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Who in the Bible
Would You Like to Be?
This is the question I used to open a bible study discussion at the Susquehanna Lutheran Village in Millersburg, Pennsylvania. My hope is for this to be a site where we can share creative ideas for bible study in a nursing home setting.
Let me tell you a little bit about
who I am and why I think this could be a helpful site. My name is Rev. Charles Oldland. I am an ELCA pastor, ordained in 1974. For eight years I was part-time chaplain at the Susquehanna Lutheran Village (SLV). In May of 2001 I became the full-time chaplain. SLV is a 194-bed nursing home facility, with a few independent-living apartments in a separate building. One of my principal duties as chaplain is oversight of the Sunday chapel schedule and the Tuesday Bible Study at the SLV.
The Sunday Chapel Service is at 3:00 P.M., and whoever leads the worship service also leads a Tuesday afternoon Bible Study. The worship leaders are principally my colleagues and I, the Lutheran pastors in our conference. The other pastors volunteer for four or five Sundays each year, and I fill in most of the remaining Sundays. In addition, I lead a "spiritual group" (which is essentially a Bible Study, too) every Tuesday afternoon.
What this means is that my fellow clergy and I lead a lot of "Bible Studies" in the nursing home setting. This is fine?there are, no doubt, plenty of you out there who do the same thing. What I am wondering is, "
What do you do when you are called upon to provide Bible Study in similar settings? Are you always doing the same thing? Have you tried different things? Do you find some things to be 'more effective' than others in communicating with nursing home residents?"
What I would like to do is to share some of the things that I have done. Hopefully, you will share feedback and ideas to this site. Who knows where we might go from here?
If you think this is a good idea and/or you have something to share, please email me at
chold@epix.net. To help me identify your message as relating to this site, type as the subject: "Who in the Bible." I have no idea the response I might get, so I can't promise at this point that I will answer each and every email I get. I will read them all, and, with your permission, some things you send me will probably turn up one of the pages at this site. That is, after all, the whole idea of the thing.