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.
Traditions can be beautiful and meaningful but in Colossians, Paul shares how traditions can also be problematic. “We’ve always done it this way before” cannot function as a core value within the church. Everything we do should be consistent with the character of Christ and the values of His Kingdom.
Ideally, every person is welcome and embraced by a church as Christ welcomes and embraces all with unconditional love. That, unfortunately, is not always expressed by the church. I believe in those moments when we do feel we need to leave, God’s love will guide the conversation and direct us towards a place that will be more welcoming and open to expressing the love of Christ for all people.
Unseen: How We’re Failing Parent Caregivers and Why It Matters made its global online premiere May 20. This is part 2 of the in-depth questions we posed to Jess Ronne to help our readers better understand the issues raised in the documentary and how churches can be supportive of caregiving families. Read part 1 here.
