Continuing our series looking at groups with similar aims, Trevor Parsons meets the dynamic Christian charity Renew Wellbeing which, in less than a decade, has grown a network of 260 wellbeing spaces and places where it’s OK not to be OK
In 2010, full-time primary school teacher, mother of three, and enthusiastic Baptist church member and leader Ruth Rice had a breakdown. Suddenly, seemingly inexplicably, it was all too much.
With all that was going on in her life—all which she loved doing—she had simply “forgotten that I was a human being. Nobody else was terribly surprised when I had a breakdown, but I was! Because I hadn’t looked after myself very well. I’d been burning the candle at both ends, and to be honest, church was a big part of that. I wanted to change the world, and I wanted everybody to come to know Jesus, and I wanted to be the best mum and the best wife. And I wasn’t the best anything. And there was a day came that I just couldn’t get out of my bed.”
Recounting her story at a Renew Wellbeing training course for churches organised by the Diocese of London, Ruth says: “The straw that broke the camel’s back—and it still makes me laugh thinking of it—was just trying to think ‘what shall we have for tea?’ I slid down onto the kitchen floor and cried for an hour. I remember thinking: ‘This isn’t right—I’ll just have a little rest.’ And as it turned out I couldn’t function in my life for about a year.”
One of the things she found most challenging in this time was how to deal with the way she was used to experiencing her practice of religion. As a church leader, it had all been about “busyness is next to Godliness”, and serving the Lord at a breakneck pace. “I’m glad for it,” she says, “but it turned into a work ethic that made me forget that I was a human being first.”
Ruth found she couldn’t even remember passages she had just been reading from the bible. She couldn’t pray because she had no words. It felt like God was nowhere. And she couldn’t face going to church because, however sympathetic everyone was, all the patting of her shoulder and unsolicited praying was hard to bear, and it didn’t make her feel better.
“So I stopped going to everything and I got very isolated, and I realised I wasn’t the only person who felt like that. And that one in four people, even before a global pandemic, is struggling at some point in their life with their mental and emotional health. And all the ways we were working hard as a church—and we were working hard—were not having much of an effect on that quarter of the population.”
What began to help Ruth was learning to “slow down, shut up, and do some hobbies.” Hobbies like painting stones—“Don’t judge me!”—crotchet, furniture restoration, and a bit of gardening. She found that these were things that did her good. As for God, she knew He hadn’t left her. She just had to find a different way of talking to Him.
Coming out of a fairly charismatic background, Ruth started to re-engage with the unfamiliar, in the form of contemplative prayer, and liturgy. “I found it really beautiful to read a psalm. Because he’s really not OK a lot of the time, the guy who wrote the psalms! And with the psalms I can always pray. Even if I’m feeling rubbish I can pray, because this gives me permission to. And I found I could take a little phrase from a psalm that was good and true, and fix it in my mind, so that I didn’t have my mind going over and over how rubbish I was, and how rubbish it was not being able to get out of bed. All the things I couldn’t fix. I found I could replace these, for a time at least, with these words that were good and true.
“I made this habit of meditating on a phrase from the psalms when I was having my cuppa in the morning, sitting holding my cup, knowing my life was held… my life like a cup in God’s hands. Held in His hands—that’s wellbeing for me. So having this practice of constantly attaching a spiritual inner practice to an outer habit, I just found it really helpful.”
Ruth started wondering whether anyone else might like to practise this same method of meditation with her. She mentioned it to a few people. It didn’t take long before her house started filling up. They called it the cup group, sitting with their cups, meditating on their phrase from a psalm. “My neighbour came, and her sister came, and a lady came who wasn’t Christian, and we all were quite happy to just sit and do this thing together.”
This type of contemplative, rhythmic practice was on offer if you went out of your way to look for it, at retreat centres hundreds of miles away, and Ruth loved the experience when she could get to one. But she started to think: “Shouldn’t every place where there are God’s people be a place where people can find this peace? Shouldn’t that be our priority?”
Those simple components were Ruth’s long journey back to “some sort of emotional recovery”, as she puts it. “I still walk with an emotional limp, and I think I always will,” she says, “and I’m quite glad of it. The way I was living before wasn’t very healthy. And as a leader, I wasn’t really leading, because I was going for a walk on my own, and people were miles behind me. This slow-down enables you to be there with the people who don’t go that fast. The showing up enabled me to have a hobby, something that was fun, that was good for my soul and my body, and that other people could join in it. And the praying… that’s our whole language isn’t it? That’s our best offer into the wellbeing conversation as church.”
Ruth’s informal sharing of the discoveries of what worked for her started to grow into something bigger. “It wasn’t about setting up a charity,” she says. “It was about me trying to authentically live well in my own skin, and then my heart breaking from the fact that there were people around me who didn’t know that God loved them that much.” She became newly aware of how unconditional and unearned God’s love was for her, and had rid herself of the feeling of pressure to get things done. And ironically this made her feel liberated to get to work on something that turned out to be quite important.
“Renew 37 was our first space, and it came about for selfish reasons on my part. I really fancied us having a place where it wasn’t my front room! And where there were some boundaries of time and place.” The place turned out to be a little shop on the high street in West Bridgford, Nottingham, next door to an existing tea shop that was run by two Christian women who offered to share the space with Ruth. They were worried about people being isolated, and wanted to partner with her church. So they arranged that four days a week the church would run it, and the other three days a week the café would use it as extra space.
By this time Ruth had given up teaching, for the sake of her mental health, and, remarkably, her church took her on to lead the project full time. At first there was talk about making Renew 37 into a multi-function space, to include church meetings, but Ruth was clear that it had to be just somewhere where people can drop in, where someone knows your name, where you can bring or share a hobby. Something more like a front room than a church. She felt sure that would help people get throught the door. And it did.
Again, for her own benefit as much as anyone else’s, Ruth opened up another room next door to the main café area, as a place to go and pray and meditate. “Because I can’t be present with people for that long without having to go off and spend a bit of time with God!” So the quiet room was established, where people could go any time, but soon a rhythm emerged of prayer together at the beginning and end of each session of the café.
“We realised that the choice of social space and quiet space was all that people needed. The option to walk into the God story or not, and just to have some company, meant that people felt in control. And actually it was really popular. And the best thing was, it felt good for me!”
A big breakthrough in expanding from a successful one-off to an inspirational national network came in 2016, a year after setting up Renew 37, when Ruth approached the Cinnamon Network, an organisation that promotes social action within churches, with an emphasis finding existing projects that have already demonstrated their value and efficacy, and replicating them.
Ruth talked to Cinnamon about the personal experiences that had led her to Renew 37, and presented her vision for helping churches to set up similar spaces where it was OK not to be OK. They went for it, and provided start-up funding for her to work part-time to set up the charity. Cinnamon also guided her through the development of the structure, governance, funding and franchising model for Renew Wellbeing. The idea was always to make sure that the principles were “multipliable and simple”.
Renew Wellbeing certainly has multiplied since then, and it is now in partnership with an amazing 260 wellbeing spaces, as well as ten more that are aimed specifically at families. So what’s different about Renew Wellbeing’s approach? After all, coming in to a Renew space will seem very familiar to anyone who has been involved in Being Alongside, whose branches and affiliates have been running drop-ins along similar lines since the late 1980s.
Part of the charity’s success is certainly the personal appeal of its founder, who is such an excellent and engaging advocate, both in person and via her books, of which she has written three. (The first of those, Slow Down, Show Up & Pray [see right], tells the whole story of Renew Wellbeing and contains the manual for how to create a Renew space).
But probably the key factor in Renew Wellbeing’s popularity is its tested formula, which is simple enough to grasp but still provides a sturdy enough framework for churches across the UK who have already identified the need for a quiet shared space to help people with their wellbeing, and are searching for guidance on how to go about serving the community in this way. If churches agree that their spaces will be guided by Renew Wellbeing’s three core principles—being prayerful, being present, and being in partnership—the charity will gladly start them on the journey, with visits to existing centres, introductory webinars, training videos, and sessions with regional co-ordinators.
It is notable that the third core principle, that of being in partnership, does explicitly encourage the establishment of links between Renew spaces and statutory services in their locality.
Once up and running, Renew spaces are encouraged to network with others in their region, to share good practice and prayer, and volunteers can attend retreats locally, as well as an annual national retreat.
Renew Wellbeing’s current goal is for 10% of churches to have a wellbeing space on this model. There does seem to be great enthusiasm for Renew Wellbeing, and maybe this will be the vehicle that brings the drop-in, wellbeing space, or whatever you like to call it, fully into the mainstream of church life.
The Church of England certainly seems keen, and is currently running a centrally funded pilot scheme for dioceses to set up Renew Wellbeing spaces in churches.
How wonderful to see an initiative that came from a Baptist church being embraced across denominations. After all, if it works, who cares who gets the glory… but God?
renewwellbeing.org.uk