Home->How We Serve->Nursing Home Chaplaincy
The Conference organizes over 600 worship services in several nursing and rehabilitation facilities. Clergy, lay leaders and choirs minister to those isolated from the community.
In cooperation with Berks County, the RBCC provides chaplain services to the Berks Heim County Home.
Some of the programs we offer at Berks Heim are:
Sunday Catholic service in the morning and Protestant service in the afternoon. We have chapel services every Tuesday and Thursday morning.
We also provide services of devotions or sacred music throughout the week. Our active schedule of 28 services offered each month in the chapel keeps our population busy. We also offer weekly Bible studies or hymn sings on each resident unit for those residents who want to participate. I feel the more we empower our residents to take ownership of their chapel services the more open and secure they feel while on their faith journey.
We are blessed with a choir of residents, so we have choir practice and they sing for chapel services. We encourage resident participation in services by reading scripture, offering prayer, reading poems or singing a solo. We also offer giant print Bibles to our residents when they can no longer read regular print. These are free to our residents as they are gifted to us by various churches. We offer audio materials to our visually impaired residents and DVD services to our hearing impaired residents. We offer a Grandparent program where two high school student volunteers are matched to a resident who otherwise would have few or no visitors. These students fill an important void in intergenerational relationships.
Other programs are available through the chapel because Berks Heim places an emphasis on the spiritual life of our residents. There are Nursing homes that do not include Chaplaincy as a budget item in their planning and those residents would often benefit from faith-based programs.
It is our philosophy and belief that the spiritual need is as important as the physical needs of each resident we serve.
