Spotlight Interview with Sandra Peoples on Creating an Accessible Church: Welcoming Every Family, Every Child
Do you know a family who has a child with a disability seen or unseen? You don’t have to look far— in fact, you don’t have to look beyond my family. We are one of the 20%, or one in five households in this country that has a child with a disability. And families like mine tend to miss out on church due to a lack of accommodation, social accommodation for sure, but also physical accommodation in some cases as well.
I spoke with Sandra Peoples, a mom, pastor’s wife and author who knows this reality first-hand. Sandra’s book is Accessible Church: A Gospel-centered vision for including people with disabilities and their families to help us as a family of faith in the church become more accessible. The book is filled with practical ways that churches can adapt teaching style, classroom safety policies, on and on and on to genuinely welcome and integrate families who have a child with special needs.
This is an edited transcript of Carmen’s interview with Sandra Peoples. Listen to the entire interview on MyFaithRadio.com or wherever you get podcasts.
Carmen: Sandra, take us into your world. Why is this your passion and concern?
Sandra: Well, like you, it’s very personal for me. I grew up with a sister with Down syndrome and so the churches we attended growing up had to be accessible to her so that they were accessible to our whole family. And then in 2010, my son was diagnosed with autism and my husband is a pastor and we kind of looked around the church, he was pastoring at the time and we thought, oh, this church isn’t accessible to our son and other kids like him. And so we took some steps at that time. And then God has just allowed me to be in different churches and help as a consultant and help strengthen or start disability ministries so families like mine are able to attend.
Carmen: Some of those disabilities are, you can, you can see them, but a lot of disabilities today, you can’t see that kid looks like they should be behaving themselves, but because of their autism or some other invisible condition, the family is dealing with challenges you cannot imagine. And so that’s a part of this conversation. We got to start seeing who’s not at church. And so Sandra, let’s just start there. Who are we not seeing at church and why are we not seeing them there?
Sandra: Well, as you said, the statistics say that one in five families in the US has a member with a disability. And if we look around our churches, we don’t see that reflected. I even asked my school district, I said, how many kids do we have who are under IEPs and five oh fours, which means they’re receiving some kind of special education services. And my district said it was 24%, 24% of kids and teenagers.
And I thought, well then we need to see that in our children’s ministry and we need to see that in our youth ministry. And the reason we’re not is because there’s fear there. There’s a fear from a family that when they bring their kid on a Sunday morning, that kid’s going to last two minutes, five minutes before that mom is going to get a call or a text or somebody coming to say, Hey, your kid, we don’t know what to do with this kid. So that’s going to keep them home until they learn that our churches are places of love and accommodation and we want more than anything for these families to hear the hope that we have in the gospel and to be part of our gospel centered church families. And so it really is a mission opportunity. It’s an evangelism opportunity to reach these families that exist in every community.
Carmen: I want to bring the families into view here. I want to help people see these families. And so I want to shift our focus for a moment to the families themselves. Sandra, let’s start walking through the five phases of disability parenting. I’m going to read the list so everybody has it, and then maybe you could just unpack one of them for us. Recognize plan B, recover and rebuild rhythms, reinforce your faith foundations, renew relationships and reach out to others. When you talk about phases of disability parenting, can you just maybe introduce that topic to us?
Sandra: Yeah, as I mentioned, I grew up in a special needs family and a lot of the families around us had kids with disabilities. And then when my own son was diagnosed, I just saw these patterns that families fall into. And I think it can apply to even more than just special needs families. I think any family that kind of experiences a crisis or something they weren’t expecting, they go through these phases, they realize, oh, what I was expecting isn’t going to happen. We’re in a plan B situation. We have to rebuild some rhythms that help us. They have to think about their faith foundation. Were there things that they believed about God that are turning out not to be true? And that can be like beliefs in a prosperity gospel. If I do everything right, God owes me an easy life. That’s an easy one to fall into even if we don’t realize that we’re falling into it.
And then once we reestablish our faith in God and his goodness, then we can look around at the relationships that are still around us. And so that’s our marriages, our relationships with our typical siblings and our families, even friendships. And then God and his mercy and his love for us gives us a mission. Once we kind work through that pain, we find our purpose. And I love that part of this journey because I mean, my mission is working with churches, but there’s other families where it’s insurance reform or special education or just a hundred different ways for families who have been through challenging seasons to turn around and say, who’s coming behind me? And how can I make this path easier for the families that are experiencing what I experienced?
Carmen: This is applicable, as you have said, not just to families who have a child with a disability, but a family who is navigating childhood cancer or the experience of trauma. I mean, I think about all of these kids who had this experience in Texas, every single one of them, every single one of those families needs this Council needs this help, needs to recognize that they are now in plan B. They didn’t ever think they were ever going to need a plan B, but that’s where they now live. And so I think that all kinds of things that kids go through affect not just that child, but affects their siblings. It certainly affects their family. And we in the church should recognize that and respond to it. And so the five phases of disability parenting that are included in accessible church are really good for every single one of us to consider both interior to the family and then as it affects, and us as a body of Christ, as a family of believers, as the household of faith.
Sandra, maybe you could tell us a story about what you’ve encountered in let’s say one congregation where they came to this point of awareness, they knew they needed help and you helped them make some practical adaptations.
Sandra: Yeah, when I mentioned that my husband is a pastor, and when he interviewed at the church that we’re at now, we said during the interview process, do you have a special needs ministry? Do you have some kind of accommodations for a family like ours? And they said, well, no, we don’t. And we said, okay, well, if you hire Lee as the pastor, we need to take some steps because the pastor’s wife and the pastor’s son aren’t going to stay home week after week. And we’ve been at this church for eight years, and we have gone from not having any ministry to now having a ministry that serves any diagnosis, every age, every stage. We have a preschool class. In an elementary class, we have buddies in our elementary classes. We have a teenager class that our son is now in. We call it reverse inclusion.
And that means the class is designed for teenagers with disabilities, but then we invite typical teenagers in so they can be friends. And then we have an adult class. We just finished up disability VBS, which means we reach out to all the families in the community and we say, Hey, we know that summer’s a hard time. And so every Wednesday in July, we’re going to host a special VBS that is geared specifically toward your loved one with disabilities. And so we welcome these kids and teenagers and young adults in and have some modified lessons so that they understand we’re creating sensory environments that are more comfortable for them. And we’re speaking the gospel over them. We are helping them understand that in the way that they can. And then the whole family feels that love and care, and hopefully it’s drawn in by the gospel.
But I believe that God puts people in churches that have these skills. They may be special education teachers or they may be occupational or speech therapists. They have some kind of experience. And God uses that in this church environment that they may not have even realized that the church was a place to use these skills. And that’s why churches of every size can take these steps.
Sandra peoples
And so there’s church after church, but I have this front row seat to see what my church is doing. And it’s just because they said yes eight years ago. And these ministries, they don’t explode overnight. It really does take time and patience. But I believe that God puts people in churches that have these skills. They may be special education teachers or they may be occupational or speech therapists. They have some kind of experience. And God uses that in this church environment that they may not have even realized that the church was a place to use these skills. And that’s why churches of every size can take these steps. The churches that my husband has pastored, the one in Pennsylvania was about a hundred and twenty five, a hundred fifty people. And then the one we’re at now when we came was 350. And so we’re not talking about this ministry being only for the mega churches because the population is so high for families like mine. Every church needs to be able to take some steps of accessibility and make some accommodations.
Carmen: It’s so important. I love the encouragement to look around for people who do have experience. I think that the practical ideas, I mean it’s in terms of, Hey, we need this. And if we need this as the pastor or in my church as the leader of worship, that’s how it starts. It starts with the concern for one child in one family and figuring out—I mean, in our church we talk of it—-literally it’s about one child and her name is Emma. So we call it the Emma- sphere. What does it look like? What does it look like to create an hemisphere? Because if we can figure it out for one child, then maybe we can start figuring it out from others and become attractive to families who see that we at least we’re trying. Now, I will tell you, and maybe you’ve experienced this as well, not everybody in the church is excited about this universally. Not everybody actually has a heart for this kind of accommodation. And that is a struggle. I mean, there are still people, some of it is generational in my experience, but some people just don’t understand why we can’t just use old fashioned discipline to get that child to conform to how they should sit still and behave. And that’s not reality. And so how do you overcome that?
Sandra: Well, like you said, a lot of it starts with one family. And from the family perspective, I just tell them, a special needs ministry is going to start in this church because you keep showing up. And so don’t give up— show up, be present in your worship services to the best of your ability and help guide these families to get to know you. Be vulnerable. I think that’s a big part of it, is that special needs families, we may be embarrassed. There may be hard things happening, and we want to hide away where it’s safe. We want to stay home where we have a more controlled environment. And it’s a very vulnerable thing to go to church and to take this risk. But when we do and when we’re met with the church’s vulnerability, really the church has to say, wow, we are not ready for you in the way that we hoped we were ready. Or we still have some attitudes that we need to work on. And so it’s the family’s vulnerability and the church’s vulnerability. And when those come together, both sides can really flourish. And it’s a beautiful picture of what Jesus can do.
It’s the family’s vulnerability and the church’s vulnerability. And when those come together, both sides can really flourish. And it’s a beautiful picture of what Jesus can do.
sandra peoples
Carmen: It’s so good. It’s so hopeful. It’s so wonderful. I know that as you’re listening right now, you don’t hear me nor Sandra saying that this is easy, but this is required and it is necessary, and it is love, and it is what it looks like today to be the household of God and the family of faith in a particular community where these families with children who have disabilities are hiding. They are not showing up. They have, in many cases, given up. They’re fatigued, they’re broken, they’re lonely. They need the church. And so we as the church absolutely need to turn our attention and our focus in this direction. So Sandra, thank you so much for helping us do that. Thank you for demonstrating it in the life of the congregation where you worship and serve.
