Michele Hendrix remembers the moment her life changed. Floating above her hospital bed, she saw her beloved pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Houston praying for her. She was just 33 years old.
Michele Hendrix remembers the moment her life changed. Floating above her hospital bed, she saw her beloved pastor at Grace Presbyterian Church in Houston, praying for her. She was just 33 years old.
At a time in her life when Joan Hurlock especially needed spiritual and emotional support, she found herself drifting away from her faith community.
Hurlock, a member of Carmichael Presbyterian Church near Sacramento, California, had spent years caring for others as a public health nurse and educator. When Paul, her husband of more than 50 years, became chronically ill, she gradually shifted her focus to caring for him at home. Although well prepared for her role as caregiver, Hurlock felt overwhelmed and overburdened. But not wanting to leave her husband alone, she spent less and less time at church.
If camps are famous as places for roughing it, the tablecloths were an unexpected amenity. “Because you are here at camp, there are tablecloths,” said Doug Walters, Camp Hanover’s executive director, to a dining hall filled with delighted laughter. “There are no tablecloths here in summer.”
The message couldn’t have been any clearer—not only the message of the Rev. Tom Tickner’s closing sermon on Oct. 14, but also the underlying message at the heart of the entire ARMSS/POAMN national conference.
Over two mornings at the 2016 ARMSS/POAMN conference the Rev. Dr. John T. Carroll shared his wisdom in a comprehensive, two-part keynote address with broad implications for his audience of pastors, educators, and others engaged in ministry with older adults.
There was at least one elephant in the room at Chris Pomfret’s workshop at the 2016 ARMSS/POAMN conference. But an elephant could scarcely have fit into the packed meeting space, which nearly exceeded the room’s seating capacity as extra chairs were carried in to accommodate conference-goers eager to engage the workshop’s theme, “Making Our Third Thirty a Great Thirty: How to Make the Difficult Decisions.”
A lively spirit filled the gathering space as the leadership of the Presbyterian Older Adult Ministries Network (POAMN) and the Association of Retired Ministers, Their Spouses or Survivors (ARMSS) celebrated their 20th year of co-sponsoring a national conference for persons engaged in ministry with older adults.
