What are the essential elements of Relational Grace and how do those connect to public health and human flourishing?
Can we use insights from key SMM program leaders to describe the characteristics, methods, and sustainability of their global health model in such a way that others can learn from it?
How are Jesus Cares Ministry programs implemented in the United States including core features and complexities?
What is the perceived impact on individuals, families, and other church members and locations where Jesus Cares Ministry has been implemented?
The setting of cross-cultural medicine inherently produces moral injury. This moral injury occurs because different cultures have different deeply held values, and medical care intersects with some of the most emotionally and spiritually powerful values. Moral injury is one of the most common reasons for distress in healthcare missionaries, and the consequences can be severe and lifelong. This calls for adequate preparation, ongoing mentoring, institutional boundary-setting, and further research.
Jason Paltzer and Keyanna Taylor describe the opportunities to strengthen the evidence coming from faith-based health organizations to improve outcomes and credibility. Meeting the financial and design knowledge of organizations to conduct and disseminate research is critical to increasing impact in community health ministry
The Public Health, Religion, and Spirituality Network is a great place to find additional researchers in public health interested in measuring spiritual factors important for public and population health.
The presence and power of gangs in Central America and other countries make transformational development strategies increasingly difficult as well as dangerous. For more than thirty years, development practitioner David Bueno has witnessed the growth and spread of gangs in communities where legitimate and constructive social institutions have gradually disappeared or been marginalized, leaving affected communities increasingly isolated. Pentecostal churches are among the few remaining social institutions, but they too are increasingly affected by gang-related dynamics.
Understanding the dynamics of a community engagement approach
to integral missions leads to a healthy and biblical understanding of human dignity. Using he Social-Ecological and HWVA models to inform a CE approach, individuals and communities have not only experienced economic growth and access to educational opportunities but also greater sense of well-being and
peace in growing in their relationship with God as their Father, Redeemer, and Friend.
A similar feature among the models was the importance of understanding the impacts of a community’s worldview and beliefs on health to discussing the spiritual aspects of health and behavior change. Community engagement and cultivating relationships were two common themes motivating the models. A primary difference among the models was the direction of engagement.
Participation in religious services is associated with numerous aspects of human flourishing, including happiness and life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. Evidence for the effects of religious communities on these flourishing outcomes now comes from rigorous longitudinal study designs with extensive confounding control. The associations with flourishing are much stronger for communal religious participation than for spiritual-religious identity or for private practices. While the social support is an important mechanism relating religion to health, this only explains a small portion of the associations. Numerous other mechanisms appear to be operative as well. It may be the confluence of the religious values and practices, reinforced by social ties and norms, that give religious communities their powerful effects on so many aspects of human flourishing.
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