June 22, 2025 • 29 mins
In this episode of Bleeding Daylight, seasoned chaplain Ben Boland shares his 15+ years of experience ministering to older adults and people living with dementia. As both a practitioner and scholar who has contributed to academic journals and spoken at international conferences, Ben brings unique insights shaped by his professional expertise and personal journey supporting his father who lives with advanced dementia.
Ben challenges our culture's discrimination against older adults, revealing that 50% of people globally hold ageist attitudes - including older people discriminating against other older people. He emphasises that our value isn't tied to productivity, beauty, or youth, but to our relationship with God as His beloved children. Through practical wisdom and theological depth, Ben demonstrates how good dementia ministry becomes intergenerational evangelism, reaching entire families with the gospel while providing desperately needed care and support.
WEBLINKS Ben on LinkedIn Ben on YouTube Priceless People on Amazon Priceless People at Word Priceless People at Koorong
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Do you want to hear more stories filled with hope and inspiration?
Dozens more Bleeding Daylight episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:34):
By sharing this and other episodes, you'll ensure that others are hearing stories of hope too.
In a society that fears and tries to avoid growing old, how do we truly care for our ageing population, especially those experiencing dementia?
Today's guest offers some practical help in that area.
(01:03):
Today I'm welcoming Ben Boland, a seasoned chaplain with over 15 years of experience serving older adults and people living with dementia.
As both a practitioner and scholar, Ben has become a leading voice in spirituality and ageing, contributing to academic journals and speaking at international conferences.
His unique perspective is shaped not only by his professional experience, but also by his personal journey as he navigates supporting his own father who lives with advanced dementia.
(01:35):
Ben's book, Priceless People, and his numerous publications reflect his passionate commitment to improving pastoral care for older adults and advancing our understanding of dementia ministry.
Ben, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, wonderful to be with you.
I am always fascinated by the way that God has wired people so differently.
(01:56):
I'm interested in the different paths that people choose and why they choose those paths.
What was it that attracted you to working with older people?
It wasn't until my first year in Bible college when we had a college mission, and one of the afternoons we went to a nursing home.
It's a very comfortable space.
I've been hanging around nursing homes since I was about 10 or 11, but I was gobsmacked that some of the other members of the team were so uncomfortable and found it such a hard space.
(02:26):
Whereas for me, it was boring isn't quite the right phrase, but boring.
That was surprising for me.
Then in my third year, I got a student minister position working in aged care.
I was much, much younger than the other chaplains.
I wasn't an ordained Anglican, so I was a bit of an outlier, really.
Initially I was a volunteer, actually, and then they said, would you like to come and be a student and we'll pay you?
(02:51):
I'm like, I'm a student.
I'm definitely keen on being paid.
Bible college costs money.
Spring that year, they said, would you like to come and work on team?
I said, oh, most definitely.
So thinking back to that experience of going into that nursing home and seeing the discomfort for other people, what do you think it is that brings up that discomfort when people encounter those who are aging?
(03:17):
I think largely it's cultural, both in terms of general Western culture, but also church culture.
Our education system, and in fact, the way we often do in churches, a youth service and a family service and an oldest service, means that we train people, particularly our youth, to engage with people who are maybe two years above or below them.
(03:41):
Then they come out of that having gone through school where you're all with your own year group, to uni or trade or something, which is often with your own year group.
Then we suddenly expect people to be able to function intergenerationally.
And I think that makes it really hard.
On top of that, with our medicalisation of aged care and our medicalisation of health and hospitals, the sick people go to hospital, the old people go to the nursing home, or the aged care facility or the care home.
(04:12):
So we're simply not used to it.
I also think as Christians, we're not always great with suffering.
And particularly death, which strikes me as slightly odd, considering Christianity is a death-centric religion or a death-centric spirituality, in that it's all about Jesus who died for us.
(04:36):
The cross is the centre of Christianity.
Yet we're not always great with that.
I know that when we're younger, we somehow don't ever believe that we're going to get old.
We think that we're invincible.
But when we start getting a little bit older, and maybe for those who were in college with you back at that time, you do start to think a little bit more forward.
(05:00):
Do you think there's perhaps a fear of what ageing may bring for us that we don't want to face, that we want to continue to believe that we'll always be young and vital and healthy?
Culturally, I'm sure that is the case.
We wouldn't spend the amount of money we spend on anti-ageing treatments and creams and all that.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry trying not to age.
(05:23):
So that would suggest that we have an issue with ageing.
One of the interesting things I see working as a care home chaplain is the younger people say, oh, well, the retiree should minister there.
Many of the retirees say, oh, I don't want to go there.
It's too confronting.
It's too scary.
It's too hard because I know I'm mortal.
(05:46):
I know I'm no longer bulletproof.
And I don't want to live with dementia.
I don't want to have to leave my family home.
So there's some real fears there.
In many ways, older people are the, if you'll bear with the term, the lepers of modern society.
Segregated, unloved, undervisited, discriminated against.
(06:10):
And it seems hard to believe that there is that discrimination against age.
And yet when we look at society's opinion of older people, oftentimes they're dismissed as outdated, as not having anything to contribute.
And yet we're talking about people who have lived full lives, probably brought up a family, had grandkids and really had an impact over the years.
(06:36):
And suddenly we expect that none of that matters anymore.
That must be incredibly demoralizing for the people who are aging to think that all this time people would listen to what I have to say.
And now I'm just being dismissed out of hand.
Yeah, it's devastating.
It's absolutely devastating.
(06:57):
The scary thing for me, at least, is the World Health Organization commissioned a report a few years ago now on ageism against older people.
So discrimination against older people.
And that found that 50%, one in two people globally discriminate against older people.
(07:17):
Now for that to even work mathematically, that means that older people are discriminating against older people.
So that's terrifying.
Older people are first and foremost people created by God in God's image and so loved he died for them.
Our value is not our beauty or our strength or our youth or our wealth or our job or our power.
(07:45):
Our ultimate value is not what we can do, what we will do, what we have done, but our relationship with God as creatures, as children.
I'm particularly interested in the fact that you say that older people discriminate against older people.
And I'm wondering if a lot of that is the expectation of older people, not just for others, but for themselves, that they have been told the excuse so many times that older people don't have value.
(08:18):
And they actually believe that about themselves, not just those around them.
Yeah, that's exactly the issue.
They've bought the lie, if you will, that your value is tied up in your productivity, that capitalism has value for people.
I used to run the Sunday school, I used to preach, I used to be a deacon or an elder or a minister, and I can't do any of those things anymore, or I can do less of those things.
(08:46):
And therefore I'm less when biblically none of those things give us value.
So when we look at that side of things of people who are aging and the body starts to break down, can't physically do the things that we used to do, that's one side of things.
But of course, what you're increasingly dealing with and dealing with within your own family is this issue of dementia.
(09:14):
Maybe you can help explain how you see dementia, because I guess it's one of those words that's bandied about.
But do we have a full understanding?
I'm not sure.
So help us understand exactly what dementia is.
Do we have a full understanding?
No.
Dementia was first described, I think it was in 1917.
So we've only had dementia in a term for a bit over 100 years.
(09:39):
So we're still wrestling with that.
And because dementia affects the mind, it is incredibly complicated.
And while we basically understand the heart, neuroscience is still exploring the very edges of what it means cognitively.
So in terms of dementia, the starting point is dementia is an umbrella term for a whole group of neurological diseases.
(10:07):
Alzheimer's is one of the dementias, it's the most prevalent of the dementias, but there's over 200 other dementias.
And indeed, some people can live with multiple dementias.
So my dad has Alzheimer's.
He has vascular dementia, and he probably has pugilistic dementia as well.
If we think about a bit like we think about cancer, cancer could be a melanoma.
(10:32):
It could be breast cancer.
It could be colon cancer.
They're all cancer, but how they affect the person is different.
Two people with colon cancer are going to be two separate cases.
So they're not identical, even if you've got the same disease.
So that's sort of the starting point for our understanding of dementia.
(10:52):
The next thing, and this is the biomedical definition, is that dementia affects the mind and it's degenerative.
In fact, it's terminal.
So dementia will kill you.
It's the biggest killer of Australian women.
So we need to get our head around that.
Because dementia affects the brain, it affects everything that the brain controls.
(11:14):
It's much more than memory.
It's not just memory loss.
It controls your ability to navigate, your awareness of day and night, your ability to slow.
Anything your brain controls, dementia can impact.
And because different parts of your brain do different things, it depends which part of your brain is affected as to how your dementia will manifest itself.
(11:41):
So that's the biological definition of dementia.
A theologian called Kinghorn says dementia is not primarily a disease of cognitive decline, but rather of relational abandonment.
He's saying and highlighting that often the issue is not that the person's mind is not as strong as it once was, but that people who did care for them, who were relationally surrounding them, disperse and neglect them.
(12:15):
And I think that's a really good reminder, particularly for us as Christians, that we need always to be with people.
We're created as relational beings.
Relationship with God, relationship with each other, relationship with the creation.
If we don't have any of those levels of relationship, we're not going to be in a good space.
(12:35):
In some earlier years, when we forget where we've put our keys or we forget someone's name, it might even be a joke, oh, it's dementia.
And yet when we get into older years, it tends to be more of a fear rather than I'm forgetting things.
(12:56):
It's a great concern when I'm forgetting things, which is natural in a lot of cases.
We suddenly think it's dementia and that can cause a lot of fear.
So what do we do in those situations?
If we do have concern that maybe there is cognitive decline, what's our first step?
(13:16):
Medically, a great thing to do if you're concerned about that is go and see your doctor.
Go and see your GP and work out what's going on.
Simply forgetting things, particularly if you're like me and you're always forgetting things, is not a sign of dementia particularly.
A better sign is that you pick up an object, a pen and think, I should know what this is.
(13:38):
I have no idea.
I think the second thing is we need to actually wrestle with our theology of dementia in terms of we need to know that even if we forget God, and those of us who are younger, who are not living with dementia forget God, don't we?
He still remembers us.
And that is true for us in the midst of dementia.
(13:59):
And indeed, people living with dementia can and do come to faith because God is not bound by dementia.
He is not limited by that.
I think those things are important.
There are also some things we can do to give ourselves the best hope of avoiding dementia.
Basically, it's all the healthy stuff your doctor's been telling you for the last 50 years.
(14:24):
Exercise is important.
Healthy diet is important.
Healthy weight range is important.
The two that are perhaps less known but are critically important is making sure you can hear well is important.
So where you're hearing aids, there is a big link between people who struggle to hear and developing dementia.
(14:45):
And fifthly, being socially connected is critical.
That speaks something to the importance of church.
Church is not simply a place where we hear the word preached, where we sing together and pray together, which great things though they are.
But part of the value of church too is that relational connection with other humans.
(15:07):
I guess on the other side of it is those who care for someone who is going through dementia, such as yourself.
And I'm sure that that can be very difficult at times.
How careful do we need to be, even with ourselves in that situation, to surround ourselves with that support network, knowing that what we're facing in the decline of someone that we love is actually going to take a big toll on us, isn't it?
(15:37):
Self-care, if you're caring, is critical.
Indeed, if you don't look after yourself, you will not keep caring.
You will experience contassion fatigue, you will burn out.
At that point, that's a really big risk factor for elder abuse.
So it's critical that we build support teams, both the paid people like the doctor or maybe a home care package, but someone who can help take the bin out or someone who can sit with that or take you shopping or do something to facilitate that.
(16:13):
So both volunteer and paid is critical in that space.
My strong recommendation is to try and build that team early rather than late.
At the risk of being bossy, if you're not caring for someone at the moment, can I encourage you to join someone else's caregiver team?
(16:33):
If each of us provides some care, the burden is lightened exponentially.
And I imagine that doesn't just fit with people who are caring for the elderly.
It's when we see people around us.
And oftentimes we hear about this in churches of people that are going through various things.
Being part of the care group doesn't necessarily mean making the meal or doing those sorts of things that we traditionally do, but actually connecting with that person and just checking in on them.
(17:04):
It can be as simple as going and having a kaka with them or getting on the phone and calling them.
If an older person is struggling to read their Bible because of eyesight, could you organise to call them and read scripture with them?
If someone can't make it to church because either they're frail or their loved one is frail, could you organise a roster so at least once a month someone goes and sits with their loved one so they can go to church?
(17:33):
Meals are great, but we can do so much more and lots of it is not going to be rugged science.
It's just basic love applied with a few grey hairs and wrinkles.
We do tend to, as a society, shy away from ageing, shying away from dementia.
(17:53):
And I guess part of that fear is not being known by the person that we've loved for so many years.
And that must be incredibly difficult to turn up to see mum or dad or grandfather or grandmother and they don't recognise us.
And we hear often from people saying, well, I had a good visit with whoever it might be this time because they actually recognised me this time.
(18:14):
That must be heartbreaking to connect with someone who you've known and they've known you throughout life and suddenly that recognition is no longer there.
Christmas two years ago, when I saw dad, he didn't know who I was and I just wanted to song.
I actually needed to take some time to grieve and lament that loss.
(18:36):
The two challenges, one is to say, oh, there's no pain because it obviously hurts.
But the other challenge is I hear people say, oh, I don't want to go and visit dad or auntie or whoever because I don't want to remember them like that.
Who are we visiting for?
Us or them?
I remember meeting a lady a number of years ago when I was working in a dementia unit, a younger lady I didn't recognise.
(19:01):
I went and said hello and she said, oh, I'm sorry, I haven't met you before.
Oh, no, I haven't been here for two years.
I'm just here to clear out mum's room.
She died two days ago, but she didn't remember me so I didn't visit.
Two years.
When we visit someone, if we only visit to be recognised and for our own gratification, that's not love.
(19:25):
And we do need to recognise, as I mentioned, that it does take a toll on the carer.
It does take a toll on the person who is no longer recognised.
But that's not the reason to pull back.
It's the reason to get a better support team around us, isn't it?
It's hard and I don't want to underplay that.
It's traumatic.
But that is the critical reason why we need the support team, the person who's happy to catch up with us for a coffee and just let us vent.
(19:51):
After a week of your loved one not behaving well and struggling with the traumas of that.
The person who's going to come in and visit on the day that you can't be there or visit on a weekly basis, so you know that someone's going and seeing that person.
All of our love in that space not only affects the person who's living with dementia, not only their direct loved ones or caregivers, but it actually reaches into the community.
(20:23):
Good dementia ministry, good older person's ministry is intergenerational.
We're actually reaching people with the gospel, not simply in the 80 plus and living with dementia space, but in the 40s, 60s, 20s, because those people have families and they watch how we, the church, love.
(20:46):
If we passionately fight euthanasia and voluntary assisted dying, but don't care, I'm afraid we risk being hypocrites.
We fight those things and we should fight them in the public square, in an advocacy, in a political space, but we also do that by actually loving people, engaging with people and helping the people most at risk from those options, if you want a better phrase, so we can do that.
(21:15):
And in doing that, we will see many older people and people living with dementia come to faith and indeed have opportunities to share the gospel to younger people as well.
I want to jump into your book, Priceless People.
I want to know firstly, what was the catalyst for writing that?
And then what would people find between the pages?
(21:36):
When I started in older person's ministry 17 years ago, I had a master's degree in theology or divinity.
I'd been in churches for all my life, so I was reasonably Christianized and aware of the Christian literature, but I didn't have any training on ministering to older people or people living with dementia.
(21:56):
So I actually thought, oh, I just haven't found the right book.
I'll need to go and find the book, do the course.
And I looked and I found a few bits and pieces and I looked some more and I spoke to other chaplains.
I did some postgraduate training, but largely the resource I wanted wasn't there.
And I thought about five years and I thought, oh, it'd be really good if someone would write a book on this stuff.
(22:20):
Someone really should do it.
There were greater minds, thankfully, and I said to a few of them, oh, you should really do this.
Yeah, that's a great idea.
It's needed.
I don't want it.
OK, so that went round for a while.
And then five years ago now, Christine Brain, who is the editor of Mia Mia and the Mother's Union magazine, asked me to write an article for them about ministry in this context.
(22:44):
One article became, I think it was almost 12 at the end.
The feedback from that was really positive.
And then I had these 12 articles which became the basis of 12 chapters and then got added to and subtracted from and wrestled with, as I spoke to volunteers, as I spoke to clergy, as I spoke at conferences, picking up, well, how do you care for someone who's non-verbal?
(23:10):
Oh, OK, yeah, I know how to do that.
I can write that down.
Oh, what does it mean to do communion where you've got people with swallowing difficulties?
Oh, yeah, I've had to think through that.
So my practice, my reading and being across the academic literature as well as the secular literature, plus a few years of experience by that stage meant that the books that are formed, what you find within the pages, it starts with theology and outlining what does the Bible teach about all the people?
(23:42):
And the super summary there is what we've covered already.
It's in the title that older people and people living with dementia are priceless, created by God, created in God's image and so loved he sent his son to die for us.
So we look at that, then look at some of the biblical accounts of aging and the biblical answers is pretty blunt, that growing older can be tough.
(24:06):
The Bible doesn't shy away from that and provides some basic stuff that older people as people need to hear the message of Christ crucify.
That doesn't matter whether you're two or one hundred and two.
The core message there is still love.
Then it moves into some practicalities.
(24:26):
How do you effectively encourage people who've been Christians for many years in the midst of their aging, in the midst of their dementia?
How do you share the gospel with people who perhaps have spent 80 years in open defiance of God?
And again, the important thing there is that the literature is clear.
(24:49):
As people grow older, they become more interested in spirituality.
We're not quite sure why that is, but it's probably that older people are very aware of their own mortality.
They no longer think they're bulletproof.
And they've had 40, 60, 80 years of finding out that sex and money and power and beauty are fleeting.
(25:12):
They are blessings, but they are fleeting.
They make a great servant and a horrible master.
There's a real interest in spirituality in terms of meaning, purpose and hope, and therefore a great opportunity for us to share the gospel.
So it runs through some of that.
How do you do that?
How do you preach well in this context?
(25:34):
How do you care for people who are nonverbal?
How do you do a whole pile of things, really nitty gritty things?
Like if someone's got an oxygen concentrator in their room, which is the machine that takes the oxygen out of their room or out of the air, if you're visiting with them, you're best to ask if you're going to open the door or the window, because otherwise if you've got a shut room with an oxygen concentrator, you will start yawning because there's less oxygen in the air.
(26:01):
So that's a really nitty gritty, dead simple thing.
There's some stuff about sharing the Easter message and multi-sensory ministry and working around people's sensory deficits, people who have got vision loss, whose hearing is not what it once was.
How do we use taste to share the gospel?
(26:23):
So there's all that, I'm going to call it richness, all that material in there.
As you describe the book, it would be suitable for people working in aged care.
It will be suitable for pastors wanting to better understand those in their congregation and those nearby who are aging.
But it sounds like there's going to be some interesting passages in there for a range of people.
(26:47):
So I'm guessing that this is going to be suitable for those who have aging loved ones or even are heading towards that season for themselves.
Yeah, it's deliberately written not as an academic text.
If you can read English, you can understand this book.
It's designed, if you will, for the pulpit and the pews.
If you're a Christian and you want to think about aged care ministry, whether you've been doing it for 40 years, I'd suspect there's going to be some material in there that pushes you, maybe even just reminds you of things.
(27:20):
If you're saying, oh, I've done youth ministry, but what do I say to grandma?
This is the book that may help you there.
It's got very short chapters and that is designed.
So people can dip in and out of it.
It's only about the size of a short novel.
It's not a tone.
It's accessible.
And I hope will be powerful in equipping people in terms of encouragement, in terms of knowledge, in how to share Jesus love with these priceless groups of people.
(27:54):
Now, I know in the time that we've had together, we've only really just touched the surface of this huge topic.
So if there are people wanting to get in touch with you to find out more about the book, where's the easiest place for people to connect with you?
Probably the easiest place is my LinkedIn account.
I'm on there semi-regularly.
(28:15):
And when I post or write an article or after this podcast's been released, I'll put a link to that on there.
So you can find out a bit about me.
You can contact me and you can find all my resources through there.
I've also got a YouTube channel, which has got some shorter videos.
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find your LinkedIn account and people can find that YouTube channel as well.
(28:42):
But Ben, I just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing.
Thank you for writing this book, which is obviously much needed.
And thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, it's been a privilege to be with you.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(29:05):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Do you want to hear more stories filled with hope and inspiration?
Dozens more Bleeding Daylight episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:34):
By sharing this and other episodes, you'll ensure that others are hearing stories of hope too.
In a society that fears and tries to avoid growing old, how do we truly care for our ageing population, especially those experiencing dementia?
Today's guest offers some practical help in that area.
(01:03):
Today I'm welcoming Ben Boland, a seasoned chaplain with over 15 years of experience serving older adults and people living with dementia.
As both a practitioner and scholar, Ben has become a leading voice in spirituality and ageing, contributing to academic journals and speaking at international conferences.
His unique perspective is shaped not only by his professional experience, but also by his personal journey as he navigates supporting his own father who lives with advanced dementia.
(01:35):
Ben's book, Priceless People, and his numerous publications reflect his passionate commitment to improving pastoral care for older adults and advancing our understanding of dementia ministry.
Ben, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, wonderful to be with you.
I am always fascinated by the way that God has wired people so differently.
(01:56):
I'm interested in the different paths that people choose and why they choose those paths.
What was it that attracted you to working with older people?
It wasn't until my first year in Bible college when we had a college mission, and one of the afternoons we went to a nursing home.
It's a very comfortable space.
I've been hanging around nursing homes since I was about 10 or 11, but I was gobsmacked that some of the other members of the team were so uncomfortable and found it such a hard space.
(02:26):
Whereas for me, it was boring isn't quite the right phrase, but boring.
That was surprising for me.
Then in my third year, I got a student minister position working in aged care.
I was much, much younger than the other chaplains.
I wasn't an ordained Anglican, so I was a bit of an outlier, really.
Initially I was a volunteer, actually, and then they said, would you like to come and be a student and we'll pay you?
(02:51):
I'm like, I'm a student.
I'm definitely keen on being paid.
Bible college costs money.
Spring that year, they said, would you like to come and work on team?
I said, oh, most definitely.
So thinking back to that experience of going into that nursing home and seeing the discomfort for other people, what do you think it is that brings up that discomfort when people encounter those who are aging?
(03:17):
I think largely it's cultural, both in terms of general Western culture, but also church culture.
Our education system, and in fact, the way we often do in churches, a youth service and a family service and an oldest service, means that we train people, particularly our youth, to engage with people who are maybe two years above or below them.
(03:41):
Then they come out of that having gone through school where you're all with your own year group, to uni or trade or something, which is often with your own year group.
Then we suddenly expect people to be able to function intergenerationally.
And I think that makes it really hard.
On top of that, with our medicalisation of aged care and our medicalisation of health and hospitals, the sick people go to hospital, the old people go to the nursing home, or the aged care facility or the care home.
(04:12):
So we're simply not used to it.
I also think as Christians, we're not always great with suffering.
And particularly death, which strikes me as slightly odd, considering Christianity is a death-centric religion or a death-centric spirituality, in that it's all about Jesus who died for us.
(04:36):
The cross is the centre of Christianity.
Yet we're not always great with that.
I know that when we're younger, we somehow don't ever believe that we're going to get old.
We think that we're invincible.
But when we start getting a little bit older, and maybe for those who were in college with you back at that time, you do start to think a little bit more forward.
(05:00):
Do you think there's perhaps a fear of what ageing may bring for us that we don't want to face, that we want to continue to believe that we'll always be young and vital and healthy?
Culturally, I'm sure that is the case.
We wouldn't spend the amount of money we spend on anti-ageing treatments and creams and all that.
It's a multi-billion dollar industry trying not to age.
(05:23):
So that would suggest that we have an issue with ageing.
One of the interesting things I see working as a care home chaplain is the younger people say, oh, well, the retiree should minister there.
Many of the retirees say, oh, I don't want to go there.
It's too confronting.
It's too scary.
It's too hard because I know I'm mortal.
(05:46):
I know I'm no longer bulletproof.
And I don't want to live with dementia.
I don't want to have to leave my family home.
So there's some real fears there.
In many ways, older people are the, if you'll bear with the term, the lepers of modern society.
Segregated, unloved, undervisited, discriminated against.
(06:10):
And it seems hard to believe that there is that discrimination against age.
And yet when we look at society's opinion of older people, oftentimes they're dismissed as outdated, as not having anything to contribute.
And yet we're talking about people who have lived full lives, probably brought up a family, had grandkids and really had an impact over the years.
(06:36):
And suddenly we expect that none of that matters anymore.
That must be incredibly demoralizing for the people who are aging to think that all this time people would listen to what I have to say.
And now I'm just being dismissed out of hand.
Yeah, it's devastating.
It's absolutely devastating.
(06:57):
The scary thing for me, at least, is the World Health Organization commissioned a report a few years ago now on ageism against older people.
So discrimination against older people.
And that found that 50%, one in two people globally discriminate against older people.
(07:17):
Now for that to even work mathematically, that means that older people are discriminating against older people.
So that's terrifying.
Older people are first and foremost people created by God in God's image and so loved he died for them.
Our value is not our beauty or our strength or our youth or our wealth or our job or our power.
(07:45):
Our ultimate value is not what we can do, what we will do, what we have done, but our relationship with God as creatures, as children.
I'm particularly interested in the fact that you say that older people discriminate against older people.
And I'm wondering if a lot of that is the expectation of older people, not just for others, but for themselves, that they have been told the excuse so many times that older people don't have value.
(08:18):
And they actually believe that about themselves, not just those around them.
Yeah, that's exactly the issue.
They've bought the lie, if you will, that your value is tied up in your productivity, that capitalism has value for people.
I used to run the Sunday school, I used to preach, I used to be a deacon or an elder or a minister, and I can't do any of those things anymore, or I can do less of those things.
(08:46):
And therefore I'm less when biblically none of those things give us value.
So when we look at that side of things of people who are aging and the body starts to break down, can't physically do the things that we used to do, that's one side of things.
But of course, what you're increasingly dealing with and dealing with within your own family is this issue of dementia.
(09:14):
Maybe you can help explain how you see dementia, because I guess it's one of those words that's bandied about.
But do we have a full understanding?
I'm not sure.
So help us understand exactly what dementia is.
Do we have a full understanding?
No.
Dementia was first described, I think it was in 1917.
So we've only had dementia in a term for a bit over 100 years.
(09:39):
So we're still wrestling with that.
And because dementia affects the mind, it is incredibly complicated.
And while we basically understand the heart, neuroscience is still exploring the very edges of what it means cognitively.
So in terms of dementia, the starting point is dementia is an umbrella term for a whole group of neurological diseases.
(10:07):
Alzheimer's is one of the dementias, it's the most prevalent of the dementias, but there's over 200 other dementias.
And indeed, some people can live with multiple dementias.
So my dad has Alzheimer's.
He has vascular dementia, and he probably has pugilistic dementia as well.
If we think about a bit like we think about cancer, cancer could be a melanoma.
(10:32):
It could be breast cancer.
It could be colon cancer.
They're all cancer, but how they affect the person is different.
Two people with colon cancer are going to be two separate cases.
So they're not identical, even if you've got the same disease.
So that's sort of the starting point for our understanding of dementia.
(10:52):
The next thing, and this is the biomedical definition, is that dementia affects the mind and it's degenerative.
In fact, it's terminal.
So dementia will kill you.
It's the biggest killer of Australian women.
So we need to get our head around that.
Because dementia affects the brain, it affects everything that the brain controls.
(11:14):
It's much more than memory.
It's not just memory loss.
It controls your ability to navigate, your awareness of day and night, your ability to slow.
Anything your brain controls, dementia can impact.
And because different parts of your brain do different things, it depends which part of your brain is affected as to how your dementia will manifest itself.
(11:41):
So that's the biological definition of dementia.
A theologian called Kinghorn says dementia is not primarily a disease of cognitive decline, but rather of relational abandonment.
He's saying and highlighting that often the issue is not that the person's mind is not as strong as it once was, but that people who did care for them, who were relationally surrounding them, disperse and neglect them.
(12:15):
And I think that's a really good reminder, particularly for us as Christians, that we need always to be with people.
We're created as relational beings.
Relationship with God, relationship with each other, relationship with the creation.
If we don't have any of those levels of relationship, we're not going to be in a good space.
(12:35):
In some earlier years, when we forget where we've put our keys or we forget someone's name, it might even be a joke, oh, it's dementia.
And yet when we get into older years, it tends to be more of a fear rather than I'm forgetting things.
(12:56):
It's a great concern when I'm forgetting things, which is natural in a lot of cases.
We suddenly think it's dementia and that can cause a lot of fear.
So what do we do in those situations?
If we do have concern that maybe there is cognitive decline, what's our first step?
(13:16):
Medically, a great thing to do if you're concerned about that is go and see your doctor.
Go and see your GP and work out what's going on.
Simply forgetting things, particularly if you're like me and you're always forgetting things, is not a sign of dementia particularly.
A better sign is that you pick up an object, a pen and think, I should know what this is.
(13:38):
I have no idea.
I think the second thing is we need to actually wrestle with our theology of dementia in terms of we need to know that even if we forget God, and those of us who are younger, who are not living with dementia forget God, don't we?
He still remembers us.
And that is true for us in the midst of dementia.
(13:59):
And indeed, people living with dementia can and do come to faith because God is not bound by dementia.
He is not limited by that.
I think those things are important.
There are also some things we can do to give ourselves the best hope of avoiding dementia.
Basically, it's all the healthy stuff your doctor's been telling you for the last 50 years.
(14:24):
Exercise is important.
Healthy diet is important.
Healthy weight range is important.
The two that are perhaps less known but are critically important is making sure you can hear well is important.
So where you're hearing aids, there is a big link between people who struggle to hear and developing dementia.
(14:45):
And fifthly, being socially connected is critical.
That speaks something to the importance of church.
Church is not simply a place where we hear the word preached, where we sing together and pray together, which great things though they are.
But part of the value of church too is that relational connection with other humans.
(15:07):
I guess on the other side of it is those who care for someone who is going through dementia, such as yourself.
And I'm sure that that can be very difficult at times.
How careful do we need to be, even with ourselves in that situation, to surround ourselves with that support network, knowing that what we're facing in the decline of someone that we love is actually going to take a big toll on us, isn't it?
(15:37):
Self-care, if you're caring, is critical.
Indeed, if you don't look after yourself, you will not keep caring.
You will experience contassion fatigue, you will burn out.
At that point, that's a really big risk factor for elder abuse.
So it's critical that we build support teams, both the paid people like the doctor or maybe a home care package, but someone who can help take the bin out or someone who can sit with that or take you shopping or do something to facilitate that.
(16:13):
So both volunteer and paid is critical in that space.
My strong recommendation is to try and build that team early rather than late.
At the risk of being bossy, if you're not caring for someone at the moment, can I encourage you to join someone else's caregiver team?
(16:33):
If each of us provides some care, the burden is lightened exponentially.
And I imagine that doesn't just fit with people who are caring for the elderly.
It's when we see people around us.
And oftentimes we hear about this in churches of people that are going through various things.
Being part of the care group doesn't necessarily mean making the meal or doing those sorts of things that we traditionally do, but actually connecting with that person and just checking in on them.
(17:04):
It can be as simple as going and having a kaka with them or getting on the phone and calling them.
If an older person is struggling to read their Bible because of eyesight, could you organise to call them and read scripture with them?
If someone can't make it to church because either they're frail or their loved one is frail, could you organise a roster so at least once a month someone goes and sits with their loved one so they can go to church?
(17:33):
Meals are great, but we can do so much more and lots of it is not going to be rugged science.
It's just basic love applied with a few grey hairs and wrinkles.
We do tend to, as a society, shy away from ageing, shying away from dementia.
(17:53):
And I guess part of that fear is not being known by the person that we've loved for so many years.
And that must be incredibly difficult to turn up to see mum or dad or grandfather or grandmother and they don't recognise us.
And we hear often from people saying, well, I had a good visit with whoever it might be this time because they actually recognised me this time.
(18:14):
That must be heartbreaking to connect with someone who you've known and they've known you throughout life and suddenly that recognition is no longer there.
Christmas two years ago, when I saw dad, he didn't know who I was and I just wanted to song.
I actually needed to take some time to grieve and lament that loss.
(18:36):
The two challenges, one is to say, oh, there's no pain because it obviously hurts.
But the other challenge is I hear people say, oh, I don't want to go and visit dad or auntie or whoever because I don't want to remember them like that.
Who are we visiting for?
Us or them?
I remember meeting a lady a number of years ago when I was working in a dementia unit, a younger lady I didn't recognise.
(19:01):
I went and said hello and she said, oh, I'm sorry, I haven't met you before.
Oh, no, I haven't been here for two years.
I'm just here to clear out mum's room.
She died two days ago, but she didn't remember me so I didn't visit.
Two years.
When we visit someone, if we only visit to be recognised and for our own gratification, that's not love.
(19:25):
And we do need to recognise, as I mentioned, that it does take a toll on the carer.
It does take a toll on the person who is no longer recognised.
But that's not the reason to pull back.
It's the reason to get a better support team around us, isn't it?
It's hard and I don't want to underplay that.
It's traumatic.
But that is the critical reason why we need the support team, the person who's happy to catch up with us for a coffee and just let us vent.
(19:51):
After a week of your loved one not behaving well and struggling with the traumas of that.
The person who's going to come in and visit on the day that you can't be there or visit on a weekly basis, so you know that someone's going and seeing that person.
All of our love in that space not only affects the person who's living with dementia, not only their direct loved ones or caregivers, but it actually reaches into the community.
(20:23):
Good dementia ministry, good older person's ministry is intergenerational.
We're actually reaching people with the gospel, not simply in the 80 plus and living with dementia space, but in the 40s, 60s, 20s, because those people have families and they watch how we, the church, love.
(20:46):
If we passionately fight euthanasia and voluntary assisted dying, but don't care, I'm afraid we risk being hypocrites.
We fight those things and we should fight them in the public square, in an advocacy, in a political space, but we also do that by actually loving people, engaging with people and helping the people most at risk from those options, if you want a better phrase, so we can do that.
(21:15):
And in doing that, we will see many older people and people living with dementia come to faith and indeed have opportunities to share the gospel to younger people as well.
I want to jump into your book, Priceless People.
I want to know firstly, what was the catalyst for writing that?
And then what would people find between the pages?
(21:36):
When I started in older person's ministry 17 years ago, I had a master's degree in theology or divinity.
I'd been in churches for all my life, so I was reasonably Christianized and aware of the Christian literature, but I didn't have any training on ministering to older people or people living with dementia.
(21:56):
So I actually thought, oh, I just haven't found the right book.
I'll need to go and find the book, do the course.
And I looked and I found a few bits and pieces and I looked some more and I spoke to other chaplains.
I did some postgraduate training, but largely the resource I wanted wasn't there.
And I thought about five years and I thought, oh, it'd be really good if someone would write a book on this stuff.
(22:20):
Someone really should do it.
There were greater minds, thankfully, and I said to a few of them, oh, you should really do this.
Yeah, that's a great idea.
It's needed.
I don't want it.
OK, so that went round for a while.
And then five years ago now, Christine Brain, who is the editor of Mia Mia and the Mother's Union magazine, asked me to write an article for them about ministry in this context.
(22:44):
One article became, I think it was almost 12 at the end.
The feedback from that was really positive.
And then I had these 12 articles which became the basis of 12 chapters and then got added to and subtracted from and wrestled with, as I spoke to volunteers, as I spoke to clergy, as I spoke at conferences, picking up, well, how do you care for someone who's non-verbal?
(23:10):
Oh, OK, yeah, I know how to do that.
I can write that down.
Oh, what does it mean to do communion where you've got people with swallowing difficulties?
Oh, yeah, I've had to think through that.
So my practice, my reading and being across the academic literature as well as the secular literature, plus a few years of experience by that stage meant that the books that are formed, what you find within the pages, it starts with theology and outlining what does the Bible teach about all the people?
(23:42):
And the super summary there is what we've covered already.
It's in the title that older people and people living with dementia are priceless, created by God, created in God's image and so loved he sent his son to die for us.
So we look at that, then look at some of the biblical accounts of aging and the biblical answers is pretty blunt, that growing older can be tough.
(24:06):
The Bible doesn't shy away from that and provides some basic stuff that older people as people need to hear the message of Christ crucify.
That doesn't matter whether you're two or one hundred and two.
The core message there is still love.
Then it moves into some practicalities.
(24:26):
How do you effectively encourage people who've been Christians for many years in the midst of their aging, in the midst of their dementia?
How do you share the gospel with people who perhaps have spent 80 years in open defiance of God?
And again, the important thing there is that the literature is clear.
(24:49):
As people grow older, they become more interested in spirituality.
We're not quite sure why that is, but it's probably that older people are very aware of their own mortality.
They no longer think they're bulletproof.
And they've had 40, 60, 80 years of finding out that sex and money and power and beauty are fleeting.
(25:12):
They are blessings, but they are fleeting.
They make a great servant and a horrible master.
There's a real interest in spirituality in terms of meaning, purpose and hope, and therefore a great opportunity for us to share the gospel.
So it runs through some of that.
How do you do that?
How do you preach well in this context?
(25:34):
How do you care for people who are nonverbal?
How do you do a whole pile of things, really nitty gritty things?
Like if someone's got an oxygen concentrator in their room, which is the machine that takes the oxygen out of their room or out of the air, if you're visiting with them, you're best to ask if you're going to open the door or the window, because otherwise if you've got a shut room with an oxygen concentrator, you will start yawning because there's less oxygen in the air.
(26:01):
So that's a really nitty gritty, dead simple thing.
There's some stuff about sharing the Easter message and multi-sensory ministry and working around people's sensory deficits, people who have got vision loss, whose hearing is not what it once was.
How do we use taste to share the gospel?
(26:23):
So there's all that, I'm going to call it richness, all that material in there.
As you describe the book, it would be suitable for people working in aged care.
It will be suitable for pastors wanting to better understand those in their congregation and those nearby who are aging.
But it sounds like there's going to be some interesting passages in there for a range of people.
(26:47):
So I'm guessing that this is going to be suitable for those who have aging loved ones or even are heading towards that season for themselves.
Yeah, it's deliberately written not as an academic text.
If you can read English, you can understand this book.
It's designed, if you will, for the pulpit and the pews.
If you're a Christian and you want to think about aged care ministry, whether you've been doing it for 40 years, I'd suspect there's going to be some material in there that pushes you, maybe even just reminds you of things.
(27:20):
If you're saying, oh, I've done youth ministry, but what do I say to grandma?
This is the book that may help you there.
It's got very short chapters and that is designed.
So people can dip in and out of it.
It's only about the size of a short novel.
It's not a tone.
It's accessible.
And I hope will be powerful in equipping people in terms of encouragement, in terms of knowledge, in how to share Jesus love with these priceless groups of people.
(27:54):
Now, I know in the time that we've had together, we've only really just touched the surface of this huge topic.
So if there are people wanting to get in touch with you to find out more about the book, where's the easiest place for people to connect with you?
Probably the easiest place is my LinkedIn account.
I'm on there semi-regularly.
(28:15):
And when I post or write an article or after this podcast's been released, I'll put a link to that on there.
So you can find out a bit about me.
You can contact me and you can find all my resources through there.
I've also got a YouTube channel, which has got some shorter videos.
I will put links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find your LinkedIn account and people can find that YouTube channel as well.
(28:42):
But Ben, I just want to say thank you for the work that you're doing.
Thank you for writing this book, which is obviously much needed.
And thank you so much for your time today on Bleeding Daylight.
Rodney, it's been a privilege to be with you.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
(29:05):
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.