When Gretchen Hiatt and Diane Harper think about churches and their mission statements, they see a common thread: One way or another, they’re about caring for people.
“It might be worded a little differently,” Ms. Hiatt said, “but in the big picture …”
“What can we do to take care of our members?” Ms. Harper finished.
So it makes perfect sense to them to see a nurse stationed in a congregation, someone who can approach an individual’s holistic well-being — body, mind, and spirit — in a different way than perhaps a pastor would. They’ve each done exactly that at Grace Lutheran Church in Toledo and at First Presbyterian Church of Maumee, respectively, where their roles as faith community nurses have led them to be advocates, educators and, importantly, ministers.
They’re two of 55 members of the Parish Nurse Association of Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan.
“All of us went into nursing because we care about people,” Ms. Hiatt said. “So this helps further that. This is our ministry that we choose to do.”
Faith community nursing — a broader but synonymous term for parish nursing — has its roots in the 1980s with the Rev. Granger Westberg of Chicago, who as a hospital chaplain began to think about physicians and clergy and the ways they each act as care-providers. He conceived of nurses operating in faith communities as a means of integrating faith and health on the belief that holistic health is more than just the absence of disease.
The American Nurses Association recognized faith community nursing as a specialty practice in 1997. Today they’re on their third edition of Faith Community Nursing: Scope and Standards of Practice. The handbook describes faith community nursing as “a specialty that focuses on the intentional care of the spirit, the promotion of an integrative model of health, and the prevention and minimization of illness within the context of a faith community.”
On the day-to-day in area congregations, that can mean any number of things, according to local parish nurses who described wide-ranging ministries.
While a faith community nurse is typically a professional registered nurse, and while some bring experience in clinical contexts to the role, theirs isn’t the sort of hands-on work that one might find in a hospital, a doctor’s office, or even a school.
A parishioner wouldn’t go to them for a bump or a bruise, for example, but they might go to a health fair, exercise program or lunch-and-learn that they coordinated. Some faith community nurses visit or keep tabs on church members who have been hospitalized or are in rehabilitation, offering companionship or a prayer and perhaps relaying updates to out-of-town family members. Others write on health-related topics for the church newsletter or bulletin, as Darlene Cook counts among her responsibilities at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Temperance, Mich.
Linda Taylor has organized a flu shot clinic at her church, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Temperance, Mich., a way to particularly serve those senior congregants would otherwise find it hard to get to a physician or pharmacy; they’re at church on Sunday, anyway, so it’s convenient.
When Kathy Jeffery offers post-liturgy blood pressure checks, she said she’s thinking along the same lines. Her position is grant-funded, and she serves at St. Martin de Porres Parish, St. Michael the Archangel Parish, the Historic Church of St. Patrick and the DeSales Outreach Center, all in Toledo.
Local faith community nurses see their roles as uniquely reflecting the needs of their congregations and their relationships to the pastors or church leaders who oversee them. These inform whether they work as paid employees or as volunteers, whether they work as-needed or according to set hours and what, specifically, they do in their ministries.
“You probably won’t talk to any two nurses who do the same thing,” Ms. Harper said.
She recently retired as the faith community nurse at First Presbyterian.
A church of any size can benefit from a parish nurse, local nurses said, but the nurse’s responsibilities might look different at a small congregation than they do at a larger one. While some nurses include in their ministry visits to hospitalized congregants, for example – Ms. Hiatt even goes to doctor’s appointments with some elderly church members, especially in cases where they don’t have family nearby – a larger congregation might call for a different approach.
Laurie Neary is the long-time parish nurse at St. Joseph Parish in Sylvania, which stands out as the largest congregation in the Diocese of Toledo. When she talks with other parish nurses in the area, she said she sees the difference that the size of the congregation makes.
“You’re talking about 10,000 registered members,” she said of her parish. “Things are a little more group focused than individual focused, just by the nature and the size of the parish.”
When it comes to hospitalized parishioners, specifically, for example, her role begins at discharge, she said. Msgr. Michael Billian, the pastor at St. Joseph Parish, said it’s helpful to work alongside a parish nurse when he and others are ministering to such a large congregation.
“The particular attention and care of the parish nurse to the people of the parish, I think, is really a great gift to a parish community,” he said. “So often we work in the educational realm, in the spiritual realm, about worshiping and prayer, but we have to meet our people where they are. If someone has a health issue on their mind, we need to be there with them as a parish community. The parish nurse is the person who’s the initial contact in that area.”
That’s in line with how the faith community nurses see themselves, too, often as an advocate or a first point-of-contact in any number of situations that might arise. They walk alongside the congregants, whether that means assisting a church member who’s arranging for a loved one to move into a nursing home or, as Ms. Hiatt found herself doing recently, finding a way for wheelchair-bound congregants to get to church once TARTA temporarily cut bus service on Sundays in January.
It demanded turning a few cartwheels, she joked, but it was more than worthwhile to see the women in church on Sunday.
Think of it as one more way of taking care of the congregation.
First Published July 6, 2019, 12:59 a.m.
