THE Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Rt Hon Hazel Blears MP, has highlighted the Waltham Forest "health preachers' scheme" as positive inter-faith work.
The scheme has worked with the local primary care trust (PCT) to convey key health messages to people within Waltham Forest's religious congregations.
Mrs Blears paid this compliment when she unveiled a framework for inter-faith partnership, ‘Face to Face and Side by Side' and announced a £7.5million investment in inter-faith work.
The investment will enable faith forums to be created across the country. Groups will access funding under the Faiths in Action Fund.
Mrs Blears said: "Faith motivates people to care about other people, and match their own faith with practical action."
Speaking on behalf of Waltham Forest Faith Communities Forum, Fr Steven Saxby explained that the Health Preachers idea was that religious people might be motivated by their faith to make positive health changes, especially if they could access positive health messages as part of their faith community experience.
"Our PCT agreed to run ascheme for a group of faith community leaders recruited by the Forum", he said. "The local authority agreed to provide funding for the scheme. The volunteer trainees were recruited as Health Preachers and it was made clear that they would be asked to communicate key health messages to their congregations in a way that would seek to engage others with health as a faith issue.
"We had an enthusiastic response from the faith communities and recruited three Muslim, three Sikh and nine Christian leaders from a wide variety of church traditions.
"There was no need to find common ground on faith issues; so we created a comfortable environment to include some who had no previous experience of interfaith work. We learnt much, not only about health but also about each other during the ten-week training course.
"Health Preachers was the first scheme of its kind in the UK and we were enthusiastic to promote it as something for others to emulate, a model for faith community engagement on the issue of health as well as a for interfait co-operation. However, the proof of the low-fat, highfibre fruit pudding had to be in the eating. The course made a difference to our health decisions as trainees. Could we convince others, through our preaching and activities, to make positive health changes? The results of the evaluation work indicated that we could and did demonstrate the success of the scheme."
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