Faith Community Nurse Network

Who is a Faith Community Nurse?

A faith community nurse is an experienced, actively licensed Registered Nurse who has completed specialized professional nursing education focused on intentional care of the spirit. FCNs serve in congregations and community settings, making home visits, leading health promotion groups, conducting healing services, helping individuals and families obtain needed healthcare and much more.

Did you know?

• Faith Community Nurses make about 100,000 home visits in the Twin Cities each year - and never charge for their services.
• 52% of faith community nurses serve as unpaid professionals.
• Research published in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing found Faith Community Nursing interventions with more than 1,000 seniors not only saved lives, but also resulted in cost savings of $3.5 million.
• Faith community nurses promote whole-person health beyond congregations, spending 20% of their role serving their neighborhood or community at large.
• A recent survey of 150 faith community nurses in Minnesota found that they have a collective reach of over 130,000 individuals.

About the Network

The Faith Community Nurse Network (FCNN) is an interfaith, service organization of and for faith community nurses. FCNN promotes the professional role of the faith community nurse and supports FCNs in Minnesota in order to strengthen outcomes of their nursing care.

Our mission is to advance faith community nursing by providing a whole-person approach to individual and population health. We do this by:

• Providing professional nursing education workshops and seminars to enhance nursing practice; 
• Connecting faith community nurses to community resources and services;
• Supporting health professionals to lead evidence-based falls prevention and health promotion programs for hundreds of older adults in the community;
• Training RNs across Minnesota to become faith community nurses through the biannual Foundations of Faith Community Nursing course; and
• Promoting faith community nursing as a vital public resource.

Our vision is to bring faith community nursing to every community.

 Our values are professional nursing practice, compassionate respect, and collaboration.

Professional Nursing Practice
We advance faith community nursing as a specialized professional practice focusing on the intentional care of the spirit, the promotion of whole-person health, and the prevention or minimization of illness within faith communities and the wider community (Scope and Standards of Faith Community Nursing Practice, 3rd edition.). The five core values of professional nursing are human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism and social justice and we subscribe to these values in our actions and decisions.

Compassionate Respect
Compassionate respect for all human beings is essential to whole person health and the intentional care of the spirit. We achieve compassionate respect through, listening, open communication, inclusivity, equity, advocacy, being non-judgmental and maintaining each person’s dignity. It is these actions that promote trust, enhance human functioning and quality of life.

Collaboration
Working together results in better outcomes. We build, support and encourage collaboration across teams, organizations and communities to solve complex problems related to health care. We respect and welcome perspectives that challenge and push us forward as we work together on similar goals. 

We need you!

Faith community nurses provide high quality spiritual, physical, and emotional care right in our communities. Help support these incredible health care workers! There are two ways to get involved: