Elaina sits down and talks with Lisa Jamieson from Walk Right In Ministries about family caregivers, the holidays, and ways the church can better support them.
The training, content, gatherings and experiences that we’ve created for pastors, church staff and ministry volunteers produced with the assistance of like-minded colleagues serving in disability ministry have become our principal service. So much of what we’re able do to help churches welcome and support families, we accomplish by bringing together experts from other ministry organizations.
November is Caregiver Awareness Month. As someone who became one of my dad’s caregivers before I started school, I grew up thinking everyone in the world was aware of caregivers and caregiving. As a young adult my husband and I cared for a son born with a life-threatening medical condition, and his typical sibling. As members of the sandwich generation, my brother, sister, and I cared for our mother for 15 years after she was diagnosed with dementia. This explains why, when I first heard that November is Caregiver Awareness Month, I was incredulous, and I still am.
In this episode, Lauren Hickman shares her personal journey and calling to disability ministry, describing how God has guided her every step of the way to serve families impacted by disability.
In today’s episode, Sandra talks about the challenges small to normative-sized churches face in disability ministry and shares how the churches she’s been a part of have overcome these challenges.
What can we do to love our neighbors with disabilities? Offer them our presence. Spend time with them. I’m convinced far fewer people with chronic illnesses would be seeking physician-assisted suicide if they didn’t have to suffer alone. Get to know the neighbors whose child is picked up by a van on school days. Provide dinner to the person in your office caring for an elderly parent or a child with a disability. Invite them to join you at church for a worship service or some other activity.
Families and individuals affected by disability deserve our respect and prayerful care. Their uniqueness deserves our attention. We need to accept and respond to others as we would like others to respond to us. Here are some ways for churches to cultivate a Christ-like response to special needs families and tricky situations in the worship service.
