The Gift of Kindness by Debbie Duncan and Cathy Le Feuvre 

This collage of Bible teaching, research findings and heart-warming stories makes for an encouraging and thought-provoking read


The Gift of Kindness
By Debbie Duncan and Cathy Le Feuvre
Authentic Media
ISBN: 978-1788932448
Reviewed by Terry Young

Debbie and Cathy’s main message is that the world would be a better place for more acts of kindness, and that kinder people are happier people. More specifically, you can be a better person if you plan and implement a few acts of kindness every day. Kindness is infectious, so that we can change others, and once infected, people stay infected and pass on good deeds for an encouragingly long time.

Their collage of Bible teaching, research findings and heart-warming stories makes for an encouraging and thought-provoking read. The chapters are short and there is a shaded box at the end of each with ‘practical pointers,’ a summary that gathers the threads together and a prayer you might like to pray.

For me the highlight was probably the reflections on Ruth where they dug into the rich loam of the Old Testament narrative: two women watching two women; two women who offered and received unexpected kindness in difficult times. That’s not the only story, though. There are stories sprinkled everywhere – the ice cream van dispensing a taste of better things outside a hospital under lockdown or someone sitting down to write a thank-you for a stream of kindness delivered decades ago.

So, who are Debbie and Cathy? Just now Debbie is an academic nurse in Northern Ireland (her most cited article is about resilience in nursing under Covid) but she has grown up children and a husband who is a minister and a wealth of Christian writing behind her, too. 

Cathy has had a career in newspapers, television and radio at local, regional and national level, latterly as a BBC presenter and producer in Jersey.  She’s also known for her work in PR and communications, having worked as a media head and consultant for many Christian organisations, including five years as the Head of Media for The Salvation Army UK and Ireland. She too, has form when it comes to writing and has published several Christian books.

They have set about kindness as a project: finding out about it, trying this out and reporting their findings on that, honestly and unflinchingly at times. They have collaborated before, when they lived close to each other and saw a lot of one another, but this time both have moved – Debbie to Northern Ireland and Cathy back home to Jersey in the Channel Islands – and the lines of communication are longer and more formal. This sense of turmoil – exacerbated by a crisis we will come to presently – is reflected in the text and provides the mixing for this recipe before they bake their cake and the final copy emerges. This is a book that has come out of the real world and bears the authentic imprint of a blend of textures.

A lumpy aspect of this mix is the appeal to the research scene. There is a wide range of research cited and plenty of references at the back, but I struggled to find my academic feet in the literature. The encouraging thing is that key features of kindness that Christians would expect to be validated – that you can become kinder, that there is something innate about our urges toward altruism even though the image we bear of our God is cracked – are being borne out in experiments.

Trickier, and too big a topic for this book and its chosen audience, is the business of unifying experiment, theology and a philosophy of who we are, into a coherent critical analysis. What Debbie and Cathy have done is to whet my interest and convinced me it would be fun to find out more.

Another gritty aspect of the book is that it is overshadowed by lockdown, so there is an unspoken underpinning theme behind it, namely, that Debbie and Cathy are still processing the pandemic and the way we reacted to it. My take on the pandemic and our response is quite different from theirs: the rich got richer very quickly while the poor got poorer; and I recall the many acts of kindness as welcome glints of hope in a world where fear, greed and selfishness prevailed all too easily. Although Christians stood out in the past for touching the untouchable, that is precisely what we didn’t do this time. We had our reasons, but we didn’t take the risk of touching. None of this invalidates what Debbie and Cathy have written: you must write from where you were, not from where you weren’t.

What it does mean is that I would love to see this pair of thoughtful writers engage more with the opposing forces to kindness – that list of anti-virtues in Galatians, for instance, that precedes the rainbow of fruit in which kindness is so memorably set.

At times, I worried that Debbie and Cathy were going to try to change the world through kindness alone, but their Christian faith holds and when push comes to shove, they are clear that none of us is good enough or kind enough to barge into heaven on personal merit.

They are optimistic, they have explored the topic broadly and tried it out for themselves, they have written it up well and now challenge us to take simple steps toward a walk of greater kindness ourselves. I doubt if Debbie and Cathy have written the last word on kindness, but what they have written is well worth reading. Try it!

Terry Young is a missionary kid who read science and engineering. After a PhD in lasers, he worked in R&D before becoming a professor, when he taught project management, information systems and e-business, while leading research in healthcare.

He set up Datchet Consulting to have fun with both faith and work and worshipped at Baptist churches in Slough for 19 years before moving to the New Forest.

World Kindness Day takes place on 13 November.