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 people, we gravitate toward the comfortable, the safe, the easy, and the peaceful. I get it. No, I really, really do. Because of this, I absolutely understand why it is scary to welcome people with disabilities into your church. That is why today I will tell you why you should encourage us to attend your church, but you should also be thankful we are part of your church.
We are living in times ripe for the history books. Most of us have been weighing questions on topics ranging from the effects of isolation to medical vulnerability, racial equity and religious freedoms. Leaders in the disability movement are keenly aware of overlaps and similarities among the issues at hand. I’ve been praying that God would use this season to grow us into more compassionate and courageously engaged people, because we desperately need to start appreciating our uniquenesses and enjoying how interconnected we are.
I’m willing to guess that everyone on the planet has experienced life off kilter in some way this year. Wow! 2020! A year we won’t easily forget. Life right now is hard for so many, feeling messy and downright immobilizing. There’s much confusion and unrest in the world today. What do we do? What do we believe?
My husband has advanced dementia. Many people I meet want to understand, but often make assumptions and therefore make mistakes. The Bible warns us not to look at externals; this is not how God looks at individuals. We need to be willing to look at our assumptions and make changes; we must be willing to learn.
Just a handful of weeks into the pandemic quarantine, I was already starting to take stock of lessons God was teaching me. In the course of time and in the newly emerging chaos of rushing back to “normal” life, I’m already struggling to remember, let alone walk out, the lessons I was so certain would not leave me! How about you? During meetings with disability leaders and a recent check-in call with a group of pastors who are navigating ministry in these times, I have heard valuable insights from varied fronts.
As teachers and leaders, we get to encourage the spiritual development of the students in our churches. But what should we expect from the children in our special-needs classes? Sandra Peoples shares how to write ISPs for each child in your special-needs ministry—Individualized Spiritual Plans that will help you set goals and measure progress!
