Welcoming parents
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Whenever I know we'll have a new family visiting, I line up others to cover the tasks I usually do on Sunday morning so that I can be fully available. Sometimes I only have to greet the family, help mom and/or dad find the right classroom, introduce the volunteers - both the teachers and, if needed, the one-on-one buddy - and walk them to the worship center (we have a large building, so it's not always intuitive to find the service). Other times - like this past Sunday - I spend the entire Sunday school hour with one of the parents, usually the mom, who isn't ready to go to service and would prefer to hang around in case her child(ren) are having a tough time.
Either way, I'm happy to move at their pace.
Here is my list of tips for welcoming parents of individuals with special needs (usually children, sometimes adults who need the support of living at home with their parents; we also talk with caregivers from group homes and other facilities when they are the ones bringing an adult with disabilities to the church, and some - though not all - of these tips apply to those interactions as well). Because this list focuses on the parents, I'll use "child" to refer to adults and children; I might be grown up, but I'm still my momma and daddy's child and will always be.
- Learn from them. While I do impart information about what we offer during our first conversation, my first priority is to learn from them. They know far more about their children than I ever will. Steve Wright, our pastor of family discipleship with who I am privileged to serve, keeps a container of 112 ping pong balls in his office. Two are black, and the rest are white. Those balls represent the waking hours in a week (assuming eight hours of sleep, so I joked with him the other day that he needs to add more white balls for most of our middle and high school students!). The black balls are the hours spent in our various ministries, and the white ones are the ones spent outside of church. The lesson? We're missing out if we only focus on the black balls. To truly impact our communities, we need to plug into those white ball hours - equipping families to worship God with their lives outside of church and to share the hope they have in Christ with others. And while we learn a lot about our friends with special needs at church, we can learn more if we find out what their lives are like during the white ball hours.
- Respect where they're at right now. I love the quote in the image (source: here) at the beginning of this post. We don't know the battle being fought by anyone who enters our church buildings or any other area of our lives. We don't need to know it. All we need to know is the grace we've received from God in Christ as the sacrifice we needed but could never deserve. Once we know that grace, we can impart it to others.
- Encourage parents to trust you and your team. It is huge for them to trust you with their child. Huge. At this time of year, my Facebook feed is full of teary posts about friends who are sending children off to college or school. Take that emotion and concern, and dial it up by a factor of about 10, and then you'll begin to understand how parents of individuals with special needs might feel about leaving their children in Sunday school.
- Don't be put off by hesitance or hostility. I'll be posting more about this in the future, but please understand that most of these parents have been burned before. As such, they might not being willing to share much with you or they may be pushy because they expect a fight. Don't let either attitude surprise you or make you defensive.
- Have a plan for what you'll do if a parent asks to stay in class with their child. In addition to hostility and hesitance, the final "h" we see from parents is "helicoptering." It's hard to just drop a child off, regardless of the abilities, but - unlike with some other parents - it's not overprotectiveness for parents of kids with special needs; it's just protectiveness. We discourage parents from staying in class, though, for two reasons: (1) we want to give parents a chance to engage in our church community outside of their child's class and (2) we require background checks for all volunteers in our children's, student, and Access Ministry classes as a safety measure. Last Sunday the mom we had visiting our church asked if she could stay, and my response was, "Certainly! However, because we require all volunteers in the classroom to have background checks, let's step into the hall instead of staying here in the room." This enabled our Access buddy to take some ownership in the classroom, mom to stay nearby, and me to usher her into the hall, and it did so in a way that helped her feel more comfortable, as she commented, "wow, background checks. That's such a good idea for churches."
- Allow parents to serve if they want to, but don't require it. We try to protect our parents by not requiring them to serve, but we have one who prefers it and who has served as her son's one-on-one buddy for most of the past fifteen years and we have another who has asked if we would be okay with her serving as the buddy for her preschool son this coming year. If parents serve, though, they require background checks before they can volunteer in the classroom.
- Show joy in serving. I had one mom tell me that she liked our church because unlike others, we included her son ... and unlike other churches who were willing to include her son, we didn't make it seem like they were a burden for us. I can get into a task-oriented mindset that gets the job done but that doesn't show that I love people, and that's not okay. The tasks only matter because the people matter. You serve well if you serve with joy, and parents will be more comfortable if they see that.
What else would you - as a parent or as a ministry worker - add to this?
