One of the things I did when I was at the Church of the Resurrection for their Leadership Institute was to attend a pre-institute class on their Matthew’s Ministry program which reaches out to people with special needs. This is an amazing ministry and something we will be working on here at Sudbury UMC, but there was one thing that struck me during this. As we were sitting in the classroom listening to Jennifer Ross, who is the director, talking about what they did and what they would recommend, outside the window was the true work of the ministry.
Last year Ross was contacted by some of the parents and told that their children were being laid-off from their jobs and needed something to do, because to be quite frank they were driving their parents nuts and they needed to get them out of the house. So they talked about what they could do and decided to begin a bakery to help out the coffee shop and do some other catering things. So they bought a convection oven and now gather together on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to bake 1500 cookies and bread to be sold in the coffee shop.
And so as we were sitting in the classroom, the Mathews Ministry participants and youth from the senior high ministry were working on cooking, wrapping and labeling all of these cookies right outside the window. There was nothing that said more about the program then seeing it actually in action. It was an incredible sight.
Seeing the kids working together was truly incredible, but it was very different than the way it would have happened when I was in high school (which was 20 years ago). Because schools are working so much on mainstreaming children with special needs these days, our youth are much more accustomed to being around them and working with them they we ever were. While there were special needs kids in the schools I attended they were all in separate classes and we had few interactions with them.
The results of this work in schools can be seen in a recent article that appeared in the USA Today (which I can’t stand, but read because it was what one of the hotels I was staying in provided). The article recounts the increasing incidence of special needs students who are being voted as homecoming or prom king and queen. They have even forced school administrators to add these students to the ballots after they were initially left off.
I will be honest that my first impression was that the kids were doing it as something that was funny to do rather than being serious about it. I said that because that is how and why it would have been done when I was in high school. They might lift them up but only so that they could make fun of them behind their backs. However, in reading the article I had to change my perspective because I don’t think that’s why youth are doing it today.
Instead, they are doing it because they truly like these kids and want them to have this opportunity. One of the places that has done this is Cibola High School in my adopted hometown of Albuquerque. One of the teachers said that because federal law has mandated mainstreaming that special needs students are “no longer seen as different. There’s a climate of acceptance and enjoying each other.” I know that there are still lots of people who have issues with mainstreaming, but these are the very stories that show how effective these programs can be.
I recently visited the Negro League Museum and I still haven’t processed everything about going there, and will have to write more about it, but there was one sign that stuck out to me. In recounting the exclusion of African-Americans from the game, one of the quotes they had said “if colored clubs were admitted (to MLB) there would be in all probability some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them no injury could result to any one.”
In other words if blacks and whites played together, whites could be offended, but if blacks were excluded no one would be offended because blacks don’t count. How often do we still hear that same type of rhetoric? It’s often a lot more subtle now, but the impact and the outcome are exactly the same.
I see now how far behind the curve the church has been on this issue. One of the questions that churches should ask themselves is to look at who is missing from their tables, and for far too long and in far too many places this has included those with special needs. Often this is because churches have not felt that they have the resources to do it, or have said that they would be welcoming but don't want to do anything until they actually have the need presented to them.
There is an age old catch 22 in churches in which they will say that they don't have a nursery because they don't have have any infants, but the reverse is that they probably don't have any infants because they don't have a nursery. Is the same true with special need children? I suspect it is, and I also suspect you know where I come down on this issue. We as the church need to be offering the love of Christ to everyone that we come into contact with, and we need to be reaching out to them rather than waiting for them to come to us.
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