Is your church “dementia friendly”?
Tony Hall launched the Bristol Dementia Action Alliance following his wife Barbara's dementia diagnosis. He offers this reflection to help churches consider how they can support those living with dementia
Is your church “dementia friendly”? What does that mean?
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Do you have people living with dementia in your congregation?
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How do you support them?
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Have they got a carer?
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How do you support carers?
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Is your church inclusive?
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Does that “include” people with dementia and their carers?
As well as preaching the Gospel, may I suggest your church asks itself these questions, as most churches have people living with dementia and those that care for them. An estimated 982,000 people are living with dementia in the UK - roughly 10 times the number of Baptist church members (we have around 100,000 members according to the latest statistics.)
What do you do when you realise someone in your church has dementia or someone is struggling to care for a loved one?
Do you just take them off the rota or suggest they go to a care home?
Jesus commands us to “Love God and love each other” – that includes people with dementia and their carers!
To help understand this, let me tell you our story – shortened version!
Barbara and I are Christians and were “born again” at Manford Way Evangelical church h in Hainault, Essex. We were married there in 1965 and after living in North London for five years, we moved to Andover and attended Andover Baptist Church. I was later promoted at work and we moved to Bristol attending Horfield Baptist Church and then Westbury Baptist Church.
It was soon after moving to Westbury, that I noticed her behaviour was changing and I saw symptoms of dementia e.g. she was forgetting things, making strange decisions. I didn’t realise it was dementia at the time.
We went to see our GP and he referred us to a consultant who suggested it was depression. I disagreed with this diagnosis as we’d known depression years ago when our eldest daughter had died of Leukaemia aged six, so we knew about depression. He eventually thought it may be early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, prescribed tablets and said he’d see her again in a year.
The tablets did nothing, wrong diagnosis. So, he prescribed another course of medication which caused her to roll around the floor in agony. Long story, but again wrong diagnosis.
He then said that he had nothing more to prescribe and to contact the Alzheimer’s Society. At this point, I felt abandoned by the NHS.
Through a speech therapist we were also seeing at the hospital, Barbara was asked if she would like to join a research project at UCL in London. Following two days of checks and scans, they confirmed “She’s got Frontal Temporal Dementia I’m afraid!” At least we now knew what she had.
On contacting the local Alzheimer’s Society, we were put in touch with a lovely Dementia Support Worker called Sally who invited us to a drop-in group she ran.
She also introduced us to Singing for the Brain, which is brilliant. Music and singing are powerful. You only have to listen to a song, and it can take you back to a memory, it may be the first dance you danced to at your wedding or something you sang at Glastonbury last year. This is helpful for someone with dementia as it stimulates memory. If you sing hymns and songs at church, keep doing it, it helps keep dementia at bay.
In 1993, we held a public meeting at church asking the question “Is Bristol a Dementia Friendly City”? From that meeting, we went on to launch Bristol Dementia Action Alliance (BDAA).
Around that time, we had modernised the front of the church with a brand-new foyer and servery which (amongst other things) facilitated the opening of a church café. I asked if I could open a memory café for people with dementia and their carers. We called it “Happy Days Memory Café” and celebrate our tenth birthday in November this year.
People in church offered to help with the memory café as well as folk from the community. Everyone was very kind to Barbara and me; one example I can share with you is that six church folks organised a rota for taking Barbara for a walk while I went to our local primary school to listen to the children read and help some with their maths.
Dementia to some is all doom and gloom, but there were some humorous times as well. In Baptist churches we have Communion. In our church the wine is served in tiny glasses, and a loaf of bread is broken with some small pieces available and a large chunk remaining. Most people just take a small piece, but what did Barbara do? You guessed it, she took the large chunk and people around us smiled.
This is just a very shortened version of our journey, but as you can see, the support we received made a huge difference in how we coped. I've also seen the impact thoughtful, dementia-friendly churches can have on people living with dementia and their carers.
Can your church offer such support?
You can read about our journey in my book called A Bucketful of Patience available from Bristol Books CIC
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Baptist Times, 26/06/2025