When you nurture and prioritize relationship for the volunteers, the volunteers become the ministry’s greatest recruiting tools, because they tell others.
On their own, the leader of a church’s special needs ministry can’t meet every need of every volunteer or participating family. But that leader can model service in a way that caring becomes contagious.
The educational and therapeutic settings are all about achievement. But that isn’t what a relationship with Jesus Christ is about. He loves us exactly as we are and He wants a relationship with us regardless of our performance.
A Jesus-focused ministry gives greater weight to connection over correction, recognizing that change and spiritual growth occur in the context of meaningful relationships. The student with special needs is more like to develop a personal relationship with Jesus if no one is hung up on the deficit in interpersonal skills and instead everyone cares more about providing a positive, anxiety-free church experience.
People don’t expect perfection, but they do appreciate when they see leaders who sincerely try to improve and ask for help in areas where they might be weak. You don’t have to be good at everything to lead, but the best leaders are honest about where they need assistance, working to fill in those gaps, while also taking action and responsibility for areas of personal growth.
It is important that the church think outside the box, actively pursuing a relationship with the family, just as Jesus Christ pursues a relationship with each of us.
No one has ever seen the wind. We’ve only experienced the effects and the results of the wind. And none of us have ever seen God. Just like the movement of a pinwheel makes us sure that the wind exists, we have ways to be sure that God exists.