‘Death-confident congregations’? Lessons from the GraveTalk Pilot

GraveTalk was a pilot project conducted in 2013-4 to initiate conversations around death, dying and funerals within the Church of England. The scheme entailed the training of facilitators to set up café-style events within their churches, at which conversations were prompted by the use of a pack of ‘conversation cards’.
Data were gathered from three sources to provide an overview of the conduct and effects of the initiative from the perspective of facilitators and participants. The sample was necessarily small and selective, and the results did not lend themselves to quantitative analysis. However, almost all participants reported positively on their experience and analysis of recurrent themes provided some important insights into the way such conversations may be structured. In particular, they cast light on the importance of a carefully-created hospitable environment in creating the conditions for group discussions of this type; and on the role and potential of conversation cards as a facilitative tool.