Dementia Dimension
Dementia is the new dimension to the Enabling Church day conference coming up in the Birmingham area on 3 June 2014. Book now – there’s not long left for the Early Bird discounted price of £13.50. In 20 years’ time, there’ll be more than half a million people in the UK aged 100 or over. A new report by the Alzheimer’s Society points to the ‘loneliness, alienation and segregation’ of many of our elderly people. But Professor John Swinton, minister of the Church of Scotland and chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at Aberdeen University, argues for a response to be found in the ‘key motifs’ of acceptance and belonging to be found in community. ‘A person’s spirituality has nothing to do with what they may or may not know. It has everything to do with who they know and how they relate to them,’ Professor Swinton writes in Friendship and Community in the textbook he has edited, Spiritual Dimensions of Pastoral Care. The inclusive community of love Professor Swinton will be a keynote speaker at a national conference in June which will address the Christian approach to a wide range of disabilities and disabling conditions. He describes the need for ‘the open, inclusive community of love and acceptance which we find revealed and lived out in the ministry of Jesus.’ Click here to read an article on the subject by Prof Swinton. The impressive line-up of Christian experts in different fields of disability also includes leading Christian psychotherapist Louise Morse, who believes that the secret of more contented ageing is found in the Bible. ‘Living by scriptural wisdom prepares us cognitively, emotionally and spiritually for contented old age,’ says Louise Morse. Ms Morse is media and communications manager for the Christian charity Pilgrims’ Friend Society and the author of books on dementia (published by Lion Monarch). The Enabling Church: Everybody In!conference will look at the challenges faced by the UK Church in welcoming and including people with dementia, sight loss, hearing loss, intellectual disabilities, autism, loss of mobility; and it will also discuss how the Church supports carers. The bigger picture ‘One in three of us will live with dementia in our later years,’ says conference organiser Dr Gordon Temple. ‘And when we look at the bigger picture we see that already 11 million people in the UK have a limiting long-term illness, impairment or disability – that’s...
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