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.
When church leadership is approached about the need to create environments that can serve the needs of the disability and special-needs community, the most common response is a lack of education and lack of resources. In other words, there is no room in the budget, no room in the mission, no room in the vision of the church, and no room for discussion about disability theology.
Communication from one person to another is so fundamental that we assume all but the youngest children can understand what we say—and even what we mean—in our own language. But mental health conditions and high functioning autism often interfere with a person’s ability to communicate with others, much like living as a stranger in a strange land, speaking a foreign tongue.
