If you were a pastor and there is an elderly woman with dementia in your congregation who is spouting profanities during your sermon, what would you do?
Most pastors and church leaders, I would suspect, would kindly request the family of such a woman to relocate her to one of the isolated or overflow rooms (if any such rooms are available on the premises), so that she would not disrupt or "stumble" anyone with her profanities. Some might even request the family to keep the woman at home. In the minds of many, this would be seen to be quite justifiable and intuitive.
However, Dr Russell Moore had a very different experience. He shares about his encounter, early on in his ministry, with an elderly woman with dementia who was spouting profanities, and how her church responded, in a message at The Village Church titled "Restoring Holiness"(at 22:15 of the video):
I was in a church I served really early on in my ministry. We had an elderly woman in the congregation who was going through dementia.
Fairly… a serious form of dementia but she could still live at home and she came to church every single Sunday.
And I would be preaching and she would just randomly yell out in the middle of the service, but the problem was she would yell out strings of profanities. Now, this was a really, really sweet, proper, in-church-every-single-week lady, which is why those profanities were in her mind because she was shocked by them. Things that she would she would hear, she would take notice of them that’s bad, that’s shocking and that sort of embedded into her mind and came out.
And she would yell out, “Well you blankety-blank-blank-blank, blankety-blank-blank-blank!”
I found something happening in my heart while she is yelling this out. I’m looking around and I’m saying: Who do we have visiting with us today that’s gonna be totally freaked out by this taking place?
What Mom has just brought her four-year-old kid in here who says, “Hey Mom, what does blankety-blank-blank mean?” Not what they’re intending to learn at church today.
I’m trying to filter through; I look at this other group of ladies over here and thinking: How upset are they about this and how upset are they going to be with me about this?
Until one day a group of those ladies came up and said, “Brother Russ, when Miss So-and-So starts cussing, it seems like you’re embarrassed.”
And I said, “Yeah, I guess I am.”
She said, “Well, we’re here to rebuke you for that.”
“Because she can’t help this and when she’s screaming out this stream of profanities here, well that’s just her way of saying ‘Amen’. And if we’re going to be the Body of Christ to her, then we need to stop worrying about what everybody else is going to think that that takes place, and instead say to the outside world around us if you want to know the kind of church we want to be, we want to be the kind of church where our sister who is suffering and who is screaming out things that would humiliate her in any other period of her life doesn’t embarrass us. We love her and we receive her and she’s welcome here, because every single one of us are bringing to the table all kinds of other things that need to be borne up by everybody else that maybe aren’t quite as visible as what she’s grappling with right now. And that’s what the church does.”
I was convicted to the heart, because I realised I’m up here teaching about the worship of God, leading people in the worship of God, but the worship of God had become more important to me than her, which means that the worship of God had become a tool for me for something other than the worship of God; that is easy to do.
This is a remarkable and beautiful story, and the congregation listening to Dr Moore erupted in applause when he shared about the women's statements.
The tenderness and attitude of the women from that church who rallied around the elderly woman with dementia brings to mind the passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul describes the Church as the Body of Christ. As Paul said, "those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment." (1 Corinthians 12:22-24a)
Further on in the passage, Paul wrote, "If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it." (1 Corinthians 12:26) Those women cared much less about what other people thought about them, but were willing to bear any possible reproach in order to come alongside that elderly woman.
Are we prepared to do that as a Church for our fellow brothers- and sisters-in-Christ, whatever condition they may be in or whatever they may be going through?
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