Fantastic video about special needs ministry

Everyone in the church needs to watch the first minute and fifteen seconds of this video. And anyone interested even a little bit in special needs ministry should watch the rest too. I'm a North Carolina girl now, but I was involved in ministry at First Baptist Church in Rio Grande City, Texas, for my two years living on the border so I do love my Texas Baptists!

(No worries if you're serving in another denomination, though. This message is about faithfulness to God's word, specific to special needs ministry but not exclusively applied to any one group of churches!)



A few highlights that I don't want you to miss:

• In the first 1:15, the message that each of these individuals has a disability and can say "STILL Jesus loves me."
• At about 1:15, the challenge:
  
  "Families with special needs
  Jesus loves them
  Will you?"
• At about 5:20ish, "the Bible teaches that every human being is loved by God."
• "As a church, it’s our responsibility to love these kids and present truth to them." (She then points out that it may be in a different sort of multisensory way for those with special needs.)
• At about 6:19, “The Holy Spirit does His work with these kids.”
• Followed shortly after with these words: “There is an entire segment of our community that needs to hear the message that God loves them, that God has a plan and a prupose … to do something amazing in their lives”
• And then this: “Families… choose churches that include their special needs family member.”
• They also point out that churches need to approach special needs ministry in a two-pronged way - to the individual with special needs and to the family (and I would add that this is true for both adults and children). You can't be effective in either without the other.
  Two pronged – the individual and the family; not one or the other
• Finally, I love the point at about 8:00 that parents can educate churches about what they can do to practically help the family. I would add that this is *huge* because each child is different. As it is often said in autism advocacy circles: if you've meet one person with autism, you've met one person with autism. And thisis true for any other disability as well.

Thank you to LifeWay Special Needs Ministry for drawing my attention to this, and thank you to Texas Baptists for making it!

(By the way, I've filled in the "contact me" link - found at the top of this page - and the others should be coming later this week. Thanks for your patience as I get the site up and running!)

sometimes sleep just can't wait

until the bottom of the stairs

or until the pretzel is fully eaten.

what it is/isn't about

Content coming soon!
(This will be a page explaining what Gospel-centered special needs ministry is about and what it isn't.)

good reads on the web - march 11, 2011

This will be a regular feature over here. I want to humbly acknowledge that there are many other helpful, and often more experienced, people on the web writing about special needs ministry, theology in light of disability, and family life with special needs. Out of respect for their work, I'll include a snippet here and then a link to the rest of the post/article so you can finish reading at their site. Please know that I'm not endorsing everything that they post, and possibly not even everything in the linked post. If I link it here, I'm just saying that it's worth reading and that I hope it is useful to YOU!

John Knight at The Works of God:

We know that life includes hard things – we simply can’t avoid it if disability has entered our family.  So we read the Scriptures with that in mind, and understand the sovereignty of God as being over all things, including hard things. (Read the rest of his post here.)

 Louise from Chosen Families:

I confess I feel guilty sometimes. When someone presents a need to me I want to help them–my mind goes into problem solving mode and I think of all the things that I can and even should do. But, because parenting is a full time job I rarely have the strength or energy to follow through with my plans. When you add to that parenting a child with special needs, the stress multiplies. (Read the rest, along with some insightful comments, here.)

Guest blogger and high school senior Evan at Disability.gov's blog:

Who am I? Easy – my name is Evan, that's who I am and that's what I'm called. And yet, for some of my friends, there are still people who would identify them by saying, “Oh, him? He's a “special needs” kid, “a SPED,” – a “retard.” (Read the rest here.)

Katie Wetherbee at Diving for Pearls:

Parents raising kids with disabilities know that ”all kids” DON’T “do that.” Even if an exhibited behavior is “typical,” the accompanying  difficulties can remind parents their circumstances are anything but typical. And that hurts.

So what can we do? (Find her suggestions and the rest of her post here - and I would recommend reading post one and two and three, as this is post four in a series about communication.)

Amy Fenton Lee from The Inclusive Church in an article on buildingfaith:

Most children’s ministers with experience in special needs ministry have at some point felt conflicted in how to best accommodate a specific child with a disability.  A child’s temperament and learning capacity may vary from one week to another.  An occasional parent may push an expectation not in line with the church’s immediate capabilities.   And parent-volunteer dilemmas may require the grace and negotiation of a skilled diplomat.

Alyssa Barnes, PhD and assistant professor for pre-service dual certified (elementary/special education) teachers at North Georgia College & State University explains, “The classroom placement of children with special needs is one of the most controversial issues dealt with in the field of special education.   As a result, the church should not find it surprising when it too struggles to find the perfect fit for a child with a complicated set of needs.” (Read the rest here.)

 Kymberly Grosso at Autism in Real Life at Psychology Today:

...in addition to stress, the autism diagnosis frequently is a life changing event for the parents of the child as well as the entire family unit. Therefore, if a marriage is strong, the couple may weather the storm over time and possibly come out stronger. But for couples who are already having difficulties in their marriage, autism is a stressor that can become the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. And for those couples, autism becomes yet another reason to divorce. (Read more of this research- and experience-based post here.)

God's good design (a bit of my story, a bit of a new blog annoucement)

For much of high school and some of college, I was planning to become a pastor. I was sent by my denomination to a summer program at a seminary in South Carolina during the summer between junior and senior years of high school. It was a program aimed at encouraging youth to consider vocational ministry, and I loved the idea of serving God in ministry as a paid job.

Then, as I began feeling disillusioned with some aspects of that denomination, I felt drawn to another passion of mine: education. I taught special education for three and a half years. While a common reaction from friends and strangers was something like, "Wow, special education. I could never do that," I never would have wanted to teach anything else. Even though I was working in public schools rather than religious ones, it was definitely a ministry for me.

Lee and I knew we wanted for me to be a stay-at-home mom before we got married, and I stopped teaching after I became pregnant with Jocelyn, choosing not to start the next school year because that would leave my school without a special ed teacher when I left partway through the year. When I was six or seven months pregnant, though, I received a call from an educational non-profit asking me to consider being their director of design for special education. Right after I got off the phone, we went to our friends' apartment for dinner, and I was agonizing over the call. (Thank you, Jenelle, for letting me talk out some crazy that night!) I didn't take the position, but it was truly my dream job at the time. And while I knew then (and now) that it was the right decision, I walked away from it with a grieving heart.

Only a few weeks after Jocelyn was born, that same organization came back to me and ended up offering me a chance to do part of that job while being a mom. It was a precious blessing, and I loved it, but it limited my ability to serve in church-based ministry because I had little time left after training special education teachers and being wife and mom.

Same song, second verse for grad school: loved it, but limited in ways I could serve at church because it was a challenge to have anything left at the end of the day. It was fantastic to grow in my knowledge and training in special education, and I knew I was ministering to my family at home. I still yearned for meaningful church-based ministry that didn't exhaust me because of the other things on my plate.

Enter the role we're in now as special needs ministry coordinators. Does it fulfill my passion for working with people with special needs? Yep. Does it provide a meaningful place for us to minister in our church and share the Gospel? Yeppers.

Isn't it cool how God works?

As I've had some recent opportunities to talk with people wanting to start or grow special needs ministries at other churches, I've found an even more ideal professional outlet than the job I passed up when I was pregnant. I get to serve my church. I get to help other churches become welcoming places for people with disabilities. I've even had a few conversations about speaking engagements and writing opportunities related to this.

It's good stuff. Looking back, I can see how God has been positioning us for where we are now, weaving together my various professional desires and passions into something bigger than I could have ever imagined.

Yes, I'm still loving my role of stay-at-home wife and momma, and if I can't serve my own family well, I have no place helping anyone minister to other families. That's not changing, nor is my commitment to having white space in our calendar and taking care of my health.

That said, I'm launching a online place (apart from Dinglefest) to support and equip those starting and/or doing special needs ministry. I'll also be able to use it as a networking tool at and following the Accessibility Summit, a special needs ministry conference in DC that our church is sending me to in a few weeks.

So, without further ado, here's the new blog: www.theworksofgoddisplayed.com. It's pretty bare bones now (with the main content so far being re-posts from here), but I'll be posting more and more in the coming weeks to have it running well before the Accessibility Summit.

I'll still be here too. I still need a place for other writings and picture posts and reviews and randomness. The main difference will be that instead of putting posts about special needs here, I'll put them there and link to it here.

I don't know what God is going to do with this. It could fizzle into nothing. All I know is that right now we need to do this to be faithful to what God is doing in and through us.

And we're excited!