Around 19 per cent of Australia’s population is of school age. A similar proportion—around 17 per cent—are seniors, if that’s defined as 65 and older. Are those percentages reflected in the time, people and resources that your church devotes to evangelising and ministering to these age groups?
Most of us would admit that our church has put vastly more effort into youth and children’s ministry than we do into ministry to older people. But why is that the case? Is it just a natural focus on the next generation, or is it a blind spot and a huge missed opportunity?
In this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast with Ben Boland, chaplain for Churches of Christ Queensland, we think about the marvellous opportunities and challenges of ministering to older people.
Links referred to:
- Priceless People: Loving Older People and People Living with Dementia (Ben R Boland): available from Koorong, Reformers, The Wandering Bookseller, Word, 10ofThose and Amazon
- Hymns We Love (Steve and Pippa Cramer): Sample session.
- Faith in Later Life
- Coming to Christ in Dementia (Mark Womell)
- Next CCL event: The smartphone disciple (Mon 27 Oct)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 41:20 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:05] Tony Payne: Now here’s an interesting thought experiment: around 19 per cent of Australia’s population is of school age—say, five to 17 years old or thereabouts—and a similar proportion, just a little less, around 17 per cent, are seniors, if that’s defined as 65 and older. Now, are those percentages reflected in the time and people and resources that your church devotes to evangelising and ministering to these age groups? I think most of us would admit that our church has put vastly more effort into youth and children’s ministry than we do into ministry to older people.
[00:00:47] But why is that the case? Is it just a natural focus on the next generation, or is it a blind spot and a huge missed opportunity? Well, that’s our subject in today’s episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast as we think about the marvellous opportunities and challenges of ministering to older people.
[Music]
[00:01:22] Tony Payne: Hello, everyone! It’s Tony Payne here again with another episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. Great to have you with us again, coming to you from Moore College here in Sydney. And today, we’re going to talk to Ben Boland about ministry to a segment of our community and our lives that often is not given the focus and thought and care and attention it really deserves.
[00:01:44] But before we get to that, Ben, how about you tell us a little bit about yourself, about your family, about where you’re living, and about your current ministry?
[00:01:52] Ben Boland: So I grew up in Tamworth in the Anglican Church there, and started doing aged care stuff at about 10 or 11. My great-grandmother was in the nursing home just down the road, and we’d drop in there and the day room on the way to the bus stop. So in many ways, I started ministry before I even could spell “ministry”. I was a slow speller.
[00:02:10] Then life moves on in various things. Still involved in bits and pieces, just through being part of the church. Studied at SMBC: went for one year; didn’t leave for three. Must have been a slow student!
[00:02:22] I spent some time there working as a student minister in one of the local parishes in Sydney, and then in that final year, I served as a student minister or catechist at what was then ARB Castle Hill.
[00:02:34] Towards the end of the year when everybody asks you that nasty question, “What are you going to do next year?”, Reverend David Tyndall, who was the senior chaplain at that stage, offered me a job and I was the first non-Moore College, non-ordained Anglican chaplain they had. And I was there for seven years.
[00:02:51] I mean, I’ve now been up here in Stanthorpe, Queensland, doing the same thing, but for Churches of Christ Queensland for about seven years too.
[00:02:59] Tony Payne: So your role with Churches of Christ Queensland: describe that. What does your role involve? So we’ve got a sense of what you do.
[00:03:04] Ben Boland: So the title is “Seniors Chaplain”, which always bothers me, ‘cause it sounds like I’m a senior chaplain, as opposed to just a chaplain. But I’m responsible for the spiritual care of residents, staff and anybody else in a residential aged care facility or a care home. So the care home here is 103 beds. That’s a full-time exercise.
[00:03:28] And then on top of that in my personal life, I spend a bit of time doing writing and advocacy, and having the privilege of talking to things like the Centre for Christian Living.
Journey to ministry to older people
[00:03:38] Tony Payne: So ministering to older people, especially those in care—aged care, that’s kind of where your ministry journey sort of took you. What drew you to that? When most people go to Bible college and are heading off into Christian ministry, and you ask them, “Where do you think you’re going to end up and what sort of ministry are you going to end up doing?”, that’s probably not the first thing on many people’s list. How did it end up being on your list?
[00:04:00] Ben Boland: I suspect it’s very, very rarely on anybody’s list. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anybody going to Bible college to do what I’ve ended up doing. Historically, particularly, aged care has largely been a dumping ground for failed clergy, as opposed to a strategic and significant ministry area.
[00:04:17] So for me, we went to Bible college, or I went to Bible college, with the plan of doing mission service. That was where we felt God was calling us as a family. Some health issues for our oldest son, who’s now 18 and reasonably healthy, made overseas stuff very complicated. And I’d seen two ministers, one Baptist and one Anglican, and had lots to do with them in that last sort of five years before then, and neither of them are in ministry now. Both of them really struggled. And I was there in the tail end of their ministry and watched that, and came away from that really scared a bit about parish ministry. If both these guys are really struggling, what does that mean for someone—like, I’m only human; what does that mean for me? So went to college for mission or to prepare for mission in the overseas context. Local church: I had some hesitations about—not so much the church, but my capacity in that space.
[00:05:13] And then I realised that I was quite comfortable in a hospital and an aged care setting, and that my comfort there was unusual. I think we all assume we’re normal, and I’ve been around hospitals and care homes and dementia for most of my life, so it’s almost a bit boring for me, in one sense. So realised, hang on a minute, that might be possible.
[00:05:38] In that third year at college, I did a course, which was 200 hours of pastoral care volunteering. I was tossing up between hospital and aged care—applied to do a hundred hours at hospital with Anglicare and a hundred hours in aged care. I had the interview in the hospital and they never got back to me. So I started volunteering, became a student minister catechist, became a chaplain. And the more I’ve done, the more passionate I’ve become about this in ministry area, and the more I’ve realised how significant it is biblically, and, I would argue, how much of a weakness, if I can use that language, we have in the church in this space.
The biblical imperative of ministry to older people
[00:06:18] Tony Payne: Let’s dig into that. Why do you think it is so significant, biblically? And then I’ll follow up: why do you think it’s a weakness for us?
[00:06:23] Ben Boland: Okay. Firstly, we start with the image of God. We know that all people, irrespective of race, gender, et cetera, et cetera, are created by God, in God’s image, and are so loved that he died for them. That’s why we care about people in a way that we don’t care about dogs.
[00:06:39] Secondly, in terms of the general stuff, the Scripture’s very clear about loving our neighbours. And again, it’s not love your younger neighbours or love your attractive neighbours or love some subset of your neighbours; it’s your neighbours.
[00:06:54] But it does speak quite significantly about the importance of ministry to older people and, particularly, loving older people. The Old Testament has multiple repetitions of the call for Israel to love the old, the poor and the orphan. And we see that flow into the New Testament too. And that’s explicit.
[00:07:12] Just on the topic of neighbours and stepping out of theology into sociology or demographics for a minute, it’s really important for us to recognise that the fastest-growing demographic in the world today is older people.
[00:07:25] Dementia today is the biggest killer of Australian women. More women die from dementia in Australia than they do from domestic violence. Now, domestic violence is abhorrent. I’m not trying to—
[00:07:37] Tony Payne: Diminish it in any way.
[00:07:38] Ben Boland: Yeah, diminish that in any way. But we spend huge amounts of money in Australia on breast cancer and ovarian cancer research and care; huge amounts fighting the scourge of domestic abuse; and dementia hardly makes the radar. It’s a big killer of men too, but you and I, Tony, are most likely to die from heart or cardiovascular disease. So ageing is significant demographically. Dementia is significant. And I mean that not simply in an Australian sense, because it’s tempting for us to think of ageing and dementia as a western or a minority world issue. But ageing and dementia are global issues.
[00:08:21] The Lausanne Mission Conference last year, I think it was—the most recent one; it was either earlier this year or late last year—identified one of the key unreached people groups today for mission is older people, in terms of the sheer numbers around dementia. Actually, I’ll pose this as a question to your listeners: which continent do you think has the largest number of people living with dementia in it today?
[00:08:49] Tony Payne: All right, I’ll answer on behalf of my listeners. Let me have a think. Which continent? Asia has the most number of people. But look, I think my first guess would be North America.
[00:08:59] Ben Boland: No, it’s Asia. Dementia prevalence rates in Asia, South America and Africa are colossal. Now, dementia is clearly a significant issue in Europe and North America—in every continent other than in Antarctica. But there’s a missional and a global significance to this, not simply a local and Australian significance in terms of ageing and dementia and ministry in that space.
Why we don’t engage in ministry to older people
[00:09:26] Tony Payne: You’re saying there are pressing and obvious theological reasons to do with the image of God and our love for all people that would say we should think about older people and people with dementia and minister to them. And just practically speaking, there’s a massive need. Given those two things, you would say, well, normally they would be two drivers of lots of people wanting to minister in this area, and trying to think and pray about it, and for it to be high in our attention, if that was the case. But why do you think not? Do you have any thoughts about why it sort of is not on our radar?
[00:09:57] Ben Boland: I do have some thoughts on that, and I’m still trying to get my head round and work out whether I’m right or not. But in my life, and I’m 45, youth and children’s ministry and evangelism has been a critical focus of the church. Core business, if you will. Yet as I read the Bible, there’s clearly stuff about raising our own children in righteousness, both old and new. Very clear. But I can’t find any instruction to evangelise other people’s children, or evidence of evangelism of other people’s children. And if we look at Jesus’ ministry, it’s almost exclusively to adults.
[00:10:38] Now, yes, we’ve got some healings: Jairus’s daughter, widow of Nain. Now, how old’s the widow and how old’s the son? But let’s call him young for the sake of the exercise. But in both of those situations, it’s adults coming to Jesus. It’s the pyre or the funeral procession coming past Jesus. It’s Jairus sending his servants, or Jairus coming to Jesus. It’s not the children coming, per se, or Jesus going to the children.
[00:11:05] Now, are there children around feeding the 5,000, the Sermon on the Mount, et cetera, et cetera? Are there going to be kids in the context? Unequivocally; I’m not saying that Jesus exclusively ministered to adults.
[00:11:17] Tony Payne: And he did say suffer that the children to come to me, kind of thing. You know, it’s, it’s—
[00:11:20] Ben Boland: Yeah, yeah. And again, but that text is interesting: ‘cause I think if we read it well and look at it hard, it looks like it’s parents bringing their children to Jesus to be blessed. So again, it’s adults initiating it. It’s not Jesus going to them; it’s Jesus responding to that. And thirdly, I think the fact that the disciples say, “Go away” says how uncommon that was for them and indeed, therefore, for Jesus’ ministry. If Jesus was always surrounded by little kids, then that message makes no sense.
[00:11:56] Now we move into the rest of the New Testament, and again, you are a better theologian than me, so maybe you can help me here. But in Acts and the rest of the New Testament letters, the only absolutely clear reference to children’s ministry I can see is Paul’s commendation of Timothy’s mother and grandmother Lois for raising him in the faith. So again, Christian child, Christian family. And arguably, and again, it depends a little bit on your theology and particularly where you stand on infant baptism, but the household conversions, Cornelius, Philippian jailer. And I think there is good evidence, and there’s certainly no evidence that there isn’t, children in those households that come to faith. But I do think it’s interesting that the ministry was to the Philippian jailer and Cornelius, as opposed to, in my experience of ministry, there’s often been a “Let’s do ministry to non-Christian children”. I mean that in family unit, as opposed to faith, and hope that they will take the faith home to mum and dad. Whereas the New Testament, and in fact the Bible, seems to almost exclusively be adult-focused, the theory being that that will flow down to the children, not flow up from childhood.
[00:13:06] So I’m still wrestling with that. I haven’t done all my thinking yet. But I think it’s an interesting point, particularly in light of Scripture’s repeated commandments to care for widows.
[00:13:17] Now again, you can be a widow at 12 if you get married young enough. But both in the ancient times, in Jesus’ time and in more modern times, younger widows tend to remarry. And in fact, Paul says, “Get married if you’re younger widows. Don’t stay single. That’s fine.” And he prioritises that.
[00:13:38] Now again, Paul also says there’s value in celibacy and singleness. So I’m not trying to say marriage versus single, and that’s a game beyond my scope of practice. But I think in terms of the ancient world, in terms of the biblical world, “widow” should be read to normally apply to older women.
[00:13:59] Tony Payne: Yeah. Well, what is it? In 1 Timothy, you’ve got to be at least 60, right, to get on the list?
[00:14:02] Ben Boland: Yeah, yeah. It’s something. So it’s older. And again, Jesus is pretty blatant, or blunt, probably a better word, when people start playing limiting the commandments.
[00:14:13] Tony Payne: Of course. So let’s not be Pharisaical. Yes.
[00:14:15] Ben Boland: Let’s not be Pharisaical. So I wonder whether we should almost read “widow”, and it’s almost not exactly, as synonymous with older person, male and female, who are single.
[00:14:27] Tony Payne: Your point’s really interesting. I mean, at one level, biblical example and how we treat the narratives and examples of Scripture and so on, it’s something for us to do with care. But you make an interesting rhetorical point: all our focus is on youth and children’s ministry, if I can characterise it. It’s a huge focus for us.
[00:14:43] And yet in the Bible, there’s almost no youth and children’s ministry. And in the Bible there’s lots of explicit stuff about ministering to older people and we do hardly any ministry to older people.
[00:14:52] Ben Boland: Were there younger Christians? Unequivocally. But the future of the church is conversion, not breeding. We are not Muslim in that sense. And I still hear people say the future of the church is children. And I’m not sure that that’s correct. I think the future of the church is conversions of people. That I’m certain of. And I wonder whether that should be focused on adults, at least, if not older people.
[00:15:19] I think on top of that, we as a Western culture have prioritised the value of youth and the attributes of youth, beauty, power, strength, et cetera. And we have seen the hope for humanity as the future, and therefore children, which is why in the Australian context, we have such fights over the curriculum in schools.
[00:15:47] I can see from a sociological perspective, the left has been very effective, if I can use that term, in “get ‘em while they’re young” and shaping them there. So I think there’s some bias—or cultural emphasis on youth, if not bias. And I think there’s always a challenge, whatever our culture is, to not be contaminated as Christians by our culture.
[00:16:08] The quote that I think significant is the World Health organisation did a report three years ago now and found that 50 per cent of the global population is ageist against older people. So we’ve just been contaminated by our culture.
[00:16:19] I also wonder whether we’ve fallen into a view that children are easier to minister to. They’re softer to the gospel. I think that’s the case, and I think the reverse is true. I hear people who talk about ministry with older people and almost assume that older people are set in their ways, either in a set and forget sense. “Oh, she’s been a Christian for 80 years. She’ll be fine.” Or in a “Oh, he’s been a grumpy old man for 80 years. How could he possibly come to faith now at 95?” So I think those are the cultural factors that have driven us in this direction.
[00:17:03] Tony Payne: Are you kind of saying, despite the many good reasons to minister to older people and to invest in ministry to aged care people and so on, that it’s largely been a case of we’ve decided to put our our eggs in youth ministry instead? Is that largely what you’re saying?
[00:17:18] Ben Boland: One of the questions I ask regularly of churches in a local church sense and in a denominational or regional Synod sense of the word is what proportion of your resources—time, energy and money—are focused on ministry of people under 20 to people over 80? Because if we see that all people are valuable and imago dei, love your neighbour—if that’s the bar, then it should be equal across the lifespan. It doesn’t matter whether you’re two or 102; you’re still important and equally important. And my experience in the Anglican world, Armidale and Sydney, and in the broader church world, is that most people say, “Probably about 80 per cent of our resources and energy and focus is on under twenties stuff.” And if you’re spending 80 per cent on until you get to 20, by the time you get to 80, there’s not a huge amount of percentages left for that age bracket. So I don’t think we have a biblical option to consider aged care ministry. I think we have a biblical imperative to minister to older people. And the question is, “How do we do that?”, not “Should we prioritise that?”
How to minister to older people
[00:18:32] Tony Payne: Let’s move on to that question, then. How should we do that? In your experience of ministering in this area and to this age group of people, what are the key factors?
[00:18:42] Ben Boland: I think the first key factor is that we actually need to care. We actually need to prioritise this ministry area. And I think largely it does actually start with that for us as the church. Given what I would argue is neglect of older people, we need to get our theology right, if I can be that blunt, and say, “Yep, we need to love older people.”
[00:19:05] I often see churches who are passionate about school Scripture and school chaplaincy, and those are important ministries. But those churches are not saying, “We need to spend time in the local nursing home or care home or the respite centre, or be involved in Meals on Wheels so we can be engaging with the older people living in our community.” There are lots of older people in our community. I suspect most of your listeners, at least if they’re in Sydney, drive past at least one aged care centre or older person centre, whether that’s senior citizens or a care home or respite centre, on the way to church each Sunday. I see many churches who are passionate about school ministry and school evangelism, but ministry to older people gets the crumbs.
[00:19:53] Many care homes are lucky to get a once-a-month church service that’s often run by a number of different churches, or one or two passionate volunteers in the church, as opposed to that being core and important ministry. It’s actually interesting that the research—and this is the academic research; I’m not talking Christian research—actually records very clearly and across cultures and across time, so it’s not just one generation or two generations, that as people age, they become more interested in spirituality. So there is increased interest.
[00:20:31] My personal experience has been, and I’ve been in this ministry for 15 years full-time, each and every one of those years, I have seen multiple people come to faith. Now, it hasn’t been tens, but it’s been twos, threes, fives per year come to faith. There is a great desire, a great harvest field.
[00:20:53] Now why are they interested is interesting. The research doesn’t say, although there’s some ideas. My suspicion, and there’s some evidence of this in the research, but it’s not black and white is that older people don’t need to know that they’re mortal. And when I’ve done student ministry and kids ministry, you’ve got to convince the kids that you are actually going to die one day. This is not an eternity on earth. Older people don’t have that illusion.
[00:21:19] I think also older people have realised the idolatry of worshipping good things and making them God. I’m thinking about beauty, strength, power. They’re all gone, or are gone and/or you’ve lived with them. Congratulations! You were the successful CEO. You were the bishop. You were the hoo ha. And you’re now a little old man who nobody listens to. So you’ve realised both from experience as well as theology of the frailty of some of the classic idols of youth.
[Music]
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[00:23:43] Tony Payne: And now let’s get back to our program.
A picture of ministry to older people
[00:23:46] Tony Payne: Let me follow that up by asking, there’s the opportunity there and we don’t devote the time and energy to it. Tell us a bit about what ministry looks like in that context, because as you said earlier, it’s interesting: we often think of ministry to aged care or care homes or to older people in those kind of contexts as a kind of nothing kind of ministry. Maybe people who aren’t good at other ministries, we’ll stick them there and they can sort of wander around and kind of have a few chats.
[00:24:16] Ben Boland: Yeah. They can’t do too much damage.
[00:24:17] Tony Payne: That’s right. And they can be a kind of comfortable presence at that, et cetera, et cetera. So we don’t think of it is a very active or strategic or a kind of place where you’d make real progress with people, and people would be converted and or people might be discipled. We don’t think of it like that at all. What is a more active, strategic, gospel-minded ministry to the aged care sector look like? How do you minister to someone with dementia? Give us some sense of what your week might be like and how it was that people came to faith.
[00:24:48] Ben Boland: People sometimes ask me, “What’s the difference between my work as a chaplain compared to the person in the local church, the vicar or rector or minister?” I run a church service every week. I preach every week. I care for my flock. I do all those things. So that’s very similar.
[00:25:03] The big dissimilarity is that when I talk to people who are in local church ministry, 95 plus per cent of the people they deal with each week are Christians. And for me, serving with older people, 95 per cent of the people I engage with each week are non-Christians. So as a staff member, I can minister to staff, and that’s really important, because most of the staff working in or with older people in Australia are not Christians, and that includes the Christian organisations. I’ve worked in buildings where we’ve had 200 staff for a Christian organisation, and I can count the number of Christians on one hand.
[00:25:42] Tony Payne: Sure.
[00:25:42] Ben Boland: And that is very intergenerational. So I deal with domestic violence semi-regularly, and child abuse allegations, sometimes because of the residents and their families, but often because it’s staff ministry. So that’s the peculiarity: focused on older people, but need to be functional in a generic sense.
[00:26:03] In terms of what my normal week looks like, the short answer is it’s a bit hard because no week is normal. Welcome to ministry.
[00:26:10] Tony Payne: Of course.
[00:26:10] Ben Boland: The more accurate answer perhaps is, so I run a church service on a Thursday morning. That’s every Thursday at 10:30am. I had the service yesterday. I had 20-odd people there. Now, 20-odd doesn’t sound like a big church service until you put that out of a hundred people, and I’ve had up to 50 per cent of my residents attending church regularly. I can’t think of a local church that would not be over the moon to have 50 per cent of their parish even vaguely involved in the church. And all the things that go with church—prayer, preparing sermons, all that stuff—kicks in.
[00:26:47] I do a fair amount of one-to-one visiting, which is not surprising. I do a lot of stuff in the suffering space, for want a better phrase. The average length of stay for my residents is 18 months now. So lots of stuff around death and dying and palliative care. Functionally, everybody in my care is basically palliative, and I’ve buried—15 years of ministry, one new congregation every 18 months, 10 congregations or so—so a lot of funerals. I’ve done one wedding and I had to make sure I did it right. It was staff member as opposed to residents. But I can run a funeral service at the drop of a hat without anything, because I just do it very frequently. So when I was initially working at Anglicare, there was an average of three deaths a week in the people I was caring for.
[00:27:38] So lots of death and grief and stuff. Lots also have just grief more generally. They talk about seven major types of grief, including dreams, community, all those things. Everybody who’s moving into aged care is facing all of those groups. That move into aged care is not a lifestyle choice; it’s a grudge purchase.
[00:28:00] And that grief applies not only to the residents, but often to the families too. And the decision to put your loved one into care or to deal with their declining functionally health is traumatic and hard. So lots of stuff with residents and lots of sort of one-to-one soft pastoral, for want a better phrase—lots of ministry that’s intentional, but not plan-able. It’s the conversation in the corridor. It’s the seeing someone in tears as opposed to, I will book an appointment.
[00:28:35] So if you think about chaplaincy in terms of other professions, chaplaincy in the aged care sense has some similarities with local church ministry, just with a different demographic. But it also has some similarities with, say, counselling and social work. But counsellors make appointments for one hour. I don’t make appointments that often. Often I’m walking past, I’m engaging with, and part of that means that I just need to be in the space and walking past and having those “stupid” is the phrase I’m going to use conversations.
[00:29:10] So I’m in Queensland, and so for the last two weeks, I have been wearing my New South Wales gear and going on about rugby league and the State of Origin. Now, when I was in New South Wales, I never had any paraphernalia. I studied bat poo as part of my honours thesis, and I think bat poo is more interesting than rugby league. Despite that, I use the Origin as a great chance to engage with people. And lots of that is just going around and being obnoxious. “Oh, we won! Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah!” And breaking that stereotype that I’m the holy God man who’s sacred and set apart. I’m just that yob who’s obnoxious. And that builds relationships and opens doors for me to share the gospel and have conversations about faith, but also conversations about grief and loss and pain.
Volunteering
[00:30:08] Tony Payne: Tell me about volunteers, because for many of the Christians who are listening to this podcast, they’re probably not going to become the chaplain at an aged care home. But you’re saying there’s lots of opportunity, there’s lots of people, they’re ready to talk, they want to talk. Or in what sort of ways might you cast a vision of what a Christian listening to this podcast could do to start volunteering into an aged care facility and ministering there, much as we might volunteer to do school Scripture or volunteer to do something else. What does it look like to start ministering there?
[00:30:36] Ben Boland: Well, firstly, it’s important to grasp the legalities here. So if you are a Scripture teacher or a chaplain or volunteering in your local school, there are a whole pile of government legislations against proselytisation, et cetera, et cetera. There is none of those in aged care. So I can share the gospel. My volunteers can share the gospel.
[00:30:56] On top of that, because the standards do mention spirituality, facilities need ideally to have some level of spiritual stuff in there. So if you go to your local care home and knocked on the door tomorrow and said, “I’m from St. Barnabas’s and I’d like to come and do a church service” or “How could I volunteer here?”, they’re going to say, “Yes please and thank you.”
[00:31:21] Now, the legal things, we do have a little bit. Particularly post-COVID, there’s some stuff, depending on the organisation, around vaccination and those things. But again, it depends on the centre, on the organisation. But there’s great openness to people just visiting, and indeed, a desperate desire to have people visiting.
[00:31:45] When I train people in terms of this ministry, I talk about a three P model: prayer, because prayer is what—where the power comes from. We all know that.
[00:31:54] Presence, and I think this is where the rubber hits the road with aged care. And presence is particularly powerful in an aged care context, because it’s so infrequent. I have many, many residents—and indeed, many, many people in care homes and indeed in their own homes in Australia today get no visitors, or get medical visitors, if I can use that language, not relationships. In 15 years, I’ve had two people who don’t want to speak to me as the chaplain. This is a people for whom loneliness is at plague proportions. The stats are 80-90 per cent—people who are just desperate to have that human contact and that human relationship. So just turning up and being with them is pivotal. So presence is really big there.
[00:32:52] Tony Payne: Second P is presence.
[00:32:53] Ben Boland: And then pastoral care. And again, pastoral care can be defined many ways, but I think for Christians, it’s ultimately just loving people. The model I teach and I use is if I’m visiting someone in their room and they want to talk about something really deep like grief and loss, that’s fine. But equally, if they want to talk about geraniums and rose petals or knitting, now my knowledge on knitting is pretty limited, but I will listen and I will engage with them there.
[00:33:20] When I do a group activity or when I’m running it, whether it’s a Bible study or church service or something, guess what? Jesus is front and centre. But the church service is often empowered by the presence in the corridor, the cup of tea, the “Oh, this person actually cares about me. Maybe his God does too.” “I’m feeling forgotten, but the chaplain cares. Jesus might too.” It moves faith, which can be a reasonably abstract to a very concrete exercise. So that’s really powerful.
Next steps
[00:33:51] Tony Payne: Mm-hmm. So Ben, you’re saying there, there’s a massive number of people in our communities who either in their homes or in aged care homes are lonely, are open to thinking and talking, who desperately want relationship and conversation with people, who are open to thinking about spiritual things and closer to meeting God than the rest of us, so the mind is concentrated.
[00:34:13] And yet it’s a ministry we almost entirely neglect. How can we change our vision of what’s possible here? And for those who are listening, especially those people who might be thinking, church—“I’m not sure what I could do to minister at my church.” You know, “All the jobs are taken. I’m not sure what I’m good at”—what would you say to that sort of person as an individual and to us as churches about how we minister to older people?
[00:34:34] Ben Boland: I think those as individuals and churches, we need to think about priority and indeed theology. Is this important and are we going to prioritise it?
[00:34:43] If it’s important, then we need to be thinking about learning how to do this well. Like anything, there is a learning curve. In terms of church ministry, I would really strongly recommend people have a look at Hymns We Love, which is a resource produced by the Good Book Company. The short version is, think of it as the best of an Alpha course and the best of Hymns of Praise, which is a Sunday morning, pushed together. So beautiful, well-presented and tailored to older people and ministry and evangelism in that context. Exceptional resource for churches, and because it’s a video, you need to provide a screen and some morning tea and some people. It’s not hard. The learning curve is very short and they’ve got a leader’s guide, all those things. That’s Hymns We Love. It’s Good Book Company, and there’s a free session online—a sample. So don’t just trust me. Jump online, click through that.
[00:35:37] Even if you don’t use the resource, the sample is wonderful in showing you how to do the ministry well, because there’s some practical things around dealing with people who are likely to be deaf, likely to be living with some level of cognitive—or many living with cognitive impairment and dementia. So that’s a great church answer.
[00:35:58] In terms of individuals, the two things we can do is be thinking, “Who are the older people in my church? Who are the older people who were in my church five years ago, but who we’ve lost?” So Mary’s been on parish council and done everything for a hundred years—80 years—but she hasn’t been in church in a while. Is that because she can’t get there, because she can’t drive anymore?
[00:36:20] Is it because her husband’s living with dementia and someone needs to sit with him to keep him safe? And there’s some very earthy, very practical things that we can do for our fellow Christians.
[00:36:33] There is also the opportunity for us to do evangelistic work in this sense, and that will largely be driven by working out how we can be present with other people who don’t know Jesus. Now, that could be a respite centre. That could be a care home. That could be Meals on Wheels or people in the community. So that’s helpful.
Helpful resources
[00:36:54] Ben Boland: I’ve got lots of other things that are practical to say and I’m not sure how to say them in two seconds, so I’m going to go with the ad break instead. I’ve got a book coming out on 8th of July: Priceless People, and it’s all about gospel ministry with older people and people living with dementia, covering some theology, and then some really practical, earthy ways of doing this ministry well, and some of the challenges and ways of overcoming that.
[00:37:21] Communion in aged care is complicated, not just because of theology, but because of swallowing difficulties. So there’s a whole pile of things that are very practical and I can’t cover now, but Priceless People covers those things.
[00:37:34] Another great resource would be having a look at the Faith in Later Life, which is a UK Christian charity about ministry to older people. They have free webinars, they have a wonderful resource hub. So there is stuff out there, much of it free. I just spoke on the Faith in Later Life’s last webinar, which is now on YouTube for free about dementia gospel ministry.
[00:37:57] Maybe that’s a helpful point to make too. We haven’t had a great deal of chance to talk about it, but dementia ministry is very much real, very much possible and very much important. And so, we need to be not simply saying, “Oh, they’ve got dementia. They’re beyond ministry.” They’re not dead. God loves them and that’s critically important too.
[00:38:18] Tony Payne: It is one of the topics we haven’t got to today, and I know it’s a special love of yours and focus of yours—the importance of not giving up on people, even when there is cognitive impairment and there are limitations, whether it’s moderate or more severe dementia, of continuing to minister the love of God in those contexts and continuing to sow the seeds of the Word as you can, and that that’s still an incredibly vital and important thing to do. But thank you for pointing to us to where we can find out more about that, and if you were particularly interested in that sort of sub-area of this conversation, let me encourage you to not only pick up ben’s book when it comes out, but check out some of those resources that he just mentioned, which particularly do deal with those issues in more detail.
[00:39:00] Ben Boland: Yeah, and if you’re interested in theology of dementia, Reverend Mark Womell’s book, Coming to Christ in Dementia, is the theological text to understand ministry in that space. So I’d recommend that highly too.
Conclusion
[00:39:12] Tony Payne: We’ll put links to these things in the show notes for this episode so that you can chase those through. Look, thank you so much, Ben, for not only your passion and enthusiasm for this area, but in taking the time to share it with us and I think to open the eyes of many of us listening that there is a field of ministry, a harvest as you put it, that is there that we often walk straight past and don’t even see, in which there are so many opportunities to get next to people and to minister Christ to them in so many different ways. Are we prepared to open our eyes and see those opportunities and prioritise them as we should? Thank you so much for being with us and thanks for being with us on the Centre for Christian Living Podcast today.
[00:39:50] Ben Boland: Thank you, Tony. Thank you, everyone.
[Music]
[00:40:07] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website, that’s ccl.moore.edu.au, where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events, and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:40:32] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:40:42] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch. You can email us at [email protected].
[00:41:01] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:41:16] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
Image by sarcifilippo from Pixabay.
