Embracing Mortality and Resurrection in Christian Ministry

00:04 - Speaker 1 Hi, my name is Laurel Marr and I am the CEO and founder of the Death and Resurrection Doula. It is a training program for Christians, lay people who are Christians and they feel called to go into their communities and serve dying individuals and their families. And I have Chad Bird with me here today and we're going to have a little a short discussion on what a ministry might look like in a church that's focused on end-of-life care for the community, and I'm going to give you a minute just to introduce yourself, Chad. 00:41 - Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, thanks for inviting me to be part of the conversation job. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Thanks for inviting me to be part of the conversation. You know I so what I do now is I do a lot of teaching, I do a lot of writing, but in years past I served as a as the pastor of a small congregation and you know, one of the things I learned there was just how much the pastor was called to serve people who were either in the hospital or maybe they were nearing death, or families after death had occurred, and just how crucial that was to my ministry, and oftentimes, as we've discussed before, just how I needed help. There's only so much that I could do. So I'm looking forward to the conversation about how this could be part of the ministry of a church. 01:27 - Speaker 1 Awesome, thank you. Well, thank you for joining me. So I want to begin by explaining how I kind of came into this ministry. Actually, I grew up in the Presbyterian church and took some years off of church and then found my way, really by providence, into the Episcopal Church and fell in love with the liturgy and, you know, I really heard the gospel actually for the first time when I was in my 30s. 01:56 I had been struggling with eating disorders since I was a teenager and I had overworked myself mentally and physically and I had two children in my mid-30s. I physically crashed and I really limped my way into a pastor's office of a new church that I had found. I had just moved to New York City and my feet were hurting. And if you live in New York City and your feet are hurting, that's really a bad combination, because everywhere you go is on foot, and so this was devastating to me and I'd been out of the church for many years, and so I found this pastor. 02:34 I felt comfortable talking to him and I walked into his office and I told him my feet are hurting and I can no longer run and I'm coming to the end of my life as I know it. I'm aware of that and we had this really interesting conversation and I said to him and I said you know, there's something really strange too. I said I feel called to the ministry of healing, but I'm so broken I can't imagine there's a connection here. And the pastor was amazed. He actually said this is really encouraging. And the pastor was amazed. 03:05 - Speaker 2 He actually said, this is really encouraging. 03:07 - Speaker 1 I said encouraging, I am coming in and admitting defeat, and so, sure enough I did. I began to lead a healing ministry in the Episcopal Church in New York City. Yeah, through that was about 10 years ago, and over the past 10 years so many parts of my life that I love have fallen away and I got immersed into a theology of the cross and I just began to understand that God is healing me and he's making me new. Through these losses and on the path of these losses, I ended up finding my way into an end-of-life doula training program and it was recommended to me by a pastor in another church. I had helped them with a funeral and she had seen I had gifts around end of life care and she was familiar with a family who was looking for some extra care as they were facing death of her husband and she had five children and she had a full-time job and they needed extra help. And so she looked up end of life doulas and she found one in New York and the doula came for a visit. But unfortunately the doula was not a Christian and was not going to be able to support them and their faith, and so they didn't hire the doula and she struggled to, you know, connect all the dots and, and you know, make everything come together as easily as it could. At the last days of her husband, he died in hospice at home. 04:47 A doula is perfect for a situation like that and if a Christian family is facing that, the whole experience can be made better by having extra hands at work. And so all this together, being in the healing ministry as a leader and losing these areas of my life, seeing real resurrection in other areas of my life, which included becoming a trained doula. I went to seminary, studied theology and I have a vision of bringing a ministry into churches and Christian communities that teaches people in the parish, lay people, how to care for dying people in the community. As an extra person for the office staff, you know this role is not a replacement for a pastor. A lot of ministering and pastoral care comes out of this role, but it would never replace a pastor. And so I, yeah, yeah. 05:53 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I was just thinking isn't that what we do as members of the body of Christ? I mean, we care for each other, and that takes many different forms, but one form that it does is caring for each other when we're hurting, when we're sick or when we're dying. So I see what you're proposing here is as a ministry that would be fully supportive of everything that the pastor is doing. We've talked before about how pastors have assistance a lot of times with the music ministry or with maybe they have a school, with a school ministry or all different facets of ministry person within that community who can offer help and support and love and encouragement and advice and wisdom to people who are in a very difficult place, either because their loved one has died or their loved one is on the verge of death. 06:59 - Speaker 1 You're exactly right and you know I've had some clients actually that I haven't started working with until after death occurs. You know a suicide, for instance, you know we did have a suicide in one of the churches that I was a part of. I was actually on staff at that time and you know ministering to the family in the wake of a loss, such a tragedy, you know was really important and they needed I think she needed more than the pastor could give. You know the pastor has a parish continuing to. You know flock you know shepherd that flock, and this woman needed support. She needed that support but she needed some more hours too, and so I was able to help her in that time. But also when I was leading this prayer ministry, I eventually ended up becoming on staff at this church and because I like to start new things and lead, I started a senior care ministry and I sort of took the pastoral care list and organized it and was arranging visits for the clergy. So these are ministries that often already are existing in a church and already have lay people participating in them. So I have this idea that what if we brought in this element to these ministries that might already be in place, even a healing prayer ministry or a senior care ministry that's in place. Is there anyone within that ministry who feels called to train and serve dying people in the community? Like that's one? You know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. I think sometimes that might seem overwhelming to a community is how are we going to get this started? But there might already be something in place that this new element of learning what care looks like at end of life. 08:48 How do we prepare families for end of life Even before that time sets in looking at advanced directives, and do we have a will in place? I mean, these are conversations that we should be having when we're healthy, conversations that we should be having when we're healthy, and even a ministry such as this could, you know, prepare families for end of life before it arrives? One thing we're facing in our country is a caregiving crisis amidst what is being some people like the term, some people don't silver tsunami, which basically means that our baby boomers are coming to end of life ages in the capacity of. We've never had a number of people aging at the same time. That's what we're facing with caregiving, a lack of caregiving at the same time. So, outside of the church, the medical world, secular world. They're beginning to look at this and say how do we prepare for this? This is going to be a dangerous thing if we're not prepared. I believe that makes this a really important time to involve churches in growing ministries such as this. 10:03 - Speaker 2 Yeah, because it's going to be a reality that the church well, of course, that we already face, but that we're going to be facing in an increasing sort of way down the road. So why not prepare for that and, like you were saying, to take often ministries that already exist in some form and to educate further those who are going to be involved in this so that they can more forthrightly and in a more focused way educate people about death and help with end of life issues and just be there for whatever it takes to kind of care for the family through these very hard times? 10:40 - Speaker 1 I agree, and you know one of the maybe confusing issues around the word. You know well they're being called into life doulas, sometimes death doulas. As a Christian, I prefer the word death doula. It gives us an opportunity to call a thing what it is and look death in the face. And look, you know the reality of death in the face and why do we die and what is our hope. So I really prefer to use the term death doula. But doulas are becoming more and more popular. There's a lot of training programs out there. From what I have found, there's not any Christian training programs and this idea of a doula is associated with New Age spirituality. 11:24 A lot of people have said to me well, do you want to call yourself something else? Like a deaf midwife or you know like? Think of something else, Laurel, even like? I think people have said how, about something more positive? Why not even say the word death or end of life? Like a coach, right? And I'm like no, I don't want to call myself a coach or, you know, a guide. I think that's even more New Age spiritual than even a doula. 11:53 But the word doulos is a Greek word that means servant. So I see this role as a doula is really a Christian role. It's a role of being a servant, being the hands and feet of Christ and serving people in this moment, in this period where death is occurring and death that we don't want to face, death that is an imposition into the created order that God has given us, and so I think it's important actually to call ourselves deaf doulas, and I think it's important to distinguish the difference between a Christian deaf doula and someone who is not a Christian, and I really believe that in doing so, we can open the idea of what it means to serve and be a caregiver in this space. 12:42 - Speaker 2 Yeah, to me it seems like this is just kind of a natural avenue of servanthood. As Christians, what are we called to? We're called to be servants. We're free, and where is perfect freedom found? Well, in serving. And we're all dying. I mean, some of us are going to live longer than others, but we're all in this process, and so part of the way that we serve each other is by caring for each other in this life and as we approach the end of life. And just what a great way to focus that service in on, in a Christian sort of way, in directing our hearts to Christ, who is the resurrection and the life. 13:23 - Speaker 1 I agree, and, concluding, I'd like to say that, you know, when we think of Jesus returning, until that day the living will be caring for the dead. Right, there will be a generation still alive at the return of Christ, but until that time, as each generation passes, we will be caring for those who die, and that points us to the expectation of Christ's return, and I think that's really important, especially during this time that we're postmoderns. You know, unbelief is unprecedented in our history at this time, and even within the church it is too, and the church is an institutional church as a whole. You know we're struggling by keeping members, and, you know, bringing in younger generations, that they're not sure what they believe, you know. And so our culture tells us you don't have to believe in anything. Our culture tells us there is nothing to believe in, and so I just think that's another reason a ministry that is, you know, characterized by servanthood, especially at death, might be able to combat some of this unbelief that's so prevalent in our culture. 14:38 - Speaker 2 Yeah, what's going to bring us face to face with those things that we like to ignore? Right, we have so much death around us and yet our culture likes to hide from that reality. And so this will face the honest truth about who we are and about life and about death, but to bring into that the light of resurrection hope, so that people not only are facing the grim reality of death but also this blazing light of hope that we all have because of the resurrection of Christ. 15:10 - Speaker 1 Yeah, well, thank you. Thank you for having this conversation with me and I look forward to keeping you updated on how this idea and vision is growing and how I'm implementing it into churches. 15:23 - Speaker 2 Yeah, I look forward to talking more, thanks.