Monday 9th March 2026
Seven truths to hold onto in dementia
Dementia brings profound challenges, whether we experience it ourselves or walk alongside others. Reverend Mark Wormell shares seven truths about Our Heavenly Father that offer hope and comfort, drawn from his experience and research for Coming to Christ in Dementia
Dementia is a stage of life that an increasing number of people face. There are over 100 forms of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is the best known and most common. Like many other forms of dementia, it affects our memories, and can affect our ability to control ourselves.
Dementia need not be intimidating when we think about who God is, who God says we are, and what He promises to do for us. Dementia is neither an end to a life of trust nor a barrier to a new life with God.
Many of us fear getting dementia, and caring for someone with dementia can be overwhelming. Yet there can be spiritual growth and contentment in dementia, both for believers and those who don’t yet know the Lord. Here are seven truths to hold onto in dementia.
God can be trusted
God has proved Himself over millennia to keep His promises. He has given us the great gift of prayer. We can trust Him to answer our prayers for people living with dementia, that He will care for them, comfort them, speak His words of love, assurance and peace to them, and bring them into His kingdom. Christian care for people with dementia goes well beyond prayer, but it can never do without it.
God knows us
God created us, and tells us He made us for relationship with Him and each other. We are of infinite value to Him, because He gave His Son for us. We are not defined by our capacities or relationships or what other people think about us. We are defined by God’s love for us. Sadly, many modern views on personhood are based on our capacities and relationships. They hold that when these fade, so does our right to be counted as a human person. That is not God’s perspective. Our existence is tied up with Him, and His desire that we know Him and enjoy Him forever. We read in Romans 8 that nothing, including death, can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. If death can’t separate us from God, then dementia certainly can’t.
God can be experienced
People living with dementia still experience God. They know things even if they have difficulty expressing them. People who reached out their hands to take the bread and wine in Holy Communion for many years still know in dementia to reach out their hands to receive something good from the God who loves them. Reading familiar Bible passages and prayers also connects us with God. They allow the Holy Spirit to bring assurance and peace.
God speaks to us
God can always find a way to us. He does this through the touch, voice, care and prayers of carers. Research and experience show that music gets through when many other forms of communication do not. It works for many forms of music, but just watch how people smile when a familiar hymn is played. I remember one service in an aged care facility. An old woman with dementia sat with her arms curled in, her head down, and apparently paying no attention to the service leader, the Bible reading or the short sermon (I say ‘apparently’ because we never know what another person is thinking). But when someone stepped up to a piano and started playing ‘At The Name Of Jesus’ she unfurled like a flower hit by morning sunlight, and sang every word of every verse from memory. God had reached her and she remembered the joy He gives.
Knowing this, we can adjust our services to draw on familiar hymns, short Bible readings, sermons that are illustrated with images or acted out, and with simple, clear messages like, ‘God is here’ and ‘God won’t let you go’.
God seeks us
When I started my research, I wondered if I would come across any stories of people coming to faith in dementia. Oh, me of little faith! In fact, every chaplain and Christian carer I spoke with had at least one, and often many, stories of God shining His light into the life of someone living with dementia. Even those who have rejected Him all their lives are reached. No one is ever beyond God’s love. So never give up on anyone, however they appear to us. Keep visiting. Keep praying, and trusting God will find His way to them.
God sustains us
We sense that our memories are very important to who we are. We may worry that when we lose ready access to our memories we may lose our faith or cease to be us. Yet God will resurrect us as us, with whatever access we need to our memories to be us. In the meantime, we can take it that our memories are held in the hand of God. This is one of the delightful ways God sustains us in our later years. Another is the way God uses His people to help us persevere in our faith. Family and friends can give up visiting a person with dementia, because they do not feel recognised, or they think they will only upset that person. But God made us for relationship with Him and each other. Even if someone with dementia has difficulty fulfilling the role in a relationship they once did, we must not give up on them. We should let God use us, and our touch, our voice or smell may help our loved ones, even if conversation is very one sided.
God’s grace is enough
God can find a way to anyone. We know God’s desire is that we all repent and turn to Him. That is not a problem for someone living with dementia. For someone who has been a Christian for years, God will remember their many expressions of trust in Him and their prayers of repentance, even if, with dementia, they have difficulty knowing that some behaviours are wrong, and remembering what they have done.
And for someone who enters dementia without a trust in God, dementia is no barrier. Faith can take the form of a simple sense that God is with them, that He is good and they need Him. As for repentance, if someone has no sense of their own sin, no pride in their sin, and no attachment to their own sin, there is no obstacle to right relationship with God for a person with dementia who has a simple trust in God. We may trust Jesus’ words in 2 Corinthians 12:9, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness”.
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A story
I have heard many stories of people with dementia coming to faith, and being sustained in their faith. My sister nursed people with dementia for many years. She tells the story of Marg (not her real name) who was taken into care with younger onset dementia. When asked if she had any religious beliefs, she said that was “a lot of garbage, a lot of rot” and “I want nothing to do with that!” After about a year she decided to stay for one of the church services conducted in her facility. She then went a few more times, and her son noticed a change in his mother. Marg asked him to bring in a Bible, which he read with her. By now she was regularly attending the services. My sister asked her why. Marg replied, “I have dementia. No mortal can help me, but maybe God can”, and “God will be there. He won’t walk away”. Her daughter had given up visiting her. As Marg’s dementia progressed she could no longer read, and language had to get simpler and she looked at pictures in illustrated Bibles. When she died she showed no sign she thought God had given up on her.
A prayer:
Gracious God, may we see each other as You see us, not defined by our capacities or circumstances, but by Your love for us in Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Amen.
Mark Wormell will be speaking at our event Evergreen later this year.
Find out more...
Join us at Evergreen, a conference supporting ministry with older people
Evergreen is a one-day event designed for Christians who care about or work with older people
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