Belonging, trust and loneliness - what helps?

Place based, belonging and the policy agendas.

There’s plenty of talk in policy circles about trust, belonging, loneliness and ‘place based’ or ‘asset based’ thinking. If you’re reading this, you might have heard it yourselves.

We find these buzz words can be helpful in getting traction for what we do. Trust, loneliness, belonging, place are all things that contribute to our overarching measure of life satisfaction and wellbeing. However, increasingly when we hear those phrases we find ourselves shouting at the radio. Slightly cross that no-one mentions the thing that is staring us all in the face.

“What about Churches!”? They are in the centre of most towns, villages. They set up and run the vast majority of foodbanks. They do so much good and yet no-one talks about it (not even the church itself).

House of Good Health - is church one of the only places to reduce loneliness and increase trust and belonging?

We have already highlighted in the seminal House of Good study the enormous economic value of the church and also what the NHS would need to pay to provide the social care and health benefits of the church (in the 2024 study House of Good Health).

At the same time as working on the House of Good health, we wanted to dig deeper into loneliness. Building on a big review in 2019 by DCMS and the What Works in Wellbeing Centre that identified a gap in understanding of UK open / national data.

Digging into the UK open data is what we do best. So we looked at the effect of churches and volunteering on loneliness, trust and belonging. Churches and their volunteers host a multitude of community activities, such as support groups, food banks and even choirs. We found that:

• There are clear findings of significant and positive impact on our wellbeing, sense of trust in others and belonging to our community when we take part in community activities and groups that take place in church buildings (no huge surprise). 

• This is directly relevant to the research work on culture, heritage, levelling up and also to the growing policy agenda of working with existing assets in ‘place-based’ work to improve lives in communities. 

• Loneliness is a complex issue with three types of loneliness identified: social, emotional and existential. Loneliness is about your circumstances and the quality of social networks - which can be improved. But some of it may be a permanent state of mind.

• Churches have a positive role to play. In this report, we establish some strong evidence for the role of churches in reducing loneliness. Attending church regularly and volunteering for and in a group both seem to reduce loneliness. 

• However, the UK data on loneliness is limited and the evidence on the relationship between taking part in or attending community activities and projects and loneliness is less clear (despite being positive for trust and belonging).

• Common sense would suggest that access to and participation in a social group should impact the circumstantial elements of loneliness - new friends, improved social networks and feeling supported. But more work is needed to provide clearer evidence. The paper provides a suggestion of the way to do this.

Finally, the elephant in the room and the forcefield of fear around the church.

We spoke to a Bishop about all of this recently. He spoke of a forcefield of fear around the church. Yes, there are issues with the church on historical and perhaps ongoing sexual abuse. But what sector with a power dynamic is without these issues (music, TV, sport, film, politics, the workplace and every Friday and Saturday night up and down the country).

This is a human (with the emphasis on man) problem. We still listen to music, go to the cinema, play sport. There remains good and very bad everywhere. And much more to be done. There also remains a lot of good that churches are doing at the heart of every town in the UK. We might not believe in God but we can all believe in GOOD.