Save the Date: April 2-4, 2018

Texas Faith and Health Summit — Beloved Community of Health

Houston Graduate School of Theology, 4300-C West Bellfort, Houston, Texas

For information, contact Dr. Fred Smith, fsmith@hgst.edu • 713-942-9505 x 215

“It is not impossible to dream of thousands of congregations that see health as a seamless whole- physical, mental, social, and spiritual – that see poverty and illiteracy and addiction and prejudice and pollution and violence and hopelessness and fatalism and conflict as brokenness, diseases that require that redemptive force offered by the faith community.” -William Foege, M.D., Senior Fellow for Health, The Carter Center

Purpose

The Texas Faith and Summit to create a Beloved Community of the Health will call to Houston, Texas, hundreds leaders healthcare, public health and faith leaders of every faith. Especially, faith leaders who are presently engaged in ministries and programs that seek to improve the health of communities by addressing the social determinants of the health by engaging in upstream prevention. We are especially interested in those who are in collaboration with health systems and public health departments. The purpose of the Summit is to foster deeper collaboration and create new ones to address social determinant of health on a population level focusing on the health equity.

Vision

The current period of America’s story represents what may be called a Kairos moment— the right time for renewing the moral vision of faith-shaped and charitable healthcare. Alternatives to the complete commodification of healthcare are needed now more than ever. Health care envisioned as the business of waging war against death, in the most cost-efficient manner, will not provide the transformative power that will lead to the beloved community of health. What is needed, instead, is an abiding commitment to social justice and a firm unwillingness to accept health disparities as inevitable. Such vision is exemplified beyond the normal boundaries of healthcare as presently envision. (Stakeholder Health: Insights from New Systems of Health)

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane.”

Goal

The goal is to bring awareness to potential and actual of the role faith community in transforming our present failed fee-for-service, piecemeal healthcare system into value and placed-based population health and health equity system without walls or barriers to good health for all.

Objectives

• Developing and deepening the collaboration between faith-based/mission driven hospitals systems, public health departments and congregational networks and faith-based organization.
• Development of peer learning and action network in Texas to increase awareness of the  such coalitions, peer technical assistance and collaborative action on the local and region level.
• Fostering regional conversation, about faith and health collaboration on population health and health equity.

Outcomes

• Awareness of the actual and potential role of faith communities in population health and health equity
• Knowledge of how to expand and deepen the collaboration between Hospitals, Public Health and Faith Communities.
• Promising practices in Faith and Health ministries that address the social determinants of the heath

Partners

• Houston Graduate School of Theology
• Institute for Spirituality and Health at the Texas Medical Center
• Methodist Healthcare Ministries
• It Time Texas
• 100 Million Healthier Lives Campaign, Communities of Spirit HUB (Institute for Healthcare Improvement)