A special place exists in northern California to provide comfort for people who have experienced infant loss from miscarriage, stillbirth, and abortion, providing solace for those who visit.
The Sacramento Memorial Garden for the Unborn, which began as an idea nearly 10 years ago, provides landscaped grounds, flowers, trees, a creek, a cross, and a memorial wall. Visitors can walk along pathways or sit on a bench. They can also have their child’s name inscribed on the granite wall.
Pastor Jeff Axtell of New Hope Christian Fellowship is one of the founders.
A group in pro-life ministry would rub shoulders from time to time, he said, from sidewalk [advocacy] to pregnancy centers.
“A group of us were really getting to know one another, and we began to discuss some ideas,” Axtell said. “We wanted to create a place where people go to, a physical location, not a website where most people are sent today.”
His church had an unused acre of land next to the house of worship, and he and the congregation decided to donate the land to this project. They contacted architects, builders, and landscape developers to help design and create the garden.
The project was completely covered by donations and labor, and took about 18 months to complete, Axell told Pregnancy Help News. Fundraising brought in nearly $500,000.
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The purpose is to provide people with “healing and hope after loss of a child,” he said.
Tweet This: The purpose of the Sacramento Memorial Garden for the Unborn is to provide people with healing and hope after loss of a child.
The garden’s memorial wall was created based on a passage in Joshua that says, “Make stones of remembrance” and a passage in 1 Peter about Jesus’ disciples being “living stones of witness.”
“We followed those ideas,” Axtell said. “We said they are little stones, they are living stones, and they are lasting stones.”
“The garden is a resource that people can come to and get help,” he added. “It’s a very peaceful, very beautiful place.”
The Sacramento Memorial Garden has a mission statement: To glorify the Lord through the design and construction of a peaceful garden, to honor and memorialize those lost to abortion, miscarriage, and stillbirth.
The organization uses Matthew 11:28 - 30 to minister to people:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
“This is our commitment as a purpose for why we exist and why we built the garden,” the pastor said.
Training church and ministry leaders about grief
In addition to creating and maintaining the garden, Axtell and his team offer resources to area pastors and ministry leaders to help shepherd congregants and others who have experienced infant loss.
“What do you do as a pastor and you’re comforting or counseling a family that has lost an infant or having gone through a past experience that they haven’t yet dealt with, like an abortion?” he queried.
“We wanted to create a pathway that was Biblical and helpful to them that would be in partnership with us,” said Axtell. “So, we would do the work, in one sense, to say, ‘You don’t have to have all the answers and we will train you, but, more importantly, we’ll be a resource if you just want to start the conversation and lead people to us. We will help you find that process of healing.”
Therefore, the garden is a resource for ministries and churches.
“Personally, as a pastor, I found myself in an area I wasn’t prepared to deal with,” he said. “In seminary, you don’t go to a class to learn how to talk with someone who’s had an abortion – that’s not a part of your training, at least, that was my experience, and so I needed some information, I needed some training.”
“So, the garden became a pathway for me to develop that care ministry in my own church, but also then to also speak to other pastors,” said Axtell. “This comes to your table sometimes. So, we developed some training.”
The grief training materials come from Reproductive Loss Network, a Biblical-based compassion and care organization. The program is called Help to Hope and is provided in-person by a team involved with the Sacramento Memorial Garden. Reproductive Loss Network provides both a virtual training and an online resource page geared toward various ages and on different grief topics.
“We encourage pastors and ministry heads, specifically counseling and care ministries in churches, to send somebody from their community to come and take the training,” Axtell said. “We are definitely still in an outreach to the church leaders in our communities so that they are more prepared to broach the subjects we’re talking about.”
In memory and recognition
The memorial wall serves an important purpose, and those who desire can request their child’s name be engraved.
“That recognizes it was a real life, a real person, that life we remember,” said Axtell. “We heal through memorializing loss.”
Tweet This: The Sacramento Memorial Garden for the Unborn recognizes and remembers life, offering healing through memorializing loss.
A National Memorial for the Unborn is in Tennessee. This served as a model for the start-up of the Sacramento garden. Axtell and the other volunteer founders wanted to see something similar on the west coast, and though the ideas are alike, the Sacramento Memorial Garden remains distinct, he said.
“Sacramento is the capital of California and Sacramento is a very influential place, so we thought Sacramento would be the perfect place to do this,” Axtell said. “From our perspective, it’s unique and one-of-a-kind.”
A resource for pregnancy help
In addition to churches, the garden serves as a resource for area pregnancy help organizations.
“We’ve done a lot of outreach [to pregnancy centers] and introduced ourselves,” he said. “We get our brochures put in almost all the pregnancy centers.”
Additionally, some of the Sacramento centers use the garden for staff meetings, to get out of the office, Pastor Axtell said.
“We’ve developed some very close relationships, but we’re always interested in connecting with more,” he said.
The future
As they move into the next decade, the pastor and other Sacramento Memorial Garden volunteers seek to continue to bring people hope and healing. Discussions have taken place about helping “other church communities develop something like we’ve done,” he said.
“It [the Sacramento garden) has been widely used by people of all backgrounds. All kinds of groups use the garden because grief is grief, and people are looking for a place to process that grief,” Axtell told Pregnancy Help News. “I think it’s become a beautiful ecumenical side of faith. We work with a lot of different kinds of people without comprising the Gospel.”
“God is healing people,” he added, “helping people to have a future of hope, not shame and guilt. Our heart is to help people heal through the work of Christ.”
