Tackling Spiritual Poverty

Cynnal is a counselling service specifically aimed at clergy, Christian workers and their families. CEO Wynford Ellis Owen explains what the newly-configured service has to offer.

On Sunday 26th October, traditionally Wales’s Recovery Sunday, we officially relaunched the Living Room, a community-based recovery centre, and Cynnal, the counselling service for all clergy, ministers of religion, Christian workers, and their families.

These services, and a new venture being developed in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University, called A Room to Live - a virtual Living Room - will hopefully be available throughout the world and in every language - under the auspices of our parent charity, the Council on Alcohol and Other Drugs (CARE - the Charity for Addiction, Recovery and Empowerment).

It feels like a homecoming. I was the Council’s CEO back in 2008, when I envisaged the Living Room concept, which launched in 2011; The Living Room has an “all addictions” approach and the help and support we offer is not time limited.

The Cynnal counselling service began in 2015, when we took over from the Churches Counselling Service for Wales (CCSW), which was being wound up. That organisation’s chair, the late Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, believed that there was still a need for the service, and that was when I was invited to take over the service, which we rebranded and renamed as Cynnal.

Lately, though, we felt we were losing our identity within a corporate entity which was secular and at odds with our philosophy and approach. We needed to regain our voice again. Hence our relaunch.

Cynnal deals with all kinds of conditions - anxiety, stress, depression, dissatisfaction with self, the unbearable burden of aloneness and all other symptoms and manifestations of the spiritual poverty that blights society these days and which doesn’t discriminate.

No doctor or tablet will resolve a spiritual problem, only a spiritual solution will do that. And the solution comes in the form of a journey of self-discovery. In fact, Christ himself described the problem and provided the solution, when he was quoted in the Gospel of Thomas as saying, “When you know yourself, you will know God the Father; when you don’t know yourself, you will live in poverty; you will be poverty.” It is this ‘spiritual poverty’ that Cynnal addresses.

Currently, Cynnal has 287 clients on its books. Several of them have completed their treatment, and many choose to take advantage of the service's long-term support and aftercare, which can be in either Welsh or English. For more information and to find out who’s really doing the ‘living and the dying’ in your name, contact us on 029 2063 0993 / www.cynnal.uk