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.
God's directive for adoptive families is the same as it is for every family. But adoptive, special-needs families experience extra challenges to meet this calling. In part 2 of this 3-part series, Sandra Peoples shares practical tips for churches to provide places of inclusion and belonging for families.
Many of the concepts that the general population have experienced for the first time in 2020 are all too familiar to some in the disability community. The new reality that many of us are experiencing for the first time is all too familiar for many families living with disabilities who face manifold barriers to leave their home on a typical day. So what if we took this opportunity to re-imagine a church that was accessible to 100% of people—rather than just the 85% who don’t live with disabilities?
By now, disruption has become a familiar friend to each of us. But though coronavirus may be new, the concept of disruption—whether from a global pandemic, broken washing machines, or relational strife—is not. In much of scripture, it seems that God uses precisely the disruption that we hate to jolt his people out of negative patterns—whether it be their blatant worship of idols or their comfortable but self-serving career paths. God does not waste these disruptions.
