Weekly round-up! {7/18/11}

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Our family ministry team is meeting this morning (all staff and a few key volunteers from babies through high school). I love all of the individuals who will be at our table, and I am grateful for and humbled by the opportunity to serve with them. And I am thankful for my sweet friend Kelsey, who will be a senior in high school next year and who is doing an amazing job as our Access Ministry intern...and who will be taking care of my two little ones this morning so I can be at the meeting.

Now on to the links...

From the Today show, here's a list of the best travel spots for families with special needs.

Amy shares some great forms for kids with gluten-free needs here. These would be good for churches or parents.

This blog by a different Amy - who is a homeschooling momma of two, one with Down syndrome - isn't new to me, but it might be to you. Here are two great posts from her about special needs ministry: The Church and Individuals with Special Needs and Ministry Alongside People with Special Needs.

In this raw and vulnerable article, Two Minutes to Eternity, Marshall Shelby wrestles with why God allowed his son to live only two minutes (due to Trisomy 13) and why his daughter - who had an intellectual disability - died at age two, not long after his son's birth and death. As you can imagine, this is not an easy read, but it is hopeful too.

A few easy reads, though, are these about churches who get it: a church-based summer camp program of  Familiesof Autism/Asperger’s Care, Educate and Support (FACES) in Georgia, a church who welcomed a child with autism and OCD and allowed her momma to be present and encouraged in the worship service, and the story of a woman who has been teaching first-graders at her church's Sunday school for the past 59 years - and counting! - and who welcomes kids with special needs into her classes (best line of the week, from a parent of a child with autism, about this Sunday school teacher:  I asked if I could stay in class with him, and she said, "Of course, you can.").

Also, Abby Hamilton did a great job with Fellowship Bible Church's first luau for adults with disabilities. Oh, yeah, and she's 15.  (I think if we could get her and Kelsey in a room, they might be able to take over the world.)

A few posts from the past week about struggles facing families who include a member with special needs:
And here are three great posts from Jackie Mills-Fernald in the past couple of weeks. She is the guru for all things special needs ministry, as the Director of Access Ministry at McLean Bible Church, and I was thrilled when she started her blog a month or two ago!

The National Down Syndrome Society has a comprehensive page on just about anything you'd like to know about Down syndrome. 

I've never read this blog before, but I love the bullet points near the end of this post: A Culture of Generosity. 

While the title of this post is 10 Simple Things Good Pastors Say, it applies to any ministry leader. Or any parent, for that matter.

And this post isn't specific to special needs ministry, but Emily at Chatting at the Sky consistently captures beauty with her words and camera. This post is about the futures that God knit each of us together for (including, of course, kids with special needs).

How good the book! (How Huge The Night)

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This book is on my list of top young adult book of all time, near the top if you limit it to modern works. (Most of my favorites in this genre are classics.) If you teach adolescents or teens – or if you, like me, are an adult who likes to read their books – do yourself a favor and get How Huge the Night by Heather Munn and Lydia Munn. I think words like well-written and encouraging and inspiring and thought-provoking are thrown around too often in book reviews, but this one truly is all of those things.

(Heads up, though, that this is overtly Christian, so it would be a no go for my public school teacher friends. Sorry! I still think you should read it, though.)

I love YA fiction, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that much of it is trash (Twilight, anyone?) and that the bar drops significantly lower when you add “Christian” before YA. Another strike against my expectations for this book was the time period; I’ve read plenty of mediocre fiction about WWII and the Holocaust. But, because the blurb seems compelling enough and because I was itching for a little escape fiction, I agreed to review it.

And my expectations? They were all so far off-base that I can’t even see them from here.

At one point, I expected to gripe a little in this review about the authors’ two-dimensional depictions of all the good guys as great and bad guys as terrible...and then they twisted the story in such a way that no only turned that concept of its head but also convicted me of arrogance and self-righteousness at the same time as the main character was convicted of the same. While there is certainly evil in this book, being set in WWII and including some Jewish characters dealing with the effects of Nazi hatred, the more subtle evils in every man’s (and woman’s) heart is revealed, much in the same way as Nathan’s “you are that man!” speech to King David in 2 Samuel 12:7.

Furthermore, it is rare for two women authors to capture and characterize adolescent boys in a rich and realistic way, but the Munns did just that. I do think that some aspects of one of the two parallel storyline was a little under-developed, but I don’t think I would have noticed that if the well-developed one hadn’t been so exceptional. At one point, the gospel of Christ is presented, but it is done so in a natural way that is logical to the story – starkly different from the forced, contrived passages that often show up in Christian fiction and seem hastily shoved in to add a little more religious content.

I was frustrated by one major misstep, but that was probably the fault of the publisher and not the authors. On the back of the book, it states, “Soon after [event A], [event B happens].” I’m leaving out the specifics, because it gave too much away. Plus event A happened on page 21, while event B doesn’t happen until page 222. In any book – particularly one that is 304 pages – you can’t say “soon after” if the lapse between the events is 201 pages!

All in all, this is a coming of age story for a young Christian boy and his friends who are living in a small town in southern France before and during Hilter’s occupation of the country. And it’s a very, very, very good one. 

Many thanks to Kregel Publication for providing this for my review. They did not ask for a positive review, just an honest one.

Wonderfully, fearfully knit together {Psalm 139:13-16}

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For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well. 
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
 the days that were formed for me,
 when as yet there was none of them.

{Psalm 139:13-16}

A how-to guide for hosting a prom for adults with disabilities

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A decade ago, our church hosted our first prom for adults with disabilities. It was called the Joy Prom, and after that event, our church began a Sunday school class for that same group. I've written about Joy Prom before here and here and the Joy class here.

This is no small undertaking, so if you're interested in hosting an event like this at your church this spring, then now is the time to start. To help you out, here's the manual that one of our Joy Prom coordinators wrote a few years ago; it has been used by several churches across the country to plan their own events.

And here's a video I found on YouTube of news coverage from our 2008 prom.


I do want to share one note of caution in planning and executing an event like this, though: It's very easy to operate from the mindset of "look at this great thing we're going to do for them," setting yourself up as the doers of ministry and them as the receivers. I've seen this become problematic after the event when that mindset continues and can prevent full involvement of "them" as people who can do ministry too. I would recommend cultivating an attitude of "look at this great night we all get to have together to celebrate life;" then you're talking and thinking about each other as friends and partners in ministry from the beginning.