Amy Fenton Lee
Does your church welcome children with special needs?
That is a question that many kids ministry leaders should be asking. It’s also the topic of our very first podcast. It took a little more work than I expected, but the end result is a very helpful conversation about welcoming special needs children into your church. The guest for this podcast was Amy Fenton Lee from The Inclusive Church blog.
Directions: To listen to this 24 minute audio recording, just press play below or download the MP3 file to your computer.
In this fast moving conversation, we covered several topics related to churches and kids with special needs. Amy shared how she began to write about this topic and offered some starting points that will work for any church. We discussed a few difficult cases, then talked about how to encourage parents who are cooping with an Autism diagnosis.
I’d love to hear your feedback about this podcast. Just leave a comment below. You can also leave questions for Amy or suggest future episode topics. Click here to grab the podcasting RSS feed.
Need More Help? Be sure to read Amy’s tips for special needs curriculum or modifying your existing Bible lessons for special needs children. You can also read another recent interview with Amy.
This was wonderful! I’m so glad you featured Amy and this important topic here and also that it brought me to your amazing website.
The issue of faith is largely ignored in disability groups, and the issue of special needs is often ignored in churches, which leaves believers who have a child with special needs feeling extremely isolated. Church should not be the hardest place to be, but it sometimes is for families like ours.
Tony, I really enjoyed this podcast and have already downloaded it onto my iTunes podcast list for re-listening. Thanks for doing this! I thought you and Amy both did a great job. I have some kids who are more ADHD and some slight autistic and 2 with Asperger’s who are very high functioning. This was helpful … and I look forward to sharing this podcast!
Staci
Great podcast. My daughter is “on the Spectrum” and I found this podcast to be really good. While visiting family, we attended a church in Fredericksburg, VA, we found they had a special needs ministry. Every time we are in the area now, my daughter begs us to go because they did so well at make her feel special. (by the way, the name of the church that deserves a shoutout is River of Life Worship Center and the Children’s Pastor/Special Needs Pastors are Tracy and Jeff Fulford).
Beyond that, I am in charge of Children’s Ministry at my church in Pennsylvania. Besides my daughter we have at least one other special needs child attending, but there are dozens that live in the area that we should be reaching. We have never really put the time and resources (read: people) into providing a special needs ministry. So the kidmin part of my is intrigued by Amy’s articles on using Teen “Buddies”.
Ok so now that I’ve posted a comment almost longer than your post, I say… thank you on a great 1st podcast!
One quick question. Do have any plans to make the podcast available through Itunes? Just curious.
Tony,
This rocks. I can’t wait to hear future installments, and I can’t think of a better way to kick it off than with Amy. I thought you both did a great job!
Wayne
@Wayne: You’re coming up in a few weeks, so be ready!
iTunes is reviewing it now, you can grab the feed at this url and select add to iTunes to do it manually.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/MTC-Podcast
Great 1st podcast. This could have gone on for hours or been multi-part, there’s so much that could be covered. Another great resource, good job Tony (and Amy).
If this is a sign of things to come, the MTC podcast is going to be a very valuable asset to the kidmin community (not that this comes as any surprise). Looking forward to future episodes.