Called to the classroom?
More and more the 21st-century church is striving to reach into the local community. Scan the job pages in the Christian press and you will find advertisements for youth workers and community workers abounding. Look carefully at the job descriptions and you will uncover a real desire among Christians to get out to where people are on a day-to-day basis: shopping centres, hospitals, schools, youth centres, sports clubs…
Pastoral workers and lay people alike are being encouraged to join the visiting teams of local hospitals and hospices, to set up after school clubs, to get involved in crèches in large shopping centres. This is all about the local church reaching out.
Christian counselling and your GP surgery
You may be surprised to discover that the supposition of popular philosopher and TheTimes’s columnist, A.C. Grayling, and your local GP probably coincide — roughly one third of all visits to the doctor’s surgery have a psychological cause.
It is widely accepted that there is a very real, but often indefinable, grey zone between diagnosable physical ailments, that GPs are trained to treat or refer, and recognised mental health issues which are referred on to the psychiatric service.