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June 5, 2026 
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On a Thursday in April, a few hundred people, many of them older Black women, sat in the main hall at Impact Church, in a converted warehouse near the airport in Atlanta. The windowless sanctuary was dark, but theater lights and the crowd’s energy illuminated the stage.
In his prayer, the Rev. Paul Thibodeaux, the church’s lead pastor, called upon God “to do some amazing things: We are expecting you, God, to bring down wisdom like never before. We are expecting you, God, to increase our knowledge like never before.”
For this wasn’t a typical sermon. Pastor Thibodeaux was opening the Alter Dementia Summit, a three-day conference aimed at educating the Black faith community about Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
