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.
As The Banquet Network is working to develop a training on disability for international missionaries, we’ve had the opportunity to listen to people with disabilities, across the world, share with us what they want missionaries to know. There is a significant theme that has continued to emerge in these interviews: people with disabilities want missionaries to care about disability, because it is in Christ that they have found purpose.
Labels can define us. Many times we attribute value to people according to what they do. We see people through our perceived definition of the label. They cease to become an individual person and become confined by the label. But churches need to be careful about labelling people, to ensure that we don’t just see the person with a disability through the eyes of the label.
There are so many great ideas out there about starting a disability ministry. But unless we take these ideas and start walking, they will mean nothing. There are things that we’re going to have to throw off—much like Bartimaeus had to throw off his cloak to freely run to Jesus. What is your cloak? What is the thing you need to throw aside in order to take your next step in starting a disability ministry?
