Living with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease can be an isolating experience for those with the diagnosis and for their caregivers—often family members who love and walk beside them each day. Doctors and social workers provide indispensable care, but they cannot offer the nurturing relationships and rest that people living with cognitive decline and their families need.
Faith United Methodist Church of Stroudsburg, PA is stepping into the gap to be the body of Christ for these families in their congregation and community. In March, they officially launched Faith Friends – a new ministry that provides weekly social time for people with various forms of memory loss and respite for their caregivers.
The ministry brings together “friends” – those living with Alzheimer’s or dementia – and “buddies” – trained volunteers – for four hours each Wednesday. Friends and buddies engage in conversation and recreational activities like crafts, games, and singing hymns, and they share a meal together.
Friends get social time in a supportive environment, and their caregivers get some time to run errands, go to appointments, or get some much-needed rest. “[Caregivers] just need time for themselves,” shares Pastor Jack Tironi, “that’s very important when you’re caring for someone, almost non-stop, 24/7 with memory care issues.”
Currently, there are ten friends who participate in the program regularly and another ten are interested in joining.
Faith UMC has been doing the groundwork for this ministry for nearly a year. The idea was planted when, at Eastern Pennsylvania’s 2025 Annual Conference, Barbara Rogers, Faith UMC Lay Leader and SPRC Chair, stopped by the Discipleship Ministries exhibit and picked up a book called The Practice of Care.
The book, written by John Bell and retired Bishop Lawson Bryan, tells the story of Respite for All, a nonprofit organization developed to “advance the social, volunteer-driven Respite model to improve quality of life for people who have memory loss due to dementia while also offering peace of mind and respite to their caregivers,” (Respite for All).
In 2012, the organization’s founder, Daphne Johnston, began a Respite Ministry at her own United Methodist Church in Alabama in response to community need. The model was so impactful that Johnston began to receive feedback from doctors in the community – their dementia and memory loss patients who participated in the program started to show signs of improvement and they began to refer other patients to it.
After learning Respite for All’s story, several members of Faith UMC were inspired to start something similar in their own community. Many members of the congregation have or have had family members with dementia and the congregation is very aware of the needs of older people in the community, shares Tironi. “For some people here, this is a very personal mission.” He went on to say that Monroe County does not even have an officially registered adult daycare; the one they did have shut down during COVID-19 and was unable to reopen due to a lack of resources. As the church has connected with other local organizations, they have only received more encouragement that such a ministry is needed.
Tironi sees this as a God-moment for the church. Through the church’s participation in the Bridges program—which equips congregations for community engagement and innovation—he has been leading his congregation to ask: “What ministries can we do that make us essential to our community? What makes us needed?”
“I think this is God’s intention for us,” he said. This is “how we are going to be the people of God who…love boldly, serve joyfully, and lead courageously…This is what that looks like.”
The new ministry is volunteer-driven and supported by grants from both the Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference and Respite for All. Faith Friends is also connected with community organizations like local health networks, other churches, and the Monroe County Dementia Coalition. God is blessing the ministry through these connections as they create community buy-in, participation, and awareness.
For instance, when Barbara Van Nortwick, an occupational therapist and Certified Dementia Practitioner who leads the Monroe Country Dementia Coalition, heard about Faith Friends, she volunteered to provide training for the buddies in the program. Churches in the Pocono Interfaith Council and Pocono United Methodist Connection are helping to recruit buddies, and doctors are spreading the word about Faith Friends.
To test the concept, Faith Friends began with several practice sessions in 2025. The sessions were attended by friends from both the congregation and the wider community and were a great success, receiving only positive feedback.
For Tironi, one of the most powerful parts of the practice sessions was leading friends and buddies in prayer. “Some of the friends have wonderful stories to share,” he said, “sometimes ones that they share two or three times while they’re there. Sometimes they forget where they are, who they’re sitting with, where they come from, but when I start saying the Lord’s Prayer, they just join right in: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven.’ … They still remember that prayer, and to me, that tells me that they remember the God that created them, the God that sustained them through all their lives, the God that loves them.”
Even more importantly, Tironi shares with caregivers, “even if their loved ones do not remember them or remember God, God always remembers them.”
As Faith Friends becomes an established ministry, the church is in the process of hiring a part-time Lead Coordinator and is planning to begin a once-monthly support group for caregivers. In the meantime, the programoffers participants – friends, buddies, and caregivers, a tangible experience of God’s love. It is grace – embodied and enacted. And it expresses the truth that even when our memory fails, God still remembers us.
Check out Faith Friends website here.