fug of smoke, and, hopefully, the whispered sounds of people plotting a revolution.
  • Singapore, our home for two years and fantastic in many ways, did sadly disappoint a little in the bookshop department. The shelves there were heavy with rubbishy management and self-help books. But it is a young country and perhaps its time will come.

Bookshops are cathedrals of curiosity. They are built so that we think, unthink, rethink, learn, cross out, and learn again. They are not just to provide tools for a job we have already decided to do. They are at their best when they slow us down, hold us up, serve up an alternative, give us pause. They may, please God, be nothing to do with the task at hand. They are infrastructure devoted to this truth: we may pick up the odd pebble here or there but the great ocean of truth lies all undiscovered around us.

In a world of brute, uncurious autocrats, who do not read, who say things are ‘quite simple’, they offer hope for the human species.

Slaves of productivity

Ramses II was an enlightened employer compared with modern economics.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

Economists worry that some things resist being made more productive.

This is a problem because increasing productivity is the bush everyone hides behind when we want a way of paying for more government services without charging more tax.

Some things are easy-ish to make more productive and all the fun things with AI and robotics may give this long trend a further nudge. So if you take a driverless car to a driverless train to get somewhere, you aren’t paying a taxi driver or an engine driver, so it’s cheaper. Productivity has gone up. Similarly if you build cars on a robotic production line rather than employing workers to fit panels and tweak nuts, you can do the same thing. With the money thus saved you, and the state, can do things that you couldn’t previously afford – more government spending, no increase in tax.

But some things resist being made more productive. And perhaps we are nearing the end of long experiment in proving this. For example, you privatise a cleaning contract. The new firm sacks the cleaners and rehires them at worse conditions. Productivity has gone up but actually all you’ve done is grind the faces of the poor and apart for being monstrous, this will bite you back, right where it hurts. Perhaps by paying people less, you have to pay more by way of supplements to the lowly paid, for example, or face greater absenteeism and ill-health.

Or maybe you can cut GP appointments from 11 minutes to 8 minutes. You see more patients. Productivity is up. But that ignores the research that says a good relationship with a family doctor improves health and decreases hospitalizations. Longer appointments, not shorter ones, may actually buy you greater productivity alongside greater human thriving.

Or you can replace teachers with computers but what you end up with is a bunch of kids who can do procedural maths, not the deeply learnt, flexible, adaptive maths education that everyone needs. Their turgid education lasts a lifetime at goodness knows what cost.

You can improve productivity (or at least people have tried) in the care sector by making visits shorter, but it doesn’t work. Lingering over a cup of tea with your client may actually produce more life and fewer of the deaths and diseases of loneliness than zipping in and out making sure they’ve taken their pills.

We are slaves of increased productivity. As a slave-driver, Ramses II was an amateur in comparison. What are we doing to ourselves? We ought instead to be slaves of human thriving. Some things can be speeded up, fair enough. Some things need to be slowed down, and done with love and creativity and passion.

Disconcerted by babies

In a good way

Photo by Michal Bar Haim on Unsplash

Babies stare. It can be worrying when they weigh you up, especially given that babies hover in unstable equilibrium, a nudge away from either rewarding you with a gummy smile or bawling in huge gulps.

It’s worrying for us, though, when, unlike babies, we stop paying attention to people – a point made by the blogger Trevin Wax1 recently and worth repeating in part:

G. K. Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” Our age offers countless wonders. What’s missing is our wonder, especially our sense of awe at the glory of ordinary human beings—those we live with, eat with, work with, and worship with.

Simone Weil once described attention as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Amid endless digital distractions vying for our focus, perhaps our greatest temptation is stinginess—the failure to be generous with our time in truly attending to others. We become unable or unwilling to look beyond the dull and irritating aspects of human interactions until we erode our capacity to offer, and receive, grace and love.

As well as being in trouble with babies, I may get in trouble with my wife, from whom I am often accused of not paying attention. Also, it’s slightly creepy when a grown-up does fix their eyes on yours for too long. And staring at the wrong person, in the wrong way, is of course offensive. Leaving aside husbandly neglect and social improprieties, however, the point stands. Recently someone told me that she wanted visitors to leave her home with two things: (1) something of Jesus, and (2) a sense of having been heard.

Creating beauty when ugly is all around

The restoration of Notre Dame cathedral, which opened in December 2024 after the fire in 2019, involved 2000 craftspeople, 250 companies and around US$900m.

Rebuilding the destroyed roof (which was nicknamed, The Forest) and was made of oak, involved a national call for oak trees. Many needed to be perfectly straight, 20m long and 50cm in diameter. A thousand trees were ultimately selected and harvested.

Then they needed 1300 cubic metres of limestone; and using ancient crafts, the structure was rebuilt (some restoration continues even after the cathedral was opened). As large projects go, it was a great success.

A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

“Each day we have 20 difficulties,” Philippe Jost, who headed the restoration task force, told me. “But it’s different when you work on a building that has a soul. Beauty makes everything easier.”

I can’t recall ever visiting a building site that seemed calmer, despite the pressure to finish on time, or one filled with quite the same quiet air of joy and certitude. When I quizzed one worker about what the job meant to her, she struggled to find words, then started to weep.

(quoted by Diana Butler Bass in her substack.)

Despite being a secular country, France rightly took pride in the restoration of this iconic building, the spritual heart of Paris. It may have contributed to winds of fresh interest blowing through Catholicism. Last Easter day (2025) 10,000 adult Catholics were baptised in France, twice the number of 2023 and the highest number since records began to be taken 20 years ago. Seven thousand teenagers were baptized, ten times the number in 2019.2.

‘Beauty makes everything easier’: fascinating.

When prayer changes history

Sometimes it happens

A high wall is cracked open by a growing tree
Photo by Murewa Saibu on Unsplash

It’s quite good to notice that sometimes big things happen. In a world of monstrous, deepset, intractable issues–our world–sometimes things shift. The tide turns. And you sort of gasp.

  • Back in the 1990s, it seemed the low-level conflict in Northern Ireland would not end. The Unionists wanted the IRA to give up its weapons. That seemed like a silly request, an ask so certain to be refused, a surrender, that the only reason for making it was gesture politics. Yet it happened. And we had the pictures of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley laughing and joking together. I still think that was one of those times that reality wobbled and reset in a different place.
  • The recent church statistics: steadily down for a hundred years, aged and hunched congregations, the situation as long as I had been watching it. Except now, church attendance going from 8% of the nation to 12% in eight years, with a zealous infusion of youngsters. And perhaps the sound of a flywheel starting up: more people, more youth, more confidence, more growth. Another wobble to the way things just inevitably are: a new story, a flex in history.
  • Then a report I just read about Iran. The ‘death to America’ slogans being discarded; the American flag on which you had to tread to enter the Tehran University being taken away. The religious police turning on veil-vigilantes rather than veil wearers. The ayatollahs wanting to cling on to power even if it means playing nicely with America. The virus of Islamism, perhaps, mutating into less harmful forms in the two great rivals, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And underneath that, in Iran at least, another flywheel spinning as more and more Iranians meet Jesus. The black tide that swept the world, and which I spent a lot of my professional life recording, has, I think, receded in part.

So we keep praying through the dark hours of the night. We keep believing Jesus is Lord and is on the throne. We hold in our hearts the promises he has made to our hearts that live there but not yet in the world; I have some of these promises lodged in my heart as I guess you do too.

I am translating the Book of Revelation for fun, for myself, at the moment, and I am struck by how much suffering that book indicates will happen before the unfolding of justice and grace and glory. It is so slow. The Iranian revolution has been going on since 1979, all my adult life. Think of the masses given show trials and then hanged; the masses sent off to war. One memory of all the reading I’ve done about Iran (and I wrote a book too): a teenage girl went swimming in a pool in her own garden. Somebody looked over the wall and reported her for being inappropriately dressed, in her swimming things in her own garden. She was charged and sentenced to 32 lashes. The terrified teen only received 16 or so, because before the end of the punishment, she was dead.

Just today I read of the dream the anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Schol had the night before her execution3: she was carrying a baby up a hill to be baptised in a church at the top of the hill. A great chasm opened in front of her. She put the baby down before herself disappearing into the chasm. She explained that our ideas (and perhaps, I would add, the promises of God) do not perish even if we do.

Slow, slow, slow. So much suffering. But it moves!

The revolution in UK churchgoing

Thousands are turning to Christ. No, really.

For someone who has been quite involved in surveys about the UK Christian scene since the 1980s, here is the most extraordinary piece of research I have ever seen.

It was published by the Bible Society on the day that the Archbishop Justin Welby resigned, and that news overshadowed this news. It should have been the other way around.

Bible Society did a survey of church attendance and attitudes in 2018 and then repeated the survey in 2024. These were national surveys conducted by YouGov with more than 10,000 participants each time.

The 2018 picture was one we have grown very familiar with: 8% of UK adults were attending church at least monthly — 6% of British men, 9% of British women. Older people (14% of all the old were attending monthly) were much more likely to show up in the pews than under 35s (4% attending monthly).

  • The 2024 picture, post-Brexit and post-covid, is a different story.
  • 12% of British adults are attending church at least monthly.
  • 33% of British churchgoers are aged 18-34
  • and the revival is led by men: 21% of British men aged 18-24 are regular churchgoers.
  • Church attendance in Britain has increased by half in six years. The increase is led by younger people and more by men than by women. Male churchgoers (13% of the population) now outnumber female churchgoers (10% of the population).

Allow me, if you would, an extended quote from the Baptist Times4:

The report’s co-author Dr Rhiannon McAleer said, ‘These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline.

‘While some traditional denominations continue to face challenges, we’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism.

‘There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’

There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.

Some of the increase in churchgoing has been driven by an increase in the ethnic minority population across England and Wales – among whom churchgoing rates tend to be higher – resulting in greater ethnic diversity in the Church. Today, around one in five churchgoers (19 per cent) are from an ethnic minority. Among 18–54-year-olds that figure rises to one in three (32 per cent), pointing to a Church which is increasingly diverse, and more so than the general population. However, there has also been a significant increase in churchgoing among the white population.

Dr McAleer said: ‘The stereotype of churchgoers is that they are predominantly old, white and female. Increasingly, that is no longer the case. We’re seeing increasing ethnic diversity, but also large numbers of younger people from all ethnicities and many more men attending church.’

Alongside this significant demographic change within churches, the report highlights evidence of ‘an active and vibrant Church’, said Bible Society. Both Bible reading and confidence in the Bible have increased among churchgoers compared to 2018, ‘indicating that new attenders are even more engaged in Christian belief and practice’.

Furthermore, the report identifies both a greater openness to faith and spirituality, and to churchgoing in general, even among non-churchgoers. Younger people are particularly warm to spirituality, with 40 per cent of 18–24-year-olds saying they pray at least monthly and 51 per cent saying they’ve undertaken a spiritual practice in the last six months – the highest of any age group.

Among non-churchgoing 18–24-year-olds curiosity about Christianity is also typically higher than average, with 34 per cent saying they would attend church if invited by a friend or family member and a quarter (25 per cent) saying they would be interested in discovering more about the Bible – again, the highest of any age group.

The report also shows how churchgoing affects both individual wellbeing and the local community.

The report’s co-author, Dr Rob Barward-Symmons, added: ‘With much of the population struggling with mental health, loneliness and a loss of meaning in life, in particular young people, church appears to be offering an answer. We found that churchgoers are more likely than non-churchgoers to report higher life satisfaction and a greater feeling of connection to their community than non-churchgoers. They are also less likely to report frequently feeling anxious or depressed – particularly young women.’

Communities are also impacted, as churchgoers are more likely to participate in activities that benefit their neighbourhoods than either other religious groups or the general population. The report found that churchgoers are more likely to volunteer, donate to foodbanks and give to charitable causes. For instance, 18–34-year-old churchgoers are almost twice as likely to donate to a food bank as their non-churchgoing peers.

Dr McAleer said: ‘Our report does not challenge the well-established fact that fewer people in England and Wales are choosing to identify as Christian.

‘However, it is the first large-scale study to concentrate not on self-declared Christian identity but on actual Christian practice. By this measurement, the Church is in an exciting period of growth and change.

‘The findings of the report should change how we think about faith in England and Wales, and particularly about Christianity. It should encourage church leaders and decision-makers to plan for growth rather than decline, and it should challenge the media and civic society to engage with and represent this significant and growing section of the population.’

Bible Society’s chief executive Paul Williams said,‘This is a highly significant report which should transform the perception of Christianity and churchgoing in England and Wales. Far from being on a slippery slope to extinction, the Church is alive and growing and making a positive difference to individuals and society.’

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. 5. (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 6. 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. 7 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. 8

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 9. 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.