Robin Thomson on Dementia and the Response of Churches

Cambridge Papers are published once a quarter (or thereabouts) and address a wide range of topics, offering ‘Christian reflection on contemporary issues’.

The latest paper is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here):

Robin Thomson, ‘Dementia and the Response of Churches’, Cambridge Papers 35, 2 (June 2026).

Here is the summary:

‘This paper highlights medical, social and spiritual challenges which our society, and church, faces in light of the growing number of people living with dementia. After considering the need to complement medical care with person-centred holistic care, through relationships characterised by love, the paper surveys some key features of a biblical framework to undergird our care for those living with dementia. While a national conversation about the provision of adult social care has begun through the work of the Casey Commission and others, this paper is primarily concerned with the contribution that local churches can make: caring for church members, supporting caregivers and building partnerships in the community.’

Exodus #1: The Lord Who Remembers

During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

Exodus 2:23-25

It’s been said that there are three signs of old age: the first is memory loss... and I forget the other two.

While it’s healthy to laugh at our occasional forgetfulness, the humour can mask the distressing reality of those who suffer with memory problems, both for the person themselves and for their relatives and friends. Writing about his mother’s loss of memory, the film director Luis Buñuel says: ‘You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Without it, we are nothing.’

Significantly, theologian John Swinton’s book on dementia bears the subtitle ‘Living in the Memories of God’. It’s not what we remember about ourselves that matters so much as what God remembers about us. Our being remembered by God provides our ultimate source of identity and hope.

In this is great comfort: for all that we might forget, God remembers.

The first two chapters of the book of Exodus cover a period of over 80 years. God is barely mentioned, but a turning point comes at the end of chapter 2 in the verses cited above. Spot the verbs: God heard, God remembered, God looked, and God was concerned, or (as the English Standard Version translates) God knew. Some of the words are picked up in Exodus 3:7-9 when God commissions Moses, and reaffirmed in 6:5 when God says: ‘I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered my covenant.’

God remembered – as he did with Noah (Genesis 8:1) and Abraham (Genesis 19:29) and Rachel (Genesis 30:22). It’s not that he had forgotten. It’s that he is now ready to act. God’s ‘remembering’ gives the exodus a significance beyond the immediate predicament of the Israelites. God is now making good on a prior commitment – his covenant with Abraham, his plan for the salvation of all nations, a plan in which we by his grace are included.

Along the way, we might sometimes find ourselves wondering where he is and what he’s doing. But he hasn’t stopped listening to us, he hasn’t forgotten us, he hasn’t closed his eyes to us. Wherever we are this week, and whatever we’re going through, he hears, he remembers, he sees, and he knows.

Holiness 3, 1 (2017) on Holiness and Pastoral Relationships

The latest issue of Holiness, the journal of Wesley House Cambridge is now available online, this one devoted to ‘Holiness and Pastoral Relationships’.

The editor, Andrew Stobart, leads into the theme with a reflection on the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, meeting in Liverpool in 1820, and being faced with a sharp decline in membership. Among the range of measures adopted, ‘increased pastoral intercourse’ with Methodist people ‘at their own homes’ was recognised as an ‘absolute obligation’. The Conference encouraged its ministers to show ‘unremitting diligence’ in conducting pastoral visitation, which included ‘giving seasonable counsel’, ‘exhorting them to a faithful and loving observance of all the duties of personal and family religion’, and ‘kindly inquiry into their Christian experience’.

The entire journal, containing the below collection of peer-reviewed essays, lecture, and short articles, is available as a pdf here.

Bill Mullally

The Effect of Presence and Power in the Pastoral Supervisory Relationship

This article addresses the important elements of presence and power in the pastoral supervisory relationship. It is based on qualitative research, which used a questionnaire methodology with six Methodist ministers, all of whom had taken part in group pastoral supervision for a period of two years. The aim of this research was to gain insight into their experience of the supervisory process. The article explores how an open, authentic and trusting environment can be created within the pastoral supervisory relationship that has regenerative and healing potential, whereby ministers will be better able to face the challenges of ministry. It contends there is a need for well-qualified, skilled and spiritually sensitive supervisory support for ministers. Such pastoral supervisors will understand the dynamics of power and presence to create a sacred space for ministers to ‘come apart and reflect a while’. This covenant relationship creates transformational possibilities for those who commit to the journey.

James Dunn

Why Four Gospels? Why Only Four?

This is a transcript of the 2016 Fernley-Hartley Lecture, which was delivered during the 2016 British Methodist Conference at the Lambeth Mission, London, and is published here with acknowledgement to the Fernley-Hartley Trust. It stands largely unchanged from its first delivery in the hope that the texture and tone of the lecture might also be retained. The article argues that answering the questions ‘Why four Gospels?’ and ‘Why only four?’ provides a clear picture of the character of the gospel of Jesus as ‘the same yet different’, as well as a challenge to today’s Christians to retell the good news in their own contexts with equal or equivalent effect. The article discusses the context in which the four canonical Gospels were recognised, pointing out that the term ‘gospel’ was coined in the process. The distinctive emphases of the Synoptics and John show how the same story can be told differently, an essential restatement of the same message for new and changing audiences.

Christopher Collins

Reimagining Dementia: Seeing Ourselves More Fully in the Dementia-Diagnosed

How does the Church respond to the increasing number of dementia-diagnosed within our communities? This paper argues that the Church inhabits Kitwood’s ‘standard paradigm’ of dementia, which focuses on the loss and decay of the person. This diverts our attention away from a more theologically nuanced understanding of the person and personhood. Using Lartey’s Theological Form model of action and reflection, I will reflect on the pastoral experience of caring for the dementia-diagnosed and seek to promote an alternative theology of personhood as relationship based on Moltmann’s ‘social trinity’ explored through the creation narrative of Genesis 2. This will allow us to develop an alternative model of pastoral care which enables us to see the ‘angelic mission’ of the dementia-diagnosed.

Paul Gismondi

Fear and Faith: Reflections on Ministry and Death

An experience of observing a cremation instigates theological reflection on the fear of death. Using Laurie Green’s model of action to reflection, and then reflection to action, the article moves through three cycles of theological reflection, exploring first the author’s response to the crematorium, then a subsequent encounter with a family during a funeral visit, and finally a conversation with colleagues. Each cycle produces further insights: the universality of death; the particularity of death; and a final glimpse of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Through this, the author explores the interaction between his fear of death and his faith.

Catherine Minor

Beyond Horror: Mapping the Contours of Holiness in an Acute Hospital

Reflecting on the experience of hospital chaplaincy in an acute hospital in the north-east of England, this article explores the conviction that God is with us both in and beyond horror. Echoes of Scripture are identified in a number of pastoral encounters, which help to illustrate the presence of God in the midst of horror. The work of chaplaincy also points to God’s presence beyond the horror of present pain and death, turning the hospital into ‘holy ground’.

Elizabeth Dunning

A Good Death? Pastoral Reflections on Closing a Chapel

This article reflects on an experience of the closure of a chapel, exploring ways to challenge the assumption that closure is a failure. Noting the lack of intentional resources to aid churches considering closure, the author identifies the Passion and resurrection narratives as a biblical model for the stages of church awareness of change. Reflecting on these narratives enables the closure of a chapel to be considered as a fitting conclusion to work accomplished, as ‘a good death’.

Jane Leach

‘On Visiting the Sick’: The Art of Pastoral Conversation

This article is a transcript of a lecture delivered as part of the first series of Wesley Memorial Lectures given at Wesley Memorial Church in Oxford in July 2016. Originally entitled ‘Speaking of God in Private’, this lecture was followed by a second, ‘Speaking of God in Public’. It is included here as part of the ongoing journal series exploring what the sermons of John Wesley have done for us, and it stands largely unchanged from its first delivery in order to retain its texture and tone. This article addresses the questions of why in Western culture it is a problem to speak of God in personal conversation; why this is true even within some churches; and whether there are any pointers towards how intentional conversation about God might be recovered in the contemporary Western context in the sermon of John Wesley’s of 1786, ‘On Visiting the Sick’.

Janet Morley

‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ A Reflection and Intercession Based on Mark 9:14–29, and on John Reilly’s Painting, Healing of the Lunatic Boy

Gillian Houghton

Reflections on Self Portrait by Eddy Aigbe

Reviews

Ethics in Brief Volume 21, Nos. 5 & 6 (2016)

Two issues from Volume 21 of Ethics in Brief, published by The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, are now available online:

Julian Rivers

Fundamental British Values and the Virtues of Civic Loyalty

This paper reflects the rise of ‘fundamental British values’ as a core part of the Government’s counter-extremism strategy. It identifies several problems with the idea of FBVs, and suggests that we need to recover the concept of civic loyalty instead. It is appropriate to promote this through education, which should in part seek to form pupils and students into virtuous citizens.

Kirsty Jones

Dementia: Living in the Memories of God – A Review

[From the Conclusion:] Offering an original and carefully constructed theology of dementia, Memories is essential reading for academic and pastoral work on disability and anthropology. Swinton effectively shows why the church should care about people living with dementia, and how it can care well. God, he emphasises, cares because he remembers persons as they were, are and will be, holding their reality in his hands and cherishing each moment of joy and sorrow. Remembering, for God, is purposeful and powerful; his memory is the foundation of humanity and each human life. Inspired by such a vision, the book moves us cognitively beyond narrow conceptions, emotively beyond apathy, and practically into action.

Centre for Public Christianity (July 2014)

This month, among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity offers a video interview with Professor John Swinton (Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at Aberdeen University) about dementia, ‘the challenge it poses to Western ideas about identity and the importance of community for those who suffer from dementia’.