Disabilities in the Church Community
Most children’s ministers and long-time volunteer leaders will at some point find themselves feeling conflicted about how to best accommodate developmentally and cognitively disabled children in their community. They may find that one child’s temperament and learning capacity varies from one week to another. In other cases, leaders may feel pressure from parents to find a solution that is just not within their capacity. The situation can quickly become fraught and become not just a programming problem, but something of a pastoral crisis.
Whatever the particular situation, when it comes to placing disabled children in church formation programs, it’s not always as straightforward as assigning them to the same group as the rest of their agemates and leaving parents and teachers to sort it out. Formation best practices must hinge on the right combination of inclusion and creative adaptation.
Alyssa Barnes, Ph.D. 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.”*
Barnes shares, “In the government funded public school systems, placement decisions involve a team of opinions. The placement process sometimes requires mediation or even due process procedures to settle on a specific child’s education path.”
Churches, of course, are not subject to many of the education laws that guide day-to-day classroom programming, but just as with conventional schools, it’s reasonable to expect that it may take trial and error before developmentally disabled children are successfully woven into the church’s children’s ministry. Additionally, while churches may not have access to the types of resources that facilitate classroom inclusion in typical educational environments, it is important that we remember that we are called together in the spirit of community and inclusion. We should do our best to see a solution that respects both the needs of the child and family and the abilities of our volunteers.
The Journey to Inclusion: History and Background
Since 1975, Congress has enacted several significant pieces of legislation shaping educational environments and other publicly funded programs that serve disabled individuals. Such laws, alongside increased research into disability, accessibility, and related best practices have pushed public programs in new directions. In particular, in light of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1999, and No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, the current trend in public education has moved away from self-contained educational settings for disabled students and toward a model of full inclusion.
Wording such as “least restrictive environment” is common guidance provided by the laws for the schools’ placement of disabled children, but how this plays out in practice depends on a range of matters, including the individual school and each family’s relationship to their child’s disability and the wider disabled community. The outcome, however, is that parents’ expectations for their church’s children’s ministries are often shaped by their experiences in their local public school systems. As such, it is helpful for formation leaders to become familiar with effective and common practices in both the secular education and in other churches with more established disability-focused ministries.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
When working with developmentally or cognitively disabled children, there is often a sense that it would be ideal to offer both inclusion options and self-contained settings. Unfortunately, this is not a realistic goal for most churches, given volunteer availability and the number of disabled children who need such settings.
The reality in many churches is that families whose children have higher support needs are typically one of just a few in their congregations, if there even are any other families like theirs. For leadership, this means that the task at hand is more often about finding an appropriate placement and creating support within existing programs than about carving out a self-contained space. Volunteer staffing and parent desires can also affect the placement of a child.
The Role of Volunteers
Volunteers, who are already the heart of most church formation programming, are often the most important players when it comes to determining the right placement for a developmentally/cognitively disabled child, as well as for supporting full inclusion of physically disabled children. For example, one volunteer may serve as a buddy, regularly accompanying the child during programming, much as a paraprofessional might in a school classroom.
Of course, church is not school, and parents resist the idea of a buddy in their effort to fully integrate their child among their typically developing peers and to provide a “normal church experience.” In those instances when reality and parents’ wishes don’t perfectly align, another option is to pad the volunteer team. Discreetly position an additional helper with the understanding that they are tagged to assist the child with a disability. Even when a volunteer is acting more explicitly as a buddy, their goal should never be to isolate and separate, but to encourage and facilitate full participation to the best of the student’s ability.
Ask about a Child’s Individualized Education Plan
One frequently overlooked resource that church formation leaders might consider engaging when working with families of disabled children is the child’s Individualized Education Plan, or IEP. These are the legally binding documents that specifically set out goals and accommodations for the child in the school classroom, but they can help program leaders understand how the public school system is addressing a child’s educational, social, and behavioral development. If families are willing to share this document, it may help you identify useful tools and strategies that you can use in church programming. It may also help you better understand the child’s capabilities and what has helped them be successful in the past.
Another powerful strategy that churches can employ when partnering with families, notes Barnes, is to invite parents to share their personal goals for their child. While the church may not be able to further a child’s educational support plan, understanding the real desires of the family may reveal areas where small adjustments can yield big payoffs.
Barnes points out that most parents of developmentally and cognitively disabled children have social objectives for their children that are equally important to their academic ambitions, and this may apply in the church setting as well. As a classroom teacher herself, she notes that parents will often state goals like having their child invited for a play date or a birthday party or their child making a meaningful friendship. Barnes relays this to children’s ministry teams, explaining that “when the church staff gets to the underlying concerns and addresses the parents’ deeper desires, the disagreements over the child’s placement may ultimately diminish.”
Celebrate the Successes
As parents’ goals for their child are implemented into the church setting, be mindful of and recognize even the smallest of achievements. Point out the fact that the child participated in the typical formation session or group worship for 15 minutes this Sunday, whereas last week they only lasted 10 minutes. Relay a sense of victory to the parents. Utilize parting conversations during the child pick-up time as a means for positive communication and evidence that the ministry team is mindful of the parents’ desires and, most importantly, attuned to the child’s happiness and their sense that they are a full part of their community.
*Editor’s Note: While Building Faith does not recommend the use of the term “special needs,” this quote has been retained based on the overall nuance of the statement.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on March 8, 2011. It has been revised and updated on December 18, 2023 to correct grammatical and punctuation errors, to use equitable and inclusive language according to our editorial style, and to use the most widely preferred and non-stigmatizing language for disabilities to date in keeping with our style guide for discussing disability and related topics. Some recommendations may also have been modified in keeping with best practices for accessibility and inclusion.