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c h a p t e r n i n e Congregations as Schools for Friendship Most Sundays, a group of very elderly women sits together on a long bench outside their church’s library after the worship service. Affectionately called “the Legacy ladies” by many church members because of their residence at a local continuum-of-care retirement community, they wait for the Legacy bus while chatting with one another and with people passing by on the way to the front door. Their church is the last stop for the Sunday morning bus route, so they usually have a lot of time for this kind of casual conversation. They are all mentally sharp, although the years have taken their toll on their bodies, leaving some dependent on walkers or canes; one courageous and determined woman uses both a walker and a portable oxygen tank. In the winter in northeast Wisconsin, temperatures at night can drift down into the “teens below zero,” but still these women usually manage to get to church. One day, a few years ago, they wanted to talk about the sermon, which had focused on kindness in community. “Well,” one of them said, “that sermon should be preached at the Legacy!” Others nodded in agreement. We asked them why they thought this. “Because we need to think about kindness.” What they had on their minds was the challenge of dealing with certain residents who were experiencing many of the difficulties of slipping into dementia. The Legacy ladies did not always feel kindly disposed to these fellow residents, and they recognized that they needed to work on this. It was both humbling to witness their honesty in acknowledging the challenge of being kind and inspiring to observe how quickly they grasped that their lives in community demanded their kindness. Having experienced a complex combination of choice and no-choice in giving up independent living in their own homes and turning in their car keys, these women were learning how to live with the kind of close contact with others we associate with college residence halls, the military, hospitals, and residences for the old. However, they had not bargained for the changes that would come in a community of aging people who, like them, had opted to move to the Legacy.1 The Legacy ladies were wrestling with some ancient and difficult questions. Why should we care about one another? Why should we value other people, particularly those who seem unable to offer us much in return for our kindness or care? Sociologists speak of social exchange, meaning that people calculate the Congregations as Schools for Friendship 133 rewards and costs of relationships, and when the costs exceed the rewards, the relationship ends. Some variations on this formula state that people evaluate their relationship by comparing what each person contributes. If one is contributing more, the relationship is out of balance. Accounting for developmental issues, given that parents generally contribute goods and services to their children long before the children can provide an equitable match, some sociologists calculate return over the long term, observing that “pay off” may come years later, when adult children look after their elderly parents. Another question bubbling beneath the surface of the Legacy ladies’ conversation about kindness in their community concerned their own sense of themselves . They wanted others to know them as what gerontologists sometimes call “high-functioning elders,” and they were forthright in admitting concern about identity contamination through their enforced close contact with neighbors who have dementia. This awareness of how the limitations of others threaten our own secure sense of selfhood begins early in life. For example, most adults can vividly recall playground scenes of ostracism of certain children labeled by others as having “cooties” or worse. These are complex challenges and difficult ethical questions, and the Legacy ladies were aware that their faith community was a setting in which they were called to wrestle with them. Congregations, Demographics, and Priorities In Building Healthy Communities through Medical-Religious Partnerships, Richard Bennett and Daniel Hale (2009) present a case for building collaborations between congregations and health care organizations to strengthen community health education and to advocate for better access to health care for all persons.2 They note that in the United States, there are more than 330,000 religious congregations . These organizations usually occupy distinctive neighborhood buildings with space, sound equipment, and parking sufficient to support community educational programs. They also have well-established...

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