About the Renewing Wellbeing: Churches Serving the Community’s Wellbeing Needs course
In this course, we will look at how simple shared habits and spaces run by churches, in partnership with existing mental health services, are helping to tackle mental and emotional health issues in communities across the nation.
Looking at the three core principles: being present; being prayerful; and, working in partnership with existing mental health services, this course will look at the story of Renew Wellbeing, a charity formed to help churches set up wellbeing cafes. With references to the psalms and the gospels, the course leader will explore why simple spaces and even simpler habits of prayer and presence seem to be so effective and so acceptable to mental health services as a way to tackle isolation and mental ill health.
Ruth Rice founded Renew Wellbeing after a period of mental ill health while in a position of church leadership. Her own story of brokenness is at the heart of her leadership. Her struggle led her to dream of a place where it was ‘ok not to be ok,’ a place where all would be welcome by name rather than a label, a place where shared habits of prayer and hobbies for wellbeing could be practised on the high street.
