This initiative has put in place a partnership with the charity Renew Wellbeing under the leadership of Ruth Rice. This charity has developed a model for developing church-based hospitality spaces with intentional support for people with mental health challenges: “a place where it’s ok not to be ok”.
In our partnership, we aim to build on Ruth’s existing work with other branches of the Christian church, and help Anglican churches to learn about and implement this model more widely. Working with seven pilot dioceses, we set a target of helping up to 20 parishes set up new Renew Wellbeing spaces to support their local community.
As part of this work, we interviewed church leaders who had already set up Renew spaces and had been running these over the last few years. They testified to their positive experience and the wonderful encounters they had had through opening and running their community cafés. Click here to watch this webinar.
The great news is that since our launch of the Renew Wellbeing initiative, 20 training webinars and 9 in-person training events have been held with Anglican church leaders. Ten completely new Renew Wellbeing spaces have been set up, and many others are in the process of reviewing the material and considering their next step. All who attended the training came away with new ideas for how to develop and build their existing hospitality spaces with Renew’s three-part motif “Be present, be prayerful, be in partnership” in mind.
You can see details of all Anglican Renew Wellbeing centres at this map.
What’s next?
Ruth and her team continue their work, encouraging those who have made enquiries, training newly registered parishes, and supporting existing Renew spaces. The hope and prayer is that some spaces can become resource hubs, helping other nearby centres, spreading the ideas and showing how the model works in practice.
It is fantastic to see the progress being made and every time we talk to a leader of a Renew space, we are reminded how much this matters to individuals. We hear so many anecdotes of people of all ages and stages dropping in at a Renew space, finding community there, and feeling supported and cared for in a safe way, in the midst of the challenges they are facing.