On behalf of our team at Key Ministry, we encourage prospective attendees to save the dates April 29th-May 1 on their calendars and invite prospective speakers to apply to be part of the faculty for Disability and the Church, Key Ministry’s annual national disability ministry conference, to be held at McLean Bible Church in McLean, VA.
Our 2024 Conference was an unprecedented success. The decision to relocate the conference from our “ancestral home” in Cleveland to Orlando led to a 40%+ increase in attendance, reflective both of the growth of our ministry movement and the ability of attendees from the Southeast region to access the conference more affordably. Our plan going forward is to rotate the conference among host churches in different regions of the country as a strategy for expanding disability ministry within those regions. The 2024 conference featured approximately 90 speakers with talks and training reflective of the breadth and depth of the disability ministry field.
One of the high points of last year’s conference was the opportunity for attendees to visit Make ‘M Smile, the largest disability ministry awareness event in the country, hosted by Nathaniel’s Hope at Lake Eola in Downtown Orlando.
We anticipate that hosting the conference at McLean Bible Church (MBC) will bring back fond memories for many of the “old-timers” in the disability ministry movement. MBC was a pioneer in the field of disability ministry. The McLean Accessibility Summit was the first major ministry conference our team ever presented at in 2006. It was at the Accessibility Summit where we first met other leaders in the field. MBC’s Access Ministry represented a model that other large, evangelical churches would emulate. Under the leadership of Pastor Lon Solomon and Jackie Mills-Fernald, the church early on recognized the support needs of families raising children with developmental and physical disabilities and raised the millions of dollars in funding necessary to construct Jill’s House on the site of McLean’s main campus to provide respite care for families from across the DC metropolitan area. We’re honored to build upon the tradition established by the team at McLean and hope to honor their work by providing speakers and attendees the types of opportunities to network and learn that were indispensable to the growth of our ministry.
As with every national conference Key Ministry has hosted, the opportunity to speak is open to any and all mature Christians with important or innovative thoughts or ideas to help grow or advance the disability ministry movement. Our speaker team isn’t a closed club of ministry insiders. We encourage leaders doing important ministry work in relative obscurity to apply. We love meeting emerging leaders and seeing the connections and collaborations that result from spending time with others who are more established. For roughly a quarter of our speakers, last year’s event represented their first opportunity at a national ministry conference. Ministry leaders with personal experience of significant disabilities are very much encouraged to apply. Approximately 20% of last year’s speakers publicly identify themselves as having a disability.
The application process is competitive. We received 165 submissions for our 2024 Conference – between two and three times as many as we received as recently as 2022. We do give preference to applications from first time speakers and to ministry leaders with a personal experience of disability. We plan to offer three full days of content if we receive a sufficient number of high quality proposals to fill the time and expanded space available to us at MBC.
We continue to “tweak” the conference format how we organize the conference in response to participant feedback. The most significant change in the format for 2025 – borrowing from the tradition of the old McLean Accessibility Summits – is the introduction of “Pathways” for leaders serving in disability ministry with children and youth, disability ministry with adults and mental health/trauma ministry. Within each of those larger pathways, attendees will be able to choose breakout session content from three different “tracks.”
One might think of the tracks within each pathway as airport runways. Our goal is to equip attendees and the ministries they represent to “soar.”
Track 1: Serves attendees starting a church or parachurch ministry at the “boarding” phase, seeking to get their ministry off the ground.
Track 2: Is for attendees who have “taken off” with an established ministry, but are encountering some bumps (turbulence) that need to be addressed.
Track 3: Is for attendees serving in thriving ministries that may be “stalling” when it comes to expanding their ministry’s scope and outreach.
While any attendee will be able to select any content they wish to attend, we want attendees to leave with a roadmap of strategies and resources for taking the next steps in ministry.
We’re also seeking to offer a wide variety of elective content on topics related to parenting, marriage and family support, research addressing “best practices” in ministry, pastoral care, strategies for promoting friendship and inclusion. We are specifically interested in proposals that will advance the disability ministry movement through content that is innovative, creative, inspired, and non-programmatic. Additional topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
-
Inspired ideas and strategies for outreach
-
Engaging lead pastors in promotion and implementation of disability ministry
-
Disability among persons serving in ministry leadership
-
Innovative community partnerships
-
Disability, gender and Biblical sexuality
-
Underserved populations in the disability community
-
Housing and employment ministry
-
Inclusion in Christian schools, colleges and universities
-
Ministry with persons experiencing disabilities of aging
-
Advancing ministry through use of technology and social media.
Our formats for prospective speakers are unchanged from 2024.
“Quick Takes” (our version of “TED talks”) will be limited to TEN MINUTES OR LESS. Quick Takes are succinct presentations on topics of interest to the church related to disability, involving a single presenter. They are included in the free livestream made available to those unable to attend the conference in person and videos are available following the conference Key Ministry online platforms. Quick Takes typically receive the widest exposure .
Breakout sessions are 75 minutes or 45 minutes in length. Breakouts typically address the “how to” of ministry. 75 minute breakouts often include multiple presenters, audience participation and work best for speakers seeking to impart lots of information. 45 minute breakouts are more appropriate for single presenters, topics for which interest may be more limited and ministry innovations that haven’t yet been broadly adopted. Breakouts are NOT part of the conference livestream and video will not be available following the conference
Some tips from the Program Committee for prospective speakers:
-
We encourage submissions from two or more presenters.
-
We encourage submissions representing collaborations of two or more ministry organizations.
-
We encourage submissions describing new areas of ministry or new approaches to established areas of ministry.
-
We encourage submissions addressing evangelism and outreach with the disability community.
-
We encourage submissions on approaches/strategies providing opportunity for persons with disabilities to use their gifts and talents in ministry.
Speakers will receive complimentary Conference registration and complimentary registration for the Ministry Intensive of their choice, along with an invitation for themselves and a guest at our Speaker Networking Dinner. Speakers will also receive opportunities for their work to be featured across Key Ministry’s platforms.
If you wish to be considered as a speaker for Disability and the Church 2025, please complete the Speaker Proposal Form available here. The deadline for speaker applications is Friday, November 1st. Our Program Committee will meet in late November and all speakers will be notified of the status of their applications no later than the first week of December. The final speaker lineup will be publicly announced in mid-December when we plan to offer limited pre-release registration tickets.
We look forward to reconnecting with old friends and meeting many new ones at McLean Bible Church on April 29-May 1, 2025. If you’re interested in speaking at a large gathering of disability ministry leaders, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re not interested in speaking but would consider joining us, consider this your “Save the Date” notice for the opening of registration for Disability and the Church 2025 (#DATC2025) in January.
