The Joy class: how it began and what happens each week

In the words of my friend Katie, who leads the Joy class:

After the first Joy Prom in April 2004, I felt God say, "Great job loving adults with special needs one night of the year, but I love them every day, and Providence needs to as well."

We began taking steps to start a Sunday school class but had no idea what it would look like. We sent out postcards to all the guests who attended the Joy Prom and planned a start date of September 26, 2004. Right away I started hearing from several interested folks who were planning to come to the class, and some even started coming to Providence a few months before Joy class even started. I attended a conference at Ridgecrest and also met with the Special Ministries department at the Baptist State Convention and was able to gather lots of great material there.

We use Lifeway's Access material, which is specifically designed for adults with special learning needs. Each Sunday at 9:30 we have snack and fellowship, then do prayer requests. We each share a prayer request with the class, and then we have a list of about ten missionaries from our church that we pray for each week, most of whom we have met through the Missions Festivals over the years. 

We use our Lifeway materials to study our lesson, and we have been following along with their five-year plan that goes through the whole Bible. Since we all learn best through different methods, we use a variety of activities including art projects, games, drama, videos, visuals, and other things to study the Bible. Each Sunday we close Joy class by saying the Lord's Prayer together. 

Some of the highlights of our year include the Missions Festival, Joy Prom, Happiness Retreat in July at Camp Caraway, baptism at the lake, the collection of art supplies for our friends in Serbia every Christmas, and the Christmas musical.

Our class members range in age from 16 to 65, though no one seems to mind the age differences!  Some of us live with family members, some in group homes, and some of us live independently or with roommates. We have different abilities, different interests, different backgrounds, and different hopes and dreams, but the things we have in common are even greater - we know God loves us, we love Jesus, and we love others.  

what do our Sunday mornings look like? (for me and my husband)

Yesterday, I posted about what Sunday mornings look like for special needs ministry at our church. If you missed that post, find it here!

I promised that I would share today about what all that means for me and my husband each week as we coordinate special needs ministry. Let me start by saying that while I usually join our family discipleship staff for their Monday morning team meetings, I am not on staff. Neither is my husband. I'm a stay-at-home wife and momma; he's a structural engineer. We're just passionate about serving in this way, and it has been a tremendous blessing.

For starters, another volunteer named Katie coordinates everything related to the Joy class, along with her team of volunteers. While I check in on them from time to time, I don't know or need to know what's going on there every Sunday morning. In other words, my Sunday morning focus is high school and younger. I will post this afternoon with a description of what the adult class is like each week.

Before we began serving in this role, we preferred to go to the 8:00 am worship service. Well, it turns out that we don't have any children or youth with special needs involved during the 8:00 am worship service, so that has continued to work well. Here's the play-by-play of our mornings:

• 7:55 am (in an ideal world; in the real one, we're usually running late): Arrive, sign in and drop off our two-year-old son at his class
• 8:00 am: Arrive in worship, usually in the very front row because that's the preference of our four-year-old daughter, who has always joined us for the music portion of the service and who began staying for the entire service when she turned four
• 9:10ish am: If the service is not over yet, we usually start gathering our items to leave around this time to be present in children's ministry through the transition between the two services. Lee usually takes our daughter to her class and heads to the car to get our travel coffee mugs (coffee = good. our church's coffee = not so good. so we bring our own from home)
• 9:15-9:40 am: The first transition! A lot happens in a short time period. We
• Check in with our 9:30 am volunteers and families, and keep my cell phone in hand because that's where established families and volunteers text me if anything changes at the last minute. 
• Greet new families. If a buddy is needed for a new child, Lee or I serve as the buddy for the first couple weeks to get to know the child and family.
• Help with other children's and student ministry needs, like assisting families as they check in kids in our computerized system.
• 9:40-10:40 am: What we do at this time varies, including...
• We check on our kids and volunteers, sometimes by peeking in the class and sometimes by joining them for a while.
• If a teacher is concerned about how to meet the needs of a child with no identified disability or special need, we go in to the class to observe.
• If there's a new child or student, one of us goes to class with him/her.
• As we near promotions in September (when children move up to the next class), I observe in the classes which will receive any of our kids to evaluate how we can help that transition go smoothly.
• If we have a new volunteer, I usually train them during this time.
• Prep materials for the next week if necessary.
• Connect with other volunteers and staff, and help with non-special needs stuff as needed.
• Talk with parents.
• Visit adult Sunday school classes to talk about what we do and how they can get involved.
• Stop by the Joy class.
• Drink coffee.
• Try not to get spotted by our son who is at that separation anxiety age right now and expects to be picked up from class if he sees either of us.
• 10:40-11:15: The next transition time!
• All the same things as we listed in the previous transition.
• If I get caught up in a conversation or anything else holds me up, Lee picks up the kids from their classes, and we meet up at the car after all is said and done. Then we talk with the kids about what they learned while we drive home.

 I've listed a lot, but Lee and I never do all of these things every Sunday. (Well, other than dropping off and picking up the kids. We would have some serious problems if we didn't make that a regular habit, don't you think?)

If you coordinate special needs ministry at your church, what else would you add to the list of what you do each Sunday?

what do our Sunday mornings look like? (in general)

Every church looks a little different on Sunday morning. As I share what we do, I'm not trying to put forth our model as the only model worth considering. Next week, I'll be sharing some links to information about what other churches do.

As you minister to and with people with special needs, you need to consider the needs of each individual and the setting in which you serve. Because the individuals and settings at your church won't be the same as any other church, you need to prayerfully determine what works best for your ministry. In other words, it is incredibly helpful to know what other churches are doing, but you will probably find yourself pulling together ideas from different churches and your own experiences rather than exactly replicating what another church is doing.

As for our church, let me start with the basics: 
Our worship service attendance is about 2000 each Sunday across three morning services, 8:00am, 9:30am, and 11:00am. In addition to seating in the worship center, we also have additional seating in our amphitheater with the service projected on screens; this smaller setting is sometimes preferred by families with children who are young or have special needs, but those families are welcome in the worship center as well. We have Sunday school classes for adults and children during each service. For sixth-twelfth grade students, we offer Sunday school classes by grade level during the 9:30 hour and one multi-grade class at 11:00. (We used to have a youth class at 8:00, but attendance was almost non-existent!) For the last two services, we have classes by age for preschool-aged children and infants and by grade for kindergarten to fifth grade, with most ages/grades split into more than one class depending on how many attend that hour. For the first service, some grades/ages are combined, since that's our service with the lowest attendance.

Because our church building used to be a hotel, our facilities are a little different from most churches. For example, our worship center used to be the hotel ballroom, and one of our other large rooms was the hotel bar. Also, many of our regular classroom have bathrooms in them, because they were once hotel rooms. However, some areas have been extensively renovated, and our children's building was only built a couple years ago, so some areas are more hotel-like and others more church-like.

So how what does it look like for the ~30 adults with disabilities and ~15 children/youth in special needs ministry?

• For young preschoolers and under: Most of our young preschoolers and infants (younger than three) with special needs are too young to be very different developmentally from other kids their age. We provide training and support to the regular class teachers, occasionally staffing that class with an additional adult or teen helper. In one or two cases, we may put a child in a younger class (for example, a three-year-old in a two-year-old class), but we rarely do that and make each decision about that based on the child's needs, the developmental appropriateness of the setting, and the size of the child (because a large, strong three-year-old, for example, wouldn't be as good a fit in a twos class as a more petite child). 
 
• For older preschool, elementary, and middle/high students: What we do varies from child to child based on the best way for him or her to encounter Christ in a meaningful way. So far, we have not had the need to have a separate class for children or youth with special needs. We do one of three things to include all individuals in each class.
1. Train and support teachers to accommodate the child with special needs in the class without extra in-class assistance.
2. Assign an extra teacher to the class to assist in general. That teacher and the other teachers work together to facilitate learning for all students in the class, with no single teacher assigned specifically to the child with special needs.
3. Provide a one-on-one buddy for the child. Unlike the extra teacher in #2, this volunteer is specifically there to shadow one child and help him or her be fully included in the class.  
• For adults: At 9:30, we offer the Joy class, which is a class for older teens and adults with special needs, mainly intellectual disabilities. The class has about 30 members, not including teachers and helpers, with an average attendance of 15-20. One or two of the couples who help teach the class also provide transportation for some of the class members each week. I know we have other adults with special needs - for example, Asperger's or ADHD - integrated in other classes and worship, but I have no idea how many.

We also have adults from the Joy class serving in visible ways - as greeters handing out bulletins, for example - in our worship services.

It can be hard to write out every we do without missing something, so please let me know if I left anything out or if you have any questions. And come back tomorrow to find out about what Sunday mornings look like for me and my husband as we coordinate special needs ministry each week!

How did we start?

Our start in special needs ministry is similar to many churches: one family. That's all it took. One family with a child with special needs.

Were we proactive? No.

Did the rest of the church step up? To be honest, not really.

That one family did what was necessary to integrate their daughter, shadowing her in classes and meeting with ministry leaders to pave the way for her. Somewhere along the way, other families came to our church and did the same.

When those kids grew up, that one family took the lead in creating some amazing events for adults with disabilities, including a weekly Sunday school class called "the Joy class."

When other families who had a child with special needs came to our church, they were pretty quickly connected to this one family. They were the welcoming committee for new folks and the ongoing support group. They made it happen, not only for their own family but others as well.

Is this optimal? Not really. Did it work for a while? Yes. Are my husband and I thankful that we've been able to step into our roles to connect church and home for these families? Oh, yes.

But is this how a lot of churches start? Yes. Please don't be discouraged if this is where you are. And hopefully resources I share here can help your ministry become more than just one family.

fun with friends

The week before Easter, we went over to our sweet friends' house and hung out for the morning. Knowing that Leiana would love to dress-up and knowing that Jocelyn wouldn't want to leave her costumes at home, we brought them with us! Such a fun day, for which I am thankful because since then we've each had a stomach bug, the kids have each had another virus that gave them high fevers, and Jocelyn now has poison ivy. It's a good thing I'm reading Stephen Altrogge's The Greener Grass Conspiracy right now, because it would be tempting to become discontented if I weren't reading solid reminders of why that's not God's best for me. (And, yes, a review is coming; I still have a couple chapters to go, so I can't write it just yet!)

But enough about that...how 'bout this precious princess?!?

I think she's bummed that the prince isn't willing to play along.

And all the dragon wanted to do was read a book about a dragon.

Thankfully, reading was an activity they all found agreeable.

Love them!

Hmm, Robbie just looked over my shoulder and said, "Baby Leiana cute." Isn't it a bit early for that?!?