Caroline Winograd’s family faces unique challenges. Her oldest son, David, has a rare genetic condition and is non-speaking. But like every other family at First Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, the Winograds are all warmly welcomed into the life of the church.
“David is always cared for,” said Winograd. “A place is always made for him, and he’s always integrated as much as he wants to be.”
Shortly after David, now 11, was born, the Winograds connected with Hand in Hand, First Pres’ disability ministry. Hand in Hand volunteers, called “buddies,” accompany him to Sunday School. Buddies also sit with people with disabilities during the service or in the church’s sensory room specifically designed for people who struggle to stay in the worship service. The buddies don’t just know how to communicate with David — they also are trained in how to share the gospel with him.
Hand in Hand serves 23 First Pres families as well as individuals with disabilities. The ministry currently supports people ranging in age from 18 months to 54 who live with a variety of physical and cognitive disabilities. Along with the buddy program and sensory room, the ministry also has a monthly support group for parents of children with disabilities and twice-yearly respite mornings so parents can have time to themselves.
The ministry has allowed Winograd and her husband, who were both involved in several church ministries before having children, to re-enter church life. Now, they’re also Hand in Hand buddies.
First Pres, which started Hand in Hand in 2012, is one of more than 600 PCA churches that has received coaching with Engaging Disability with the Gospel. First Pres began working with Engaging Disability in 2020 when Hand in Hand’s leaders were looking for support with their growing ministry. Engaging Disability, begun in 2007, helps churches welcome and disciple people with disabilities and their families.
Most of its work happens through coaching churches, but beginning this year, Engaging Disability will offer resources specifically designed to help children with disabilities participate fully in worship services.
Making Worship Accessible to Everyone
“We’re trying to get everybody back to church together,” said Ashley Belknap, executive director of Engaging Disability. The organization also publishes Reformed, adapted discipleship resources for people with disabilities in a way that helps churches break down, she said.
Most of the organization’s work is with churches in the PCA, but it also works with conservative and Reformed churches across other denominations like the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and Reformed Baptist Church.
She often hears stories of families who can’t attend worship services together because of a child’s disability. Sometimes, parents are asked to remove their child from the service. Other times, one parent stays home with their child so the rest of the family can attend church.
This disheartens Belknap.
“If God ordinarily works in the lives of his people through worship, through the preaching of the Word and through prayer and sacraments, don’t we want our kids impacted by disability to be in the places that God ordinarily works?”
Reformed theology does not, in itself, exclude people with disabilities and their families, says Belknap. But the emphasis in many PCA churches on lecture-style teaching or remaining quiet during most of the service can be challenging for many people with disabilities.
“Those are values. Those are not theological bearings,” said Belknap. “That’s just the way that things have practically worked out through culture and experience in the church over time.”
And without compromising on theology, those values can be tweaked.
“I’m not encouraging flamboyant changes across the church, but each church can be nudged towards small steps of growth, which can have really significant impacts on the congregation, especially families impacted by disability.”
Engaging Disability’s latest initiative, Room on Our Pew, is designed to help children with disabilities participate fully in the church service. The Room on Our Pew project is funded through a $1.25 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc.
During the five-year project, the organization will produce five different toolkits to help children with disabilities participate in worship services.
The first toolkit gives an overview of what people do at church. Future toolkits will focus on prayer, singing, listening to the sermon and, finally, the sacraments of baptism and communion. Each toolkit will also include a visual presentation of the gospel.
Some children with disabilities may struggle to use children’s bulletins with space for children to write sermon notes or color, explained Kara Whittaker, director of strategic initiatives for Engaging Disability.
These new toolkits will include visual resources, like cue cards, visual schedules, and social stories — pictures that explain what is happening during different parts of a worship service. The prayer toolkit, for example, will include pictures children can point to to say what they would like to pray for.
“All of these things are just going to make worship more accessible for all children, too,” said Whittaker. “A really central belief to everything we do is that the more accessible you make something for someone with a disability, the more accessible it is for everybody.”
Whittaker has a child with impacted by disability and knows first-hand how isolating church can be for families whose children struggle to find their place in church.
Engaging the Whole Church
Along with the toolkits, Engaging Disability plans to publish books that show pictures of people with disabilities worshipping God at church.
“What we find is that for children with disabilities, especially children with autism, they really connect with real photos and the ability to see themselves in those photos and see themselves in worship,” said Whittaker. Right now, it’s hard to find those pictures of people with disabilities worshipping in a Reformed service, she said.
But it’s not enough to just have individuals with disabilities know they belong in church. Engaging Disability also wants the whole church to be ready to welcome, disciple, and serve alongside people with disabilities.
The Room on Our Pew initiative also enables Engaging Disability to welcome 25 churches each year into an 18-month cohort program. Churches, who must apply for a spot in the program, will get to test resources in development and receive training about how to welcome and disciple children with disabilities and their families.
The first 12 months of the program are an intensive training program followed by a six-month implementation phase where churches can take what they have learned and put it into practice in their congregations.
Churches will be placed into smaller groups of three to five churches for monthly meetings. Each church is encouraged to have at least three members who will participate in the program.
The goal with this new program is the same as it is for all Engaging Disability’s coaching programs: for people with disabilities and their families to be fully welcomed into churches and supported for spiritual growth. “We want every church to have room on their pew to welcome families impacted by disability,” Belknap said. “To accomplish this goal, everyone in church leadership — elders, pastors, deacons, staff, volunteers — needs to be involved.”
And people with disabilities need to be welcomed into ministries throughout all stages of life, from nursery to children’s Sunday School, to youth group to adult ministries. If a teenager with disabilities can navigate youth group or a young adult with disabilities can find friendship in adult ministries, they are more likely to stay in the church throughout their lives, Belknap says.
That’s important, because disabilities can teach everyone more about what it means to follow Jesus and find hope in the coming Kingdom of God, said Whittaker.
“What disability reminds us of is that we’re living in that tension between the already and the not yet,” says Whittaker, who has a son with autism. “I think sometimes we think about disabilities, that that’s the hard thing that God gave us. But then other hard things come. In some ways, it helps us develop a resilient faith. It helps us run with endurance. … We’re all in a world that we weren’t made for. … This world’s not our final home.”
Meagan Gillmore is a journalist in Ottawa, Ontario, where she attends Resurrection Church.