Every day, I’m thankful that God continues to give me the privilege to lead and serve this incredible ministry.
In 2028, we’re planning a year-long celebration of our first quarter-century of ministry. Our team has been seeking to discern what the future holds for disability ministry between now and the specific role we’re being called to fill between now and then. We have unprecedented opportunities - but if we’re to pursue the plans God seems to have for us, our ministry will need very different levels of staff support and resources than we’ve relied upon in the past. Here’s a look at what we think the next few years have in store for us and the disability ministry movement.
Our ministry may be most impactful through our work in facilitating live disability ministry training events. Disability and the Church is moving to Orlando this coming May so we might accommodate all the deserving leaders and teachers in our field desirous of a platform to train pastors and church leaders interested in ministry with the disability community. We hope to host at least 500 leaders from across North America at this year’s conference, with a goal of welcoming upwards of 1,000 leaders by 2028. The speaker lineup will be announced and registration opened after the Christmas holiday.
We recognize we can’t meet the North American church’s needs for disability ministry by hosting one large, live event each year. Church attendance is down. Pastors and ministry leaders have less time and money for training and travel.
We want to make high quality, live, in-person disability ministry training available to 90% of church staff and volunteers on an annual basis by the end of 2028 within a half-day drive of where they live. Between our large, annual conference and what we’re calling the “Disability and the Church Tour” we seek to provide such training to 2,500 pastors and ministry leaders annually by the end of 2028. The “tour stops” will be 1-2 day regional conferences with sessions addressing the essentials of disability and mental health ministry. While we’d love to stage our first pilot “tour stop” in 2024, a more realistic goal is a launch in the first quarter of 2025, addition of several more stops in the second half of 2025, six to eight stops in 2026, and a full itinerary by 2027.
We see ourselves continuing to promote the growth of the disability ministry movement. We’d like to see the number of churches doing intentional disability or mental health ministry double between now and the end of 2028. One measure of our impact is the number of ministry leaders who belong to and are actively engaged with the Special Needs and Disability Ministry Leaders group we facilitate on Facebook. The group currently has approximately 2,750 members, over 1,700 of whom have been “active in the group” in the last four weeks. We would seek to double those numbers by the end of 2028.
We will continue to play an important role in the expansion of evangelism and outreach directed to the mental health community. The mental health ministry community doesn’t currently come together around a regularly scheduled in-person event to train church leaders or facilitate networking and partnership between ministry organizations in the way Disability and the Church offers such benefits to the disability ministry community.. We hope to launch such a resource through our first national Mental Health and the Church conference, to be held in Cleveland in Fall, 2024. Our goal is to grow this event to host 500 pastors, clinicians and church leaders annually by 2028. An additional goal is to provide mental health content accessed by 10,000 church leaders by the end of 2028. Such content will include a curated newsletter with links and commentary on mental health and disability-related news, with a professionally produced, companion podcast to introduce pastors, church staff and interested Christians to thought leaders and trend-setters from the fields of mental health, medicine and ministry.
We see ourselves called to two new frontiers of ministry activity in the coming years. We seek to be at the forefront of advancing evidence-based disability ministry interventions. Potential areas of focus include outcomes research on the impact of Key Ministry training, expanding the body of research on the impacts of mental illness on church attendance and engagement, facilitating recruitment of churches into outcomes research.
In addition, we have been greatly encouraged by the recent openness among Christian schools to welcome and include students requiring special education services. We see ourselves having a role in helping Christian schools serve kids with primary emotional or behavior disorders, as well as working with Christian colleges and universities to develop model disability inclusion strategies while exposing students to opportunities to serve the disability community.
We’ve traditionally shared an update with our followers and supporters at this time of year to coincide the kickoff to our 2023 Annual Fund campaign. My “ask” this Christmas is a little different than in years past.
We’ve arrived at a crossroads as a ministry organization. A key operating principle from our early years of ministry has been to offer leaders with gifts, calling, ideas or experiences to contribute to the work of disability ministry the opportunity to become better known through sharing their work with others. We’ve been successful because so many have been excited to embrace the opportunities we’ve been in a position to provide.
Most speakers at our conference pay their own travel costs in addition to volunteering their time and talent. The content provided through our blogs, social media platforms and video trainings is predominantly created by volunteers. My day job as a child and adolescent psychiatrist has enabled me to volunteer my services for the last 21 years. We’re a volunteer organization run with absolute bare-bones staff support. We’ve accomplished our ministry this past year with three part-time staff on our payroll, none of whom are paid more after employment taxes than a teenage employee starting off at Chick-fil-A. From a Biblical perspective, what we pay our staff is an injustice. Beth and Catherine have done heroic work leading our ministry. They can’t give any more than they’re already giving.
We’ve done as much as we can possibly do with the staffing and funding models that have sustained us for our first 21 years. It’s a struggle to sustain the ministry we’ve been doing with our current staffing and funding, much less pursue the expanded opportunities we’ve been presented with .We’ve done pretty well making “bricks without straw.”
This information is taken from the 990 forms non-profit organizations are required to follow annually with the IRS and lists the annual income of our peers operating in the disability ministry space. One of these things is not like the others...
Joni and Friends isn’t listed because their income in 2022 of $39 million dwarfs the combined budget of all the other national organizations.
To put this graph in perspective, our expenses associated with hosting the Disability and the Church conference in Orlando alone are likely to exceed our total income from last year. Our ability to accomplish so much with so little in the way of financial resources is a testament to the extraordinary faithfulness and generosity of our staff and volunteers, the stewardship of our Board, and most of all, the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the people who do the work of Key Ministry. We can’t keep this up without more help from paid staff.
Here’s the bare minimum of what we need to add to our team in 2024 to pursue the opportunities God has placed before us.
A full-time staff position devoted to the day to day operation of the ministry.
A full-time staff position devoted to organizing and coordinating training events
A part-time staff position devoted to grant writing and fund development
Expanded funding for video editing and production.
An expanded role for our social media manager in curating and disseminating the content and resources we’ve already produced for churches and families.
We so appreciate your prayers and financial support as 2023 comes to a close. We’ll put every penny to use in 2024 to help us navigate our transition to an organization largely funded by the training events we produce. We need a different type of support from what we’ve asked for before to make this ministry vision a reality.
We need your connections. We need supporters who will introduce us to foundations, churches and individuals with interest in the ministry we resource with the financial resources necessary for us to continue doing what we’re doing and take the next steps in making disability ministry and mental health ministry training and support more accessible to all who desire it. If you have connections within foundations or churches or know individual Christians with the desire and means to support our ministry, would you be willing to introduce them to Beth and/or myself? I’ll get on a plane and go wherever I need to in the continental United States to meet someone with the means to make a substantive difference in the work of our ministry.
Here are some of the things on our “Christmas list” looking ahead to 2024 and beyond that foundations, churches, or individuals might provide that will greatly impact our capacity to serve churches and ministry leaders in the coming years::
Additional sponsors for the Disability and the Church National Conference
Sponsors for our planned Mental Health and the Church National Conference
National sponsor and cosponsors for the Disability and the Church Tour
Sponsors for Disability and the Church Tour Stops
Website Sponsors - we very much need to update our current site
Sponsors for Key Ministry Podcast and our proposed Mental Health, Medicine and Ministry podcast
Sponsors for our Special Needs and Disability Ministry Leaders Facebook Group
Social Media Sponsor - to support the advertising necessary to increase awareness and utilization of our resources and services
Video Roundtable Sponsor
Sponsorships to cover our travel costs when offering training at major ministry conferences
Scholarships to cover costs of attendance for church staff and volunteers who desire to attend Key Ministry events but are unable to afford registration our travel costs.
Since God is the owner of everything and has provided us with the talent and treasure to offer our ministry to this point, I’m going to share a gift idea beyond “that we could dare to ask or imagine.”
We would be extraordinarily blessed for a donor or foundation to endow or fund key positions on our staff. We might start with positions for a training director or mental health ministry director, since we happen to know of a couple of very highly qualified people who would serve with impact and excellence in those positions.
At the very top of the “wish list” would be funding for an Executive Director position that would allow me to “retire” from medicine and serve the ministry full-time. I’ve never wanted to take money for doing ministry -I’ve cherished my “amateur” status and I do this because it’s my way of honoring God for what He’s done for me and my family. I’m fortunate to have had a “tent making” job that enabled me to volunteer for the last 21 years while supporting the ministry financially. As the practice of medicine has evolved in recent years, it has become more difficult for me to do both jobs with excellence. It would be a great blessing to be able to focus exclusively on doing the work of this ministry between now and the age when my ministry position will be “self-funded” by retirement savings.
If you know of a foundation, church or individual with the means and interest to support our work, e-mail me at steve@keyministry.org. If God has blessed you with the means of supporting our work through your year-end giving, you may donate through our website, contribute to the Facebook fundraiser on my page where I’ll be matching the first $2,500 in gifts made this Christmas season, or send a check to:
Key Ministry, 25935 Detroit Road, #125, Westlake OH 44145.
Thanks for your prayer and support on behalf of our ministry!
