Nourishing Roots - with Rev. Miranda Threlfal-Holmes, 12/03/24, 10:00-16:00

Join us for a day of reflection and spiritual renewal with the Free Churches Group, led by Rev. Miranda Threlfal-Holmes

Date: 12th March 2024, 10:00-16:00

Venue: The Quaker Meeting House, 22 School Lane Liverpool L1 3BT

Price: £20.00

Join us in Liverpool for a day of reflection and spiritual renewal with the Free Churches Group, led by Rev Miranda Threlfal-Holmes, held at the Liverpool Quaker Meeting House.

Nourishing Roots days are organised for Chaplains in Healthcare, Prisons, Education, and beyond to allow us time to reflect, recharge, and reinspire for our work and ministry.

Miranda is the Archdeacon of Liverpool and Team Rector of the St Luke in the City. She has experience in Higher Education chaplaincy and has published a number of books on chaplaincy, prayer, Christian history, and reading the Bible.

The day will include a buffet lunch.

Please contact Thandar (thandar.tun@freechurches.org.uk) for the discount code if are a chaplain from the FCG denominations. Visit here for the denomination list.

Photo by Brigitte Tohm on Unsplash

Introduction to Spiritual Distress: Research and Implications for Spiritual Care

Webinars for Free Church and other UK chaplains

November 21 & 29, 9:00 – 10:15 am Central Standard Time/ 3:00-4:15 PM GMT

Session 1: Basic Concepts, Examples, Prevalence, 21st November 2023
Session 2: Harmful Effects, Tools for Screening, Future Research, 29th November 2023

Description: Religious or spiritual (R/S) distress includes tensions and struggles about finding meaning in illness or injury and/or tensions and struggles with what one holds to be sacred. In these webinars we will review the research about R/S distress and discuss its implications for spiritual care providers. We will also look at methods that have been developed to identify patients or family caregivers who may be experiencing R/S distress and possibly benefit from referral to a spiritual care provider.

In Session 1 we will review basic concepts and definitions about R/S distress, and we will look at several vignettes of patients with R/S distress. Then we will examine some of the research about the prevalence of R/S distress and consider its implications for spiritual care providers.

In Session 2 we will examine some of the research about the harmful effects associated with R/S distress. Then we will review some tools that have been developed to screen for R/S distress and discuss how they can be incorporated in clinical settings to improve the provision of spiritual care. We will also discuss areas for future research about R/S distress.

Presenter: George Fitchett, D.Min., Ph.D. is a Professor in the Department of Religion, Health, and Human Values, Rush University Medical Center, Chicago Illinois. With training in both healthcare chaplaincy and epidemiology, he is one of the U.S.’s leading chaplain-researchers. In 1999 he and his colleagues reported the harmful effects of R/S distress in a sample of medical rehabilitation patients. The topic has remained a focus of his research. He is the former Director of Transforming Chaplaincy, whose mission is to promote evidence-based spiritual care (www.transformchaplaincy.org). In 2019 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University for Humanistic Studies, Utrecht, The Netherlands. Transforming Chaplaincy: The George Fitchett Reader, a collection of his research, was published in the Fall, 2021.

These webinars are free to attend thanks to support from the College of Healthcare Chaplains and the Free Churches Group

Please book your place HERE.

New NHS England Chaplaincy Guidelines Published on 2nd August 2023

The Free Churches Group (FCG) warmly welcomes the NHS England’s NHS Chaplaincy – guidelines for NHS managers on pastoral, spiritual and religious care, which recognises the invaluable contribution that Chaplains make to health and care and sets the ambition for inclusive chaplaincy services in all NHS settings.  

The FCG is developing a chaplaincy hub to resource and equip those interested in chaplaincy. As part of this, we are actively engaged in supporting healthcare chaplains who come from a Free Church tradition to provide high-quality, evidence-based and patient centred chaplaincy care through a varied programme of development opportunities. As such, we are delighted to see the emphasis the guidelines place on training, support and supervision for chaplains including the recognition that chaplains should engage in a programme of Continuous Professional Development, ‘which may include attending external training.’ We hope that this will lead to greater budgetary support from within organisations to enable chaplains to take advantage of training and development opportunities.

The FCG is pleased to see the drive for high quality appointments in the guidelines, with a clear expectation for employers to seek the endorsement of a respective religion or belief community before the appointment of a chaplain. For candidates from Group Members of the FCG, this will enable employers to benefit from the quality assurance arrangements that we have in place. We recognise that chaplaincy is a distinct calling requiring particular skills and, as such, we agree with the statement in the guidelines that providing pastoral care for people in a faith community setting or in other areas of NHS care is not, on its own, necessarily sufficient to demonstrate suitability. Therefore, the FCG fully supports reference in the guidelines to use professional appointment advisors to assist with the recruitment process from the outset. We also commend the direction to make use of clinical simulations consisting of a chaplain-patient encounter observed by those experienced in chaplaincy as part of selection processes.

As an ecumenical body of twenty-seven Church/Parachurch groups the FCG represents approximately 10,000 congregations across England and Wales. The guidelines recognise the role chaplains can play connecting with faith groups to help organisations understand local needs and creating opportunities to improve services and address health inequalities. We strongly encourage the development of communication between NHS chaplaincy teams and Free Churches.

The FCG is disappointed that the new guidelines do not contain suggested staffing ratios as included in the guidance published in 2003 and 2015. These were widely used by chaplaincy teams to both submit business cases for additional staffing as well as defending possible cuts. We are, therefore, grateful that the members of the Chaplaincy Forum for Pastoral, Spiritual and Religious Care in Health have produced a staffing framework to complement the guidelines.

We recognise the considerable work involved in producing these new guidelines and would like to thank all those involved for their time and effort. The guidelines make clear that high quality holistic care within the NHS in England cannot be achieved without the full integration of chaplaincy. We look forward to continuing our work enabling healthcare chaplains and chaplaincy to flourish.

FCG Chaplaincy Hub Offer for all Chaplains - Nourishing Roots with Paul Rochester

Join us for a day of reflection and spiritual renewal with the Free Churches Group, led by Bp. Paul Rochester, held in the beautiful and peaceful surrounds of the Royal Foundation of St Katherine, London on Tuesday 10th October 2023 from 10 am to 4 pm.

Paul is the General Secretary of the Free Churches Group and an ordained minister in the Church of God of Prophecy where his is a Senior Pastor for a Church in South London and has regional oversight for eight churches. Paul wrote his MA Dissertation on silence and Pentecostalism.

The day will include refreshments on arrival, mid-morning, and mid-afternoon as well as a hot buffet lunch.

Registration will be from 9.30am onward for a 10.00am start.

The cost for the day will be £20 for FCG chaplains, with a small number of places available for non-FCG chaplains from September.

Register your place here.

For more information, please contact Mark Newitt at mark.newitt@freechurches.org.uk

Visit here for more events.

Photo courtesy by Royal Foundation of St Katherine.

Free Churches Group, Health and Social Care Chaplains Study Day

Moral Injury, Staff Support and Looking After Ourselves

Free Churches Group, Health and Social Care Chaplains Study Day

27 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9HH

Tuesday June 20th 10:30 to 15:30

Cost: £15 for chaplains whose denomination is a member of the Free Churches Group

 £25 for all other chaplains

Please register your place HERE.

09:45 doors open

10:30 to 11:15 Session one – Introduction to Moral Injury [Katie]

11:25 to 1210 Session two – Supporting Health and Social care staff to Navigate their way Through MI. [Diana]

12:10 to 13:05 Lunch (provided)

13:10 to 13:50 Session three – How we set up staff support work at G&ST [Tracy]

13:55 to 14:40 Session four – Sharing Good Practice [input from the panel and attendees]

15:00 to 15:30 Session five –Self-care and Creative Reflection [Bob]

15:30 cake and conversation for those who want to stay for a little bit extra

The focus of the day will very much be about lived experience rather than academic discussion. A well as the examples that the presenters will share we want to draw on the knowledge of those attending so please do think about examples of good practice from your context that you’d be happy to share in session four. If you have questions you’d like to ask both the presenter and those attending you can email them in advance to Mark at mark.newitt@freechurches.org.uk

A CPD certificate for 4 hours will be available at the end of the day.

Presenter Biographies

Tracy Morgan is originally from New Zealand. She trained as a health care chaplain in 2018 and works at Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. First working in Paediatrics and acute adults, Tracy joined the dedicated staff support chaplaincy team that was formed in response to the Covid 19 pandemic in November 2021.

Diana Steadman worked in education and guidance before training in pastoral ministry at Spurgeon’s College. She is currently serving as Staff Wellbeing Chaplain at Kingston Hospital NHS Trust where from 2017 she has been establishing the role working alongside a Physiotherapist, Clinical Psychologist and Mind-Body Practitioner as part of an in-house Staff Wellbeing Team. Diana is now responsible for creatively supporting and advocating for the pastoral needs of staff within Unplanned Care, harnessing the tools of reflective practice, pastoral supervision, coaching and other development activities, and by reporting into divisional progress and Trust-wide steering group meetings.

Katie Watson is Head of Chaplaincy at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. She has served there for 15 years. Prior to this she was a Military Police Officer in the British Army with operational experience in Bosnia and Croatia during the early 90s and Northern Ireland during the conflict. She runs ultra distance trails and does so that cake can be a major factor in her diet.

Bob Whorton is retired from Healthcare Chaplaincy but continues to work as a reflective supervisor. His interests are in creativity, writing, embodiment and the use of the imagination.

Note: If you are a Free Church Healthcare Chaplain, please contact Thandar at thandar.tun@freechurches.org.uk for a discounted price. The member denominations list is available to view here.

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash