The special academic program of pastoral care for people with hearing impairments is being discussed in the UGCC

Those meetings will take the form of seminar-presentation with the report about the current challenges for the Church to provide the service to those who cannot hear. Among the main topics for the discussion there will be such issues as: who deaf person is; what the deafness is when in theological terms; provision of the service for deaf of the Universal Church; the experience of the UGCC Center of pastoral care for people with hearing impairments "Nadiya", establishment of the religious community of deaf people and the churching of the deaf person.

In order to assist to the participants of the seminar, some special materials on this topic will be offered. Those are the two books - "Service, where no birds sing" and "To see - means to pray." They contain the documents of the Church, conference proceedings, the testimony of deaf regarding the modern approaches to the ministry in the Church.

Those meetings will become an opportunity to present and to make popular this special type of pastoral care among the wide range of people who are interested, as well as, to seek for the volunteers, resources for such an interaction and service in the Church.

Fr. Oleh Lazurkevych

Program manager

Reference:

The UGCC Center of pastoral care for people with hearing impairments "Nadiya" was established primarily to monitor the situation in the life of a deaf person, to determine the high priority measures in order to facilitate the work of pastor, to find resources, to create opportunities, that is, so as the Church could work consistently and systematically in this kind of pastoral care.

The Centre initiates an environment for communication, service, and support among deaf people and among members of their families, gathered around the Eucharist with faith in the complete self-realization of a deaf person in the Church. One of the priorities of the Center is the establishment of responsible leaders and guides leaders in the community of those faithful, who do not hear.

The main goal of the Center is to create an inter-institutional collaboration to perform more complex tasks that cannot be performed by one person or even an institution and that require the involvement of narrowly focused specialists for different areas (the theology of a context of a deaf person, the Ukrainian sign language, the culture and psychology of a deaf person, education and upbringing of deaf children, etc.).

While working on the design of a syllabus for the pastoral care for people with hearing impairments, the UGCC Center of Pastoral Care for people with hearing impairments “Nadiya” and UCU in collaboration with the sign language laboratory of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, conducted in 2010 and in 2011 two summer modules "Intensive courses of sign language and culture of a deaf person".