The Words We Use Matter

Posted on July 25, 2010 by Dr. G

 

shutterstock_335109926Most parents of a child with a mental health condition wouldn’t conclude a church had anything to offer their family if they were to see a wheelchair symbol on a church website or find a link offering “special needs ministry.” In my experience, the kids who come to a practice like ours desperately want to be seen as normal. One challenge in helping them to succeed in school often involves overcoming their reluctance to accept special education services or accommodations to which they are legally entitled because they don’t want to be perceived as “different” by peers and teachers. Children and teens may also be very sensitive about participating in church activities in which the preponderance of their peers are identified with any type of disability.

Their parents are no different. Families are often reluctant to disclose to church staff or volunteers that their child has a mental health condition, receives special education services, or takes prescription medication for emotional or behavioral issues. They’re apprehensive that their child’s weaknesses will be perceived as an outcome of poor parenting by others in the church. They just want to be treated like everyone else.

The definition of disability according to the Federal Register is as follows:

¨An individual with a disability is defined as a person who has a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of such impairment, or is regarded as having such an impairment.

If a mental or physical impairment substantially limits a person’s ability (or their family’s ability) to actively pursue spiritual growth and fully participate in the ministry of a local church, is that person “disabled?”

shutterstock_333276203While there’s no question that the kids and families we serve meet the legal requirements for disability, their unwillingness to be identified with the disability community is one factor that has contributed to a lack of understanding within the church on how to best reach and minister to them.

Key Ministry helps churches serve kids with disabilities.  Our job will be largely completed when the understanding of how to include kids with common emotional and behavioral conditions is incorporated into “standard operating procedure” in the children’s and youth ministry world.

Revised January 23, 2016

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Disability Ministry in a “Simple Church” World

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Dr. G

shutterstock_221882353I’m going to stir up a little controversy today by disagreeing with many of my friends in the disability ministry community.

A couple of years ago, I was attending a meeting of disability ministry leaders prior to a major conference hosted at McLean Bible Church. Several participants expressed great frustration at the reluctance of many of the larger, rapidly growing churches to devote staff and volunteer resources to the establishment of identifiable disability ministry programs and to market the availability of their programs on the home pages of their websites or in yellow pages advertising. I’ll admit that our thinking in earlier ministry plans was very similar. We used to measure progress by the reach and scope of church programs resulting from our training or consultation.

I may not be the sharpest crayon in the box when it comes to child psychiatry, but I figured out pretty quick that I needed to understand something of how a family functions and how parents make decisions when convincing them of the benefits of a specific course of treatment. The same is true when working with churches.

Simple ChurchThom Rainer and Eric Geiger authored Simple Church, a book that’s had vast influence on the approach senior pastors, executive pastors and church boards take in establishing ministry priorities and considering new opportunities. By clicking the link above, you can read a sample of the book, but here’s the basic premise: Churches that design a straight-forward and strategic process to facilitate spiritual growth are more likely to grow than churches that offer lots of programs that have the potential to compete for the attention of the people and the resources of the church. In my experience, “Simple Churches” generally demonstrate great passion for reaching people who don’t know Christ and are disconnected from the local church…the same families we at Key Ministry are trying to connect. Seems like we should be able to find common ground.

Key Ministry has made a very strategic decision to emphasize inclusion in the training and consultation we do at churches. While we’re happy to help your church set up a program if your church does “programs,” our job when we work with churches is to help families of kids with emotional, behavioral or developmental issues participate in the process that church uses to build disciples. If people grow spiritually through great teaching in your weekend worship experiences, our job is to figure out how to help you get parents into those services. If your church emphasizes participation in small groups, it’s our job to help you frame solutions so the families in question get connected and stay connected to a small group. If your church emphasizes service, we need to help you involve families in service opportunities.

We recognize that every church won’t choose to pursue families of kids with hidden disabilities. That’s OK. We will help you figure out how to serve our families in a way that’s aligned with your church culture without a stand-alone “program” if that’s how you do ministry.

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Rolling out the Red Carpet

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Dr. G

10609598_339795679509017_2602956741834197121_nA big part of what Key Ministry seeks to offer churches is help in welcoming families of kids with emotional or behavioral issues. This is simple, but it’s not. The families we serve typically have some experience with church. Unfortunately, their experiences tend to have been negative. In many instances, families have negative experiences of church because of a disconnect between the environments in which ministry occurs and the way in which their kids experience the world.

In my neck of the world, the majority of church attendees are Roman Catholic. In most Catholic churches, kids are expected to sit through Mass with their families. Personally, I think it’s a sin to bore kids with the Gospel, and truth be told, engaging the kids in the audience is not typically the primary concern of the priest during Mass. Kids are typically sitting in pews with hard backs. Much of the worship service tends to be repetitive, and homilies in a Catholic church, like sermons in a Protestant church, aren’t terribly relevant to your typical ten year old.  Add to that the expectation that attendees at worship will be quiet and reverent, and the experience can be pretty unpleasant for many kids. Imagine attending church with a kid who has a condition that causes them to have more difficulty regulating their behavior, more difficulty listening to uninteresting content and more difficulty ignoring the people sitting around them. Take into account the shouting match the parents had tearing the kid away from his X-box to get him ready for church, and there’s a good possibility the family won’t be fighting for a parking space in the local church parking lot.

Lest we think that our non-denominational, “seeker-sensitive” churches have the monopoly on serving such families, I remember well the first time we trained at a rapidly growing church in another city. We were touring the children’s ministry area and it would not be unfair to say that the walls and hallways looked like the Crayola crayon factory after an explosion. One of their staff members (an interior designer prior to entering ministry) suggested to her colleagues that they repaint the walls in richer colors and reduce the brightness of the light in the children’s area. Modifying the intensity of the sensory stimulation in the environment helped to have an easier time maintaining self-control.

shutterstock_151284752To borrow from our friends at North Point Ministries, We want to help churches create the kinds of environments that unchurched families (families we seek to serve) want to attend. What do those environments look like for families with kids with sensory processing issues? Families in which a child (or a parent) struggles to overcome social anxiety? Kids who struggle to ignore distractions in their immediate surroundings? We’ll explore those issues in greater detail in future posts.

Revised February 24, 2016

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Church, We’ve Got a Problem

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Dr. G

Emotional girlHow will the church serve a generation of families with kids who have issues with emotions or behavior that interfere with their ability to function on a day to day basis?

Kids with “hidden disabilities” like these are gradually becoming the new normal. Check out this study in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. To summarize:

22 % of U.S. children entering first grade met criteria for at least one mental disorder. Kids with autism spectrum disorders or developmental disabilities were excluded from this sample.

The most common condition experienced was Simple Phobia (9.0%). Other common conditions included ADHD (8.7%), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (8.4%), Separation Anxiety Disorder (2.1%) and Tic Disorders (1.7%).

An important point the authors of the study made was to note that the 22% figure applies only to kids who demonstrated problems that interfered significantly with their ability to function normally on a day to day basis. In lay terms, that means the child is able to learn at a level consistent with their intelligence in school, make and keep friends in an age-appropriate manner, function in an age-appropriate way as a member of their family and participate in extracurricular activities common for that community…like church.

The numbers quoted in this study from Yale are pretty consistent with data reported elsewhere. If you were to look at the kids involved with children’s programming at your church, do you think anywhere near 22% of the children being served experience one or more of these conditions? If not, let me welcome you to the new mission field down the street and around the block from your church.

Next, we’ll talk about how the church can be equipped and unleashed to welcome and minister to the families of this generation and their kids.

Updated January 27, 2014

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600817_10200479396001791_905419060_nConfused about all the changes in diagnostic terminology for kids with mental heath disorders? Key Ministry has a resource page summarizing our recent blog series examining the impact of the DSM-5 on kids. Click this link for summary articles describing the changes in diagnostic criteria for conditions common among children and teens, along with links to other helpful resources!

Posted in ADHD, Anxiety Disorders, Key Ministry, Mental Health | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Never the twain shall meet

Posted on July 10, 2010 by Dr. G

shutterstock_450223867-2

I live in two worlds. People from my work world rarely enter my other world. That reality is tragic…and utterly unacceptable.

I’m a physician specializing in child and adolescent psychiatry. In my job, I get to do lots of cool stuff. I teach at two medical schools and do research to assess the safety and effectiveness of medications given to kids for ADHD, anxiety and depression. I run a group practice in a suburb of Cleveland where, together with a very talented team of mental health and education professionals, I see lots of families struggling with the full range of emotional and behavioral problems occurring among kids of this generation. I enjoy my job. With all due modesty, I’m really good at piecing together why kids are having problems and developing plans in partnership with their parents to help address the most important concerns. But all too often, I go home with the knowledge that what my kids and their families most need isn’t going to happen.

In my other world, I’m part of a family centered on honoring and serving Jesus Christ, together with my wife and two girls. We’ve been blessed to have been a part of two great churches where all of us have had the opportunity to experience great teaching, find friends we’ll enjoy for the rest of our lives, worship together and serve together.

So, what’s wrong with that?

The families I see in my work world rarely venture into the community of Christ-followers I do life with in my local church. And that’s totally unacceptable to God!

I hope and pray that God will use this blog and the efforts of our team at Key Ministry to help people involved in the church world to get to know and understand the families I see in my work world. Families of kids with “hidden disabilities”…significant emotional, behavioral, developmental or neurologic conditions without outwardly apparent physical symptoms. Once my church friends get a handle on the families in their communities who come to practices like mine, we can problem-solve together just how to welcome them into our environments, include them in the stuff we do so they can come to know Jesus, accept him as Lord, and grow to be more like him. Just like we do.

Together, God will help us figure out how we as church can welcome and include families of kids with real, but invisible disabilities. Families living within the shadows of our steeples.

Updated July 8, 2015

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