Fortress Press

Dementia and the Church: Memory, Care, and Inclusion is a treasure chest of insight, inspiration, and guidance for churches that seek to practice "informed compassion" for people affected by dementia. With sensitivity birthed from painful personal experience and knowledge gleaned from extensive research, Dr. Cail has provided a much-needed resource for faith communities and their leaders.

Having been involved with ministry to dementia patients as a deacon and chaplain for over thirty years, I am so glad to have this book available. I teach pastoral care ministers and chaplains to the sick, and I wish this book had been available when I started many years ago. Dr. Mary McDaniel Cail's book is a touching and yet very practical approach to understanding dementia and Alzheimer's disease. It provides insight for those who are involved and are ministers to these wonderful and precious people. Having had my own family members go through these times in their lives, I have learned to value those who know how to minister to people in this time of their lives.

This is a deeply helpful and much-needed book, filled with powerful stories, important information, abundant resources, pastoral wisdom, and practical steps that all of us can take. It offers both an unflinchingly realistic account of what it is like to live with dementia and a hopeful way forward for pastors, individual church members, and congregations as we seek to do better at walking alongside people with dementia and those who care for them. I will be recommending it widely in my dementia ministry with churches and using it as a textbook in my seminary course on ministering to those living with dementia.

Dementia is a complicated journey. It is one that we often fear as we anticipate it and wonder who will care for us and love us as we move into it. The church is a space of love within which Christians live out the beautiful truth that nothing can separate us from the love of God. In order to make the belief believable, we need a community who can live out that love and help us to live into it as we move on in our dementia journey. In this thoughtful, moving, and deeply practical book, Mary McDaniel Cail offers us maps, ways of thinking, and practical guides for the journey that can help us as individuals and communities to enable love, lament, and joy as we walk with one another along difficult roads. This is an important book that offers new and exciting possibilities for creating communities where everyone truly belongs.

Church congregations are aging. The aging process brings with it unique opportunities and some very specific challenges for churches. The opportunities are endless and include wisdom, a lived history, amazing stories, and an endless desire to help. One of the challenges of aging for both the congregation and the pastors and deacons who serve in congregations is the illness of dementia. Mary McDaniel Cail has not only given us a glimpse and a firsthand account of dementia in all its forms, but she has also presented us with a blueprint and model for what she refers to as "compassionate care." This book gently guides the reader through the caring process for caregivers and for those who receive the care. This book is very practical in that it offers the definition of dementia, as well as the realities of those living with dementia and of those who care for someone with dementia. She guides the reader through the process of creating a caring ministry, including educating the congregation and preparing leaders and volunteers to carry out this important work. She provides vocabulary, programs, and activities that work. She even includes a comprehensive bibliography for additional study.

As someone who was a caregiver for a parent and a spouse, I highly recommend this book to all congregations, pastors, deacons, and anyone else caring for someone with dementia. This book is well on its way to becoming a seminal piece of literature for caring ministries.

There's no subtle way to put it: Dementia and the Church should be assigned reading for seminarians, clergypersons, pastoral care professionals, and counselors the world over. In it, Dr. Mary McDaniel Cail sheds desperately needed light on the crucible of cognitive decline and how best to care pastorally for those who live with it--which my decades in Christian ministry have shown me is many more people than we realize. This beautifully written, impressively well-researched, and deeply compassionate book is a gift to the church and all those who seek to embody the grace of God to sufferers.