Thursday, January 10, 2013

Hopsice Care for Churches?

 
 
"You understand what this means, Dad?" a friend asked of her father as they prepared to move him to in-house hospice care.
 
"Yes, I do!" he snapped.  "It means a death sentence!"
 
Sadly, many people share his assessment.  We are a culture dedicated to preserving life at all costs and determined to outwit death. We find it difficult to grasp the hospice concept of accepting the inevitable and changing our focus, in our last months, from medically-supported resistance to a gracious acceptance that creates a space for vitality and creativity.  We are challenged by the idea that vitality and creativity -- life itself -- can be redefined, and decline honored.
 
Yesterday, it occurred to me that the hospice approach might be applied to the aging church.  I was delighted to learn from one of my most thoughtful and imaginative friends that someone has already begun this discussion in her own denomination, and I am looking forward to learning from him and his work.
 
It seems to me that the overall challenge is three-fold, whether in the life of an individual or that of a church.
 
First, there is the struggle to see, to recognize, to accept. This is the step I know best . I have watched dozens of people, their medical treatment failing and their bodies crumbling, unable to acknowledge that an illness has gained the upper hand.  Most insist that it would be "giving up" to discontinue the chemo that wrenches their guts into knots and demands twenty-three hours of sleep for every one of alertness.  When asked what kind of prognosis or timeline the doctor has indicated, they say, "That's not a question I want to pursue." The suggestion that it might be time to change course is met with furious resistance.  Years ago, when my stepmother was diagnosed with stage four cancer and told that she had a one percent chance of surviving a year with aggressive and debilitating treatment, my brother and I found ourselves butting heads with a brick wall whenever we tried to suggest other options.  I have watched her story play itself out again and again.
 
So it is with the declining church.  Few people want to look reality in the face, or imagine the likely outcome of another decade dedicated to following the path of the last fifty.  They look right past the realities of increasing financial burdens on elderly members struggling to carry them, of upkeep and supplies neglected, of the impossibility of paying for the staff they need. Words like "merger" and "close" meet stiff resistance.  
 
The second step in the challenge is the metanoia, the change, the turning point.  And oh ~ that is difficult, because it means walking the rocky path named Loss and Grief.  For an individual, the decision to abandon aggressive medical intervention means relinquishing the hope that life will continue indefinitely, that the body will regain its strength and function, that grandchildren will be seen and enjoyed, that the plans for later years will be fulfilled.  So much will be abandoned before it ever happens, and so much anguish accompanies such terrible, all-encompassing loss.
 
For members of a church, the metanoia is similar, and must surely be accompanied by the dreadful sense that a lifetime of effort was for naught. What else could it mean, that decades of sacrifice of time and treasure and talent have produced a building empty of younger generations? My people love to talk about the days when the town boasted two gas stations, a hardware store, a grocery, and two churches with Sunday school classrooms bursting at the seams and the sanctuary filled to the brim for worship. All of that has faded, been gone for years and years -- but the moment of intentional  metanoia has yet to come.
 
The third step: How to live into one's decline?  How to foster transformed vitality and creativity when they look nothing like what you've assumed they should?  How to develop the vision of the future that makes the metanoia not only palatable, but . . .  enchanting?  Is that possible?
 
Yes, another post . . . .
 
 
 
 
 

17 comments:

  1. Looking forward to the next. An important topic and a perfect metaphor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Working as a Hospice Chaplain, the main points to address to the church are:
    Are you comfortable where you are?
    What is next for you?
    How do you say "I love you" to the church?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HNW, I would love it if you would elaborate. You raise so many questions in your succinct questions.

      Delete
  3. I just to say I wasn't called to be a hospice chaplain. But that's exactly what I am called to be. The question for me is, I believe that hospice is the right choice, but the congregation isn't there yet. How do I know that it is the right choice, after all I'm just there in the short term? If it is the right choice, how to I move them forward to that hard decision? It has to be a mutual coming to the decision, through lots of denial. And from my personal experience, denial is powerful and narcotic. But, also based on personal experience, denial sometimes is the right place to be. I think it takes lots of waiting.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, and that's one of the questions -- who gets to choose? Or influence the decision? (For either the individual or the congregation.)

      Delete
  4. I encounter a lot of this language and conversation at the Episcopal Church Building Fund. They help churches either die gracefully or morph into something else. As Christians we believe (or at least proclaim) resurrection and that is a HUGE part in this. There is never resurrection without death, so sometimes things (churches, ministries) need the chance to die a grace-filled death before anything else can be imagined. Sometimes the imagining alone will revive a congregation. In my diocese we are have been faced with this for the last 4 years and have found it energizing to be doing the honorable work of "diagnosing" and facing reality. Just naming alone can sometimes be relief. I am an RN and a priest, so I mix these metaphors a lot in my diocesan job.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amy, the friend who brought this metaphor to my attention (after, like Lisa(see below) I had thought it a stroke of genius on my part) is an Episcopal priest.

      I am very grateful to have the word resurrection thrown into the mix. One of the intriguing things to me about pastoring is how many Christians resist death without any articulation of the concept of resurrection life. I have found that those who do not claim faith for themselves are sometimes far more able to accept the end, which they tend to see as part of the natural cycle of life and death of which they are a part, rather than as a time of deterioration followed by judgment.

      Perhaps there is much teaching to be done about resurrection in its many senses, including the ways in which the congregation has experienced it in the past.

      Delete
    2. Robin - when I did CPE I was amazed at how many "very Christian" people were trying to pray away death even in the most dire of circumstances - it flabbergasted me! It is the same phenomenon - I like to throw into the conversation I have with churches now: How many of Paul's churches are still in existence just as they were in his time? How many of Peter's? How many did Christ himself leave? No church is ever always the same throughout all time, just as no human being has ever survived this life without death.
      Montessori methods of leading people to a discovery are very effective in this sort of ministry. It has to be done carefully, prayerfully and pastorally but it is honorable and necessary work to do.

      Delete
    3. btw- "Allow Natural Death" convo is much more helpful than "Do Not Resuscitate" language.

      Delete
  5. It was really incredible to come here and read this post, because I was just talking over your previous post about how to minister to an aging church with the hubs, and I mentioned the idea of "hospice" for the congregation. (I thought I was coming up with something original...:D) I am not a minister, have not attended seminary. But it seems to me that there must be a way to make the discussion look less like "giving up" and more like "going" up...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, and one might imagine the past year of your own life as an example. Would you be taking those incredible photos of birds from your restaurant kitchen?

      Delete
  6. The idea of hospice is being comfortable with no heroic measures to sustain life, letting life to end while everyone is knowing what is happening and comfortable. The ideas I posted were last things that people(churches) that are dying need to answer for themselves. I thought they fit well with what your wrote. Amy talked about resurrection, I think this may be true for a people confined to structure. Get out of a structure and see what is out there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well, now I feel better about last week's sermon. I was trying to urge my people to get out and see the world around them; maybe they first need to think in terms of escaping the structure itself.

      Delete
  7. Many years ago as the spouse of a minister, we experienced the amalgamation of several country congregations who already knew each other because the churches were very close. There was very little discussion and the decision was made at the Conference office. Forty years later there are still hard feelings but I believe that if this had been handled with consultation with the people, the story would have been different. I like the idea of hospice because there is so much grief associated with moving on in such a situation. God bless you who care so much for your people that you want to help them through the necessary changes that are on the horizon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My people have been angered by upper echelon suggestions of merger, just as my stepmother and father were angered by our suggestions of hospice care for a stage 4+ cancer situation.

      Montessori! Create the environment in which the individual comes to her own learning.

      Delete
    2. And honestly, allowing them to come to their own learning is the only way to honor the human beings involved. Any decisions made by a hierarchal body will only impede progress. God's timing comes into play here.

      Delete