In this week’s episode, Garett reflects on how life experiences shape our ministry perspectives while looking at the importance of being flexible in ministry with the goal of reaching more people with the hope of Jesus. He encourages us to consider and embrace a ministry approach similar to that of the four friends who found a way to take their paralyzed friend to Jesus rather than allowing our preferences to dictate how we operate our churches.
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Hey everyone! This is your friend Garett Wall and I’m blessed to be with you for Episode 90 of Key Ministry: The Podcast. Thank you for joining in this week for what is a bittersweet message for me as this week’s episode will be my last go-round as a host with the Key Ministry podcast. Last spring, I was invited to join Beth, Catherine, Sandra, and Lamar as a co-host, and it’s been a wonderful experience for me. It has challenged me to lean in closer in my relationship with Jesus and it has pushed me to go deeper in my understanding of God’s Word. It has propelled me to better understand “why” and “how” we can more effectively minister to our friends and families in the disability community. And now, it’s time for me to step aside from the podcast and follow the Holy Spirit as he continues to work in me and through me as a husband and dad for my family and as a minister for our friends, families, and volunteers in Shine Ministry at Southeast Christian Church in Louisville.
When I look back at where I was in my life just over 11 years ago, the disability community and the reality of life impacted by disability and special needs was nowhere near the forefront of my mind. It was late in the fall of 2012 when my wife Becky and I had been married for almost 4 years, we had just celebrated our daughter Lily’s second birthday, we had a strong connection to the church where Becky and I met, and I was rolling along in my career in college athletics. And though none of those things changed immediately during the first week of December in 2012, life did change in a significant way with the birth of our son Isaac and his Down syndrome diagnosis. From that day forward, my perspective on life, my relationship with Jesus, the dynamics of my family and day to day life for us was impacted in powerful ways.
As I reflect on how God has shaped me and my family since Isaac’s birth more than 11 years ago, I’m reminded of the power of perspective. Each of us carry our own perspective or point of view through life which is shaped by everything from our experiences to our interactions to our beliefs and our biases. That point of view essentially serves as the lens to which we view life as we encounter new experiences and new interactions which can either strengthen our existing beliefs and biases or lead us down a path of new or adjusted beliefs and biases.
In ministry, it’s beneficial to not only have a strong understanding of yourself and how God has shaped you and equipped you in your brokenness to love, serve, shepherd and disciple other people but also to have a self-awareness of how your perspective and point of view impacts your ministry. In what ways has God used your life experiences and your journey of sanctification to shape your perspective and your point of view for ministry? For some it may be a dramatic story of redemption where God saved you from a life of addiction or violence or self-indulgence and now, you pursue others in a similar plight to share that same hope of Jesus. For others, it may be that God used specific people in specific ways in your life to impact you in a such a powerful way that He’s now led you down a ministry path where you can be that same type person to someone else. Or maybe, like me, it was an unexpected diagnosis and the new normal that came with that diagnosis that has shaped your perspective and your point of view on life, your understanding of God’s love and the powerful ways he equips those he calls into ministry.
No matter how much I could possibly attempt to push back on it or fight it or try to adjust it, I can’t help but view life and ministry through my lens as a husband and as a dad in a family significantly impacted by disability. I didn’t ask God to create Isaac with Down syndrome and autism and sensory processing disorder, and I assure you my wife and daughter didn’t ask for those realities either. But in God’s providence, he chose this path for Isaac’s life, and he’s called our family to journey with him in that reality. That’s the point of view I bring to the table each day as I navigate life as a follower of Jesus and as a man seeking to follow God’s calling in my life to love, serve, shepherd and disciple other people impacted by disability. After more than 11 years on this journey with Isaac, it’s difficult now to remember my life before the impacts of Down syndrome.
I share all of that so that each of you have a better understanding of my perspective and my point of view for disability ministry. I’ve experienced the ups and downs of navigating church with a kiddo that isn’t wired in a way where he can thrive in most of the ministry boxes we’ve created for kids in our local churches. With his multiple diagnoses, his sensory needs, and his challenging behaviors, it’s like forcing a square peg into a round hole trying to push him into a typical children’s worship or classroom setting. His needs and the challenges those needs were a significant factor in not only the way God moved our family from our previous church where Becky and I first met to our current church, but those needs and challenges also played a powerful role in how the Lord called me to serve in disability ministry.
Along with those 11 years of experience seeing the impacts of disability on my son and my family, I’ve been serving now for more than five years on staff with our disability ministry team at my own church where I’ve seen first-hand the ways God can use his church to love, serve, shepherd and disciple kids, teens and adults with disabilities and their families. We’re blessed as a ministry to offer numerous pathways and connection points for our friends and families impacted by disabilities into our church. And we don’t do it by holding firm to one or two specific philosophies or approaches or plans. We’ve created various types of programming and we’ve joined arms with other ministries in our church to work together to meet the tangible and spiritual needs of as many of our friends and families as possible. Studies show that only 15 percent of churches in America have an intentional plan to minister to the disability community, so the first step is creating a plan and being prepared to meet individuals and families where they are and take them to Jesus.
At my church, we’ve branded our ministry as Shine Disabilities Ministry so that those inside our church who are unfamiliar with what we do will better understand the “who” in our ministry and for those outside our church who are seeking hope and support to know where to find a church that is equipped to love, serve, shepherd and disciple their loved one with special needs without asking them to change first. With about 25 years of experience ministering to the disability community, our church has been fortunate to create significant awareness and build numerous lifelong relationships along the way. We don’t always get it right and we’re certainly not a perfect ministry but we’re also not content with asking and expecting people who were created a very specific way by God to be something they’re simply not just to fit into worship spaces and ministry philosophies we’ve created. We want to be like those four friends who found a way to take their disabled friend through the roof to Jesus, even if it didn’t make sense to any of the people watching them.
On that note, I just want to share three thoughts I have from my life experience through my own family and the ministry where I serve. I’ve shared these with others in the past, including earlier this week with someone who is carrying the burden of knowing there aren’t kids with special needs in her church because they haven’t met the families where they are, and they haven’t truly welcomed them because they don’t have a plan for them. Disability ministry doesn’t happen by accident. Either you plan for it and you pursue it as a church with a heart of meeting families where they are or you hold on to the belief that you’re a welcoming church that just doesn’t have many, if any, individuals and families impacted by disability in your congregation. And that takes me to my first thought…
To quote my friend Ryan Wolf from Ability Ministry, I believe disability ministry is a necessary ministry for churches. With the needs and behaviors of my own son, I usually view any church through the lens of whether my family could worship there. More often than not, the answer to that question is a “no” which is why I’m passionate about helping more churches make families like mine a priority. If you think you can minister to me and my family and families like mine without a disability ministry plan, I’m here to tell you from experience that it won’t work and it won’t be sustainable. To lean on the words of Benjamin Franklin, “if you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail” and that holds true for ministry. As we depend on the Holy Spirit to guide us in ministry, we’re called to care well for the church and there is nothing caring and loving and Christ-like about telling someone with a disability and their family they should go visit the church down the road and their special needs ministry because your church can’t and won’t love, serve, shepherd and disciple them where they are. We should be so in love with God and so in love with people that we’re not okay with that being the answer in our churches.
So how do we do that? Well, that takes me to my second thought: The best way to do any kind of ministry, especially ministry for our friends and families in the disability community, is to first mirror Jesus in the ways we love all people and invite them into life as a follower of Christ in his church. I don’t believe there’s one single right way to do ministry like ours but instead it’s a ministry approach that is more like those four friends in Mark 2, Luke 5 and Matthew 9 who couldn’t and wouldn’t allow the barriers and roadblocks and misguided thoughts of those watching to prevent them from making a way to Jesus for their friend who was paralyzed. If you and your church have barriers that prevent someone with a disability from worshipping and finding community, then it’s okay to be flexible and remove those barriers for that person and their family. Someone or some group of people in your church helped create those barriers, even if that wasn’t the intent, so it’s okay for someone in the church now to remove those barriers. We’re not following a scientific formula or trying to build a rocket or following a strict recipe where creativity isn’t on the list of ingredients. We’re taking the hope of Jesus to all the nations and our own traditions, tech sheets, classroom expectations, and ministry philosophies often contribute to the barriers rather than remove them. We tend to think we have it all figured out in ministry and if something comes along that challenges that or if someone comes along who doesn’t fit into the plan we’ve created, we just refuse to adjust even though we’re essentially pushing that person away from our church.
And that takes me to my final thought: It’s okay that you don’t have all the answers. None of us do and that’s how it works if we’re going to depend on God to make this thing work. Jesus is enough so we’ll just keep chasing him and praying for the Holy Spirit to guide and equip us on this journey. But I plead with you to not hold so firmly to your opinions and your preferences and your ministry philosophies and your beliefs that you have it all figured out that you end up pushing away those you’re seeking to shepherd or those who would love to partner with you in the great commission. Whether it’s integrating kids with special needs into a typical children’s worship environment with the goal of inclusion or creating specialized worship spaces for kids whose needs and behaviors restrict their ability to thrive in a typical children’s ministry setting, both are good and both are needed. We see the fruit of both of those settings and philosophies in our church every single week. It’s okay to embrace each of those as beneficial and acceptable because they both work well for those who are created in a way to thrive in each setting. And we could talk for hours about the differing beliefs and philosophies and approaches to disability ministry but at the end of the day, you should have enough flexibility and enough humility to adjust and tweak your programming and your philosophies and your preferences to meet the needs of the person and the family you’re seeking to love, serve, shepherd and disciple. And if you’re not willing to do that, then I encourage you to find a way to better understand the perspectives and the points of view of others who may have tangible life experiences contributing to their own beliefs and convictions.
I’ll close my time with you by sharing the words of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the church at Corinth where he wrote in verses 21 through 27 of chapter 12, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’ On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”
My prayer for those of us in the trenches of disability ministry is that we will continue to partner well with one another for the sake of the Gospel so that we can allow the beauty and uniqueness of every person in Christ’s church to be seen and known. Let there be no division in this movement to see more churches intentionally equipped to not only minster to the disability community but also to include our friends and families impacted by disability in the mission of the church by embracing their indispensable abilities for the kingdom.
Thank you again for joining me for today’s conversation and for allowing me to share another voice and another perspective with you over the last 11 months. I’ve enjoyed it and I look forward to listening to future episodes as God continues to use Key Ministry to promote meaningful connection between churches and families of kids, teens, and adults with disabilities for the purpose of making disciples of Jesus Christ. Check out keyminstry.org/podcast for show notes and a transcript of this week’s episode and I hope to see some of you in Orlando in May for Disability and the Church 2024. Our Shine Ministry team will be there and I’d love connect with you. Have a blessed day and I look forward to talking with you again soon, wherever that may be.
