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.
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.
Many people seem to believe they are too bad, broken, sad or worthless to be accepted by God. In our outrage culture, people who have been rejected or treated poorly often end up hating those who have hurt them, particularly when the hurt comes from a person who is supposed to represent God. But what might happen if your church explicitly communicated that mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and more are not a barrier to finding a shalom-building relationship with Christ?
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?
One of the challenges I constantly face is change. Change means that the old way is no longer working. Change means that a new way is begging for opportunity. I can’t but help to think that with all the changes we are being forced into making in our churches, the way that we worship God must be at the very top of the list of changes that we are seeking to make.
Isolation has affected all of us. Racial tensions, struggles, and division in our country has affected everyone in America. We are all a little broken right now. As a pastor, it is hard to build up people when you cannot function. Recently, the amount of mental strain it costs me to function “normally” and put on a brave face is extreme. But I have returned to the point that I can rely on what I know instead of what I feel. Here’s how you can, too.
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!
