Podcast: How to Get Started on Disability Ministry (No Matter How Big Your Church Is) (Sandra Peoples)

October 13, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How to Make Your Church an Accessible Church

In this podcast Sandra Peoples addresses the theological and practical implications for serving those with disabilities in your church and community. Sandra talks about the long-term care that these families may need, the practical ways that churches can do this, and how everyone in a congregation can contribute to helping people with disabilities feel they belong.

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Accessible Church

Accessible Church

Sandra Peoples

Sharing years of expertise and personal experience as a caregiver, ministry consultant and professor Sandra Peoples shows churches how to remove physical and social barriers to create a welcoming, inclusive space for disability families.  

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:35 - A Personal Story of Disability

Matt Tully
Sandra Peoples is the disability ministry consultant for the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention, and an adjunct professor at Liberty University, teaching classes in disability ministry. She’s also currently a PhD student at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and she and her family live outside of Houston, Texas. Sandra, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Sandra Peoples
I’m so excited to be with you.

Matt Tully
You’ve written this amazing book called Accessible Church, and the whole focus of the book is helping churches—helping pastors and ministry leaders and everyday attenders—to take a step forward when it comes to loving those with various disabilities who might be in their congregation. We’re going to get into some of the ideas that you share in that book and the advice and the encouragement that you offer, but I think before we jump into some of those topics, it’s probably helpful to go back a little bit and hear more about you and your own personal story, because you’re from a family that has experience with some disability. So, I wonder if you could just start by telling us a little bit more about yourself.

Sandra Peoples
Yeah, sure. I grew up with a sister with Down Syndrome. She was my big sister, and so I have never not been in a family impacted by disability.

Matt Tully
And your sister’s name was Sybil?

Sandra Peoples
Sybil, yes. That’s right. Sybil, Sandra, Sarah. We have a younger sister too, so we got called all kinds of names. We responded to any name that started with an S at our house.

Matt Tully
Did your parents ever confuse your names?

Sandra Peoples
Oh yeah. Pretty often.

Matt Tully
You start with the same syllable.

Sandra Peoples
You just answer to whatever. And so that shaped quite a bit about my experiences. The church that we grew up in was a First Baptist church of a small town in Oklahoma, and they did a great job including Sybil and making accommodations for her, really to the point where I didn’t realize that a church wouldn’t make some of those accommodations.

Matt Tully
That was your normal

Sandra Peoples
That was just normal for us. I went to college, and then I went to seminary, I married a pastor, and then he’s serving at a church in Pennsylvania. (We’re fast forwarding a little bit.) We have two boys. The older one is David, the younger one is James. After James turned three, he got an Autism diagnosis. I had grown up in a special needs family and had these experiences as a sibling, so I was shaped by a lot of that, but then I was going to have all these new experiences as a parent, and it was going to be very different. And lots of things changed about our family, but one thing that didn’t change was the church we attended, because my husband was the pastor. And so we kind of looked around and we thought, Actually, there aren’t any people with disabilities who are members of this church. It was a church of 125–150, and so we thought about how churches don’t often choose not to welcome people with disabilities; it just kind of happens by default. If you’re not proactive about it, it often doesn’t happen. And that’s where we found ourselves, when our son got his Autism diagnosis. And so God had providentially put people in that church—an occupational therapist, a special education teacher—and we were able to work together with them, and James was included in everything we did. And then that ministry grew. We did a lot of outreach in the community. We hosted Autism support groups so that everybody in our community knew we were a church that would welcome their loved ones with disabilities. And so it really changed quite a bit of the culture of that church while we were there. God was so kind, and the families that came were patient with us as we learned. Every diagnosis is different—even the same diagnosis. We have a saying in the Autism world that if you’ve met one person with Autism, you’ve met one person with Autism, because their stories can be so different even with the same diagnosis. And so it just taught us so much about what churches of that size can do and how they can love families. And then we’ve been outside of Houston—we live in a suburb of Houston—we’ve been there for eight years, and my husband’s the pastor of the church that we’re at now. When we got there, we said, "Do you have a disability ministry or a special needs ministry?" And they said no. And we said, "Okay, well if you hire Lee, we’ll have to have some kind of ministry because the pastor’s son and the pastor’s wife aren’t going to stay home week after week." And they said, "Okay, great. We’re all in." And so we’ve been able to build that at our church over the last eight years and just start meeting families’ needs and growing from there. And it’s been really amazing to see God’s faithfulness but also the willingness of the people to do it.

Matt Tully
Just hearing your story in that brief form—growing up with a disabled sister and all the things that you must have learned through that experience of loving your sister and seeing your parents navigate that—did your understanding of this calling to love those who are struggling with disabilities change as a parent when you got that diagnosis with your son?

Sandra Peoples
I think it did. I think there were things I assumed about God and my relationship with God that changed once I had James. And so part of that, honestly, is I think I had accidentally bought into some kind of prosperity gospel beliefs. I thought if I followed all the rules and I did everything right, that I would be rewarded with the perfect kids and the pastor-husband.

Matt Tully
"Normal."

Sandra Peoples
Yeah. And so when we got James’ diagnosis and I prayed and kind of wrestled with that, I just said, God, I’ve already done this. I’ve already lived this life as a sibling, and now you’re asking me to do it as a parent. Down syndrome is very different from Autism. Autism's an invisible disability, so it brings extra challenges. But I’ve just learned so much about God’s love. The way that I love James is much more similar to the way that God loves me than I realize. There’s nothing that he can do or not do to deserve my love. I don’t withhold that because he can’t meet an expectation or can’t do something that I think he should be able to do. And so it brought me so much freedom in my relationship with God. Even though God knew my weaknesses and my vulnerabilities, you still try to perform—even for him. And so to strip that away and to still feel deeply known and deeply loved and to see that everything that we go through, there’s a purpose for it. One of my favorite verses when I think about James’ Autism is from the book of James, where it says, "Every good and perfect gift comes from God." And I just think somehow in God’s story for our family, Autism is a good and perfect gift. I wouldn’t have necessarily chosen it as our path, but he’s going to use it for our good and his glory. And trusting in that has really brought a lot of freedom.

07:55 - A Theology of Disability

Matt Tully
I’d imagine that that’s probably a common story for many families who have disability as part of their story—the struggle to believe that God is sovereign over this, that he is in control somehow, and that he also is doing this ultimately out of love. How have you wrestled through that with your husband?

Sandra Peoples
A lot of it, I think, we just dig into Scripture. Scripture is so rich on the topic of theology. I don’t know that everybody realizes how many passages deal with disability and the theology of disability. One of my favorite passages is from the book of Exodus, where God is calling Moses and saying, "Go before Pharaoh and say, ’Let my people go.’" And Moses says, "I can’t do it. I’m slow of tongue." And so we think maybe he had a speech impediment or something that impacted his speech. And then God says, "I make man deaf or mute or seeing or blind. I do that." And so even when you can think of all of the causes for a different disability or all of the things that could have happened or not happened, ultimately, God tells us he is in control of that. And so that brings so much peace to say he chose this for our family, and so we’re going to seek his guidance, seek his will in this, and bring him glory (whatever that looks like). It changed our church. I just think of the changes that happened because they called Lee as their pastor, and we’re the kind of family we are, and so the the mission outreach that it is. If I’m sitting in a waiting room in a therapy place, I’ve got a hope that not everybody in that waiting room has. And so I am on mission in those places to say you can have a peace, you can have a sense of purpose if you have a relationship with God. And so it just feels very missional to me in what we get to do.

Matt Tully
That’s one of the things I loved about the book is one of the opening chapters that you have is called “Laying the Foundation: A Theology of Disability.” You have a quote in there that I really liked: "The theme of disability crops up all around the Bible from Genesis to Revelation." And as I stopped and thought about that statement for a minute, I just realized how true it is that all throughout Scripture, this motif of disability—oftentimes physical disability—is so prevalent, especially in the Gospels when we see Jesus come onto the scene. He’s engaging with people who have some kind of disability all the time. What’s behind that? What do you think is going on there, and why do we maybe not always even realize that that’s the case?

Sandra Peoples
Yeah, that’s a theme. I think until it’s part of your story, sometimes you’re just not looking for it. And they say that disability is a minority group that any of us could enter into at any time. And so you could be an able-bodied person for decades and then something happens, and you join the disability community. And so what a kindness of God to weave that throughout the Bible so that when we’re hit with that, whether that’s a family member or our own disability, we have these examples. Jesus is pointing to his power over all of creation. And so in these healing stories, I think they’re about the healing of the person. They’re about showing his power over the disability. But they’re also about restoring that person back into community that they could be a part of. And so you think about how at that time, people were considered unclean if they had a disability, and so they were ostracized from the community. They didn’t have the same access to the temple or to the rituals around the temple. And so when Jesus comes and he heals, not only does he heal these physical needs, but he also restores them to community. He gives family members back into that family unit that they had. And so that’s what I think is especially beautiful about the stories that we see throughout Scripture to think, What can we do that imitates what Jesus did? We can’t heal with a touch, but we can restore people into communities who feel like they’re far away from the gospel and to a church family. And so that’s what I love about what Jesus did and then what we can emulate from that to just say, I can’t do everything he did, but I can make a difference for a family. I can break down some barriers that exist in our churches and bring those people into our community.

12:33 - Defining Disability

Matt Tully
For the purpose of this conversation and of what you’re trying to do in the book, how would you define the word disability? What are you talking about when you use that term?

Sandra Peoples
That’s such a good question. You mentioned that I’m in a PhD program, and I actually spent hours this week defining disability for my dissertation. There are so many aspects to it. And I think that those of us who have a biblical worldview can be very honest about what struggles people with disabilities face. And so a disability is, in part, just an impairment, whether it’s a physical impairment or a cognitive impairment, it’s something that is different about a mind or a body that is typical in other people. And so that can look so different in every person. And it’s not always just about that disability; it’s how other people are reacting to that disability. And so this social aspect of it is a part of that too. For example, my son James can speak 100–150 words. That’s part of his disability. The social part of that disability is that when he goes to church, do people say "hi" to him? Do they look at him and speak to him and assume that he will communicate "hi" back, or do they act as if he’s not even there and only speak to me as his mom or his caregiver? And so that’s kind of the social aspect that I think in our churches we can address as well. It’s beautiful at my church. We walk in and they say, "Hi, James!" And sometimes he waves or sometimes he looks.

Matt Tully
But both of those need attention—maybe the physical space realities and needs there but also the social needs that might be there as well.

Sandra Peoples
Right. Because they both impact the person with the disability. And we can overemphasize one or the other. That has happened before, but I think we have this opportunity to acknowledge that both functional and social aspects of disability exist, and be able to make it a smoother path for people, no matter whether the challenge is functional or social, to be part of our church families.

Matt Tully
In the book you distinguish between visible disabilities and invisible disabilities. I wonder if you can just give some examples of both of those categories. Why does that distinction help us? Why is that an important thing to at least have in mind?

Sandra Peoples
Yeah, that’s great because I have this family experience in both aspects. Growing up with a sister with Down Syndrome, if we went to a restaurant, they would look at her and they would say, "Oh, she clearly has Down Syndrome. We can change the expectations of what she’ll be able to do."

Matt Tully
So the visibility helped, in some ways, people to kind of change their expectations and be prepared.

Sandra Peoples
Right. But if I walk into a restaurant now with James, there are no physical signs of Autism, and so they will expect him to act like any other eighteen-year-old who’s there, and he can’t do that. And so there are challenges, of course, to both physical and invisible disabilities. But we’re seeing now just this growing population with invisible disabilities, because you count Autism as an invisible disability and other neurodiverse diagnoses. So that can even be ADHD. My older son, David, has Dyslexia. It’s a learning disability, but it’s an invisible one. And so if he goes into a church setting, nobody’s even making accommodations or ideas for what the experience could look like for him. And so we often don’t see invisible disabilities until there’s some kind of behavior. In a church setting, it could be that they make vocalizations. If the sensory input is too much, James might cover his ears with his hands. And so we kind of have to be on the lookout for those invisible signs that somebody has a disability, and then change our expectations of what we might need to do to serve them.

Matt Tully
For those of us who aren’t maybe as directly connected to the disability community, and again, often that’s happening through a family member, give us a sense for how common disability is today. I think in the broader culture we do hear more about that community. What are some of the stats that help us understand how frequent this can be?

Sandra Peoples
The census that came out back in 2000 in the US said that one in five families in the US has a family member with a disability. That can range from Autism to Alzheimer’s. So that’s a pretty big range. Newer numbers that have come out since then say two in seven. So that’s a little bit more than one in five. I like to encourage, especially children’s ministry leaders and student ministry leaders, to call your school district and ask how many students they have that are under IEPs and 504s. (That’s our special education language for kids who are getting some kind of accommodations at school). And so I called our school district and said, "How many kids do we have that are under these plans?" And it was almost 24 percent. And so that’s a pretty big percentage. And if you look at your children’s ministry or your student ministry, is that reflected at your church, or is there a significant part of the population you’re missing out on reaching? Because if that’s not reflected in our classrooms and in our pews but it’s reflected in the stats for our communities, there are reasons that they’re not showing up, and there are steps that we can take to make sure that they feel comfortable and are accommodated for.

18:18 - Approach, Ask, Adjust

Matt Tully
If you were to summarize, based on your own experience as a sister and as a mother, what are some of the implications for a local church, or for families who have disability as part of that story, when a church isn’t thinking about these things? When a church isn’t really being proactive on some of these fronts, what happens?

Sandra Peoples
Well, a family like mine with a significant disability like James’, we will go to a church’s website before we visit a church. If there’s nothing on that website about some kind of inclusion plan or disability ministry, we won’t even show up. We’re not even going to attempt to show up. There are other families who will come and they will try it out. Maybe they’ll go into the worship service, and their child makes some kind of vocalizations or something that turns people’s heads, and so they can feel very judged. They can feel very uncomfortable. I’ve heard from lots of families that have been asked to leave churches, saying, "Your child is too loud. We can’t make the accommodations you need." So actually being asked to leave a church is a pretty common occurrence. We talked about those invisible disabilities. There are parents of kids with invisible disabilities that may take their kiddo to children’s ministry and drop them off and kind of cross their fingers that everything is going to go okay and not even be honest with the children’s ministry director that there could be some things that they might need. And so let’s think just of a child with ADHD. That’s pretty common. Well, if they’re getting a call from the school, it’s very rarely good news, right? It’s, "This behavior’s distracting. They did this. They couldn’t do this." And so there’s just this constant bad news that these families hear, and so if they attempt to go to church, they’re going to think, Well, I’m just going to get more bad news, but I’m at least going to try. Maybe it’s important enough to me that I’m going to try and show up, but I’m going to hope that everything goes well. And so we have to, as churches, be accommodating and ask the right questions so that we can communicate that we are places of belonging and accessibility, and we want these kids to be successful and safe while they’re with us. And so we have to ask those families to really be vulnerable. I think vulnerability’s a big part of this, where they admit, ’This is what my child’s diagnosis is. These are the struggles he has. Here’s what you can do to help. If this is the behavior, here’s what works at home or at school to kind of help that behavior." But that takes a level of trust and care and support, and you might not be there on the first day, but hopefully you can get there as you get to know the family.

Matt Tully
You’ve obviously been living in this world for a long time, but is it still sometimes even hard for you to be that transparent, to be that honest, to ask for that kind of help?

Sandra Peoples
It for sure is. Especially at my church, James almost needs somebody one-on-one with him. He’s in what we call a reverse inclusion class. It’s for our teenagers and young adults with disabilities, and then typical teenagers come in as part of that class.

Matt Tully
That’s such an amazing idea. When I encountered it, I’d never heard of it before, but it seems like such a thing that could be so beneficial for literally everybody involved.

Sandra Peoples
Yeah, it really is. And what’s been beautiful about it is we’ve been at our church for eight years, and they know him, they know us, and so it’s much easier to talk about our needs. But actually, having a sister with a disability shaped that for me because I grew up trying to downplay my needs. Because my sister required some extra attention, I didn’t want to cause my parents any extra work. And so I would be very private about anything—grades or relationships or anything. I felt like I was bothering my parents if I did too much. So that influences even now how I talk to people about our needs as a family. But one beautiful picture of how this has worked at our church is our older son is off in college, and so of course when he was home, there were things that he could help with, and now he’s gone. A few weeks ago at church, his friends were serving in James’ class as part of that reverse inclusion class. And so James walked into the service holding onto the arm of one of David’s buddies who was still in the youth group. And I just thought, what a beautiful picture. James can’t do this on his own. He can’t walk into this service and find his seat and be able to sit there, so he needs help from other people. But also these teenagers at our church have grown up with him and with David, and so they’ve been around us enough that they know what the needs are and they’re able to meet those needs. And not even in a way that screams accessibility or inclusion, but it’s just one teenager being a friend to another teenager and just saying, "Let’s get in here together, and let’s do this. Let’s sit together at church, and let’s worship together side by side." And so it does take vulnerability on the part of the family and also vulnerability on the part of the church to say we may not have all the answers. We may not have all the programs. We need to learn from the family. And that takes vulnerability too.

Matt Tully
A simple pattern that you lay out in the book for starting to engage with a family impacted in this way is three three words: approach, ask, and adjust. I wonder if you can just walk us through very briefly what each of those stages might look like.

Sandra Peoples
In the book I give these little vignettes of a family. They visit a church for the first time, and one of the boys in the family can’t sit through it. So one of the parents takes him out and they go into the lobby, and so I show what could happen if the person who’s sitting behind them notices. They go out into the lobby, they ask that family, "What needs do you have? What can we do?" And then they take that back to the ministerial team and say, "Here are the accommodations and the changes that we can make that would make it possible for this family to be part of our church family." And so you’re approaching, you’re asking, and you’re doing that with kindness and vulnerability. You’re not blaming or saying, "Why would you even show up here?"

Matt Tully
That could be one of the things that holds people back from that approach and that ask is maybe feeling worried and wondering, Am I going to ask the wrong question? Am I going to bring something up that they don’t want to talk about right now? What advice can you give to someone who’s wanting to do that but just feels nervous that they’re going to say the wrong thing?

Sandra Peoples
Let’s say you notice that a boy at church is covering his ears, that’s a sign that the sensory input is too high for him. So, you could say something like, "Oh, I noticed your son was covering his ears. I have a nephew (or I have a friend) and I’ve seen him do that too when the noise is too loud. Did you know that we have noise reducing headphones available in the lobby?" So even just kind of saying, "Here’s what I observe, here’s my experience with what I observed, and here’s a solution that might help. I know it helps my other friend that has an invisible disability, but something like noise reducing headphones help there." Most families are going to understand that you might not use the right language or you might say something differently than we would say it. But we just have to lead in love, assume the best of each other, and just welcome those questions so that we can all learn and go forward and feel like there is an opportunity for that family to be included.

Matt Tully
I wonder what you would say to somebody listening right now—maybe they’re in a leadership role at a church overseeing the children’s ministry or something like that— and they hear about some of the accommodations that you might encourage a church to consider making in order to make it more accessible for someone with a disability. And they might just have a little sense of concern that if we go down this road, is there a possibility that that might actually negatively impact other kinds of priorities or the broader community, whether it’s disrupting a classroom or it’s requiring more volunteers to miss a worship service. How do you encourage people to think about how they make those prudential calls on what they should pursue and maybe what they don’t need to pursue?

Sandra Peoples
That’s a great question. I think part of it is a theology answer. Do we see every child in our ministry as created in the image of God, which means they can have a relationship with God? They were created to respond to God in whatever that looks like for them. When we start there, it’s easier to brainstorm solutions for kids. It’s easier to be patient with challenges. It’s easier to make accommodations because we’re going to assume that there is the potential here for discipleship and evangelism.

28:04 - Making Sacrifices for Accessibility

Matt Tully
If our definition or the goal of a Sunday school hour is merely the communication of information you know about the Bible, well then having a child who’s causing some disruptions is going to be a hindrance to that. But if our gathering together as a church is more than merely communicating information and we see it in that more theological light, I think that does start to open up more opportunities for us with our kids. You write at one point in the book, "As churches we may need to lay down our preferences, our traditions, and our reputations for the sake of the gospel." I wonder if you can share any examples of what this has looked like in churches that you’ve worked with or you’ve been a part of. What’s an example of a church sacrificially laying down something in order to love better?

Sandra Peoples
I mentioned James and his class coming into our worship services. They’re all teenagers and young adults with varying disabilities, and they sit on the front row over in their section. They sit with us through the worship time, and then they go back to their class during the sermon and they have their own lesson. But their worship style looks different from the worship style of most of the rest of us. It’s a Southern Baptist church in a suburb of Houston, and so there are expectations there of behavior and of noise level. And that class can’t meet all those expectations. And so we kind of have to lay down our preferences. We’re teaching them what it looks like. We’re teaching James how to sit in the services. We actually brought him in on Wednesday nights, and we would set a visual timer and we would sit for five minutes and then ten minutes.

Matt Tully
Nothing’s going on at the church. You’re just coming in.

Sandra Peoples
Right. We’re getting him used to being in that environment with the lights. And then we could sit through worship team practice so he could get used to the noise level in there. Part of that was us coaching him on how to do it, but the other part of that was the church family loving that they’re there. And even sometimes from the platform, our music minister will say, "Isn’t it fun to worship with our friends with disabilities?" I love to hear from some of the older members of our church who might not know a lot about disability but then they see James and his classmates. We had one lady say, "Oh, I was at the grocery store and there was this mom and her son, and the son was really having a hard time, and I understood that he wasn’t being disobedient. He had a disability and was overwhelmed by it." And so she’s able to offer more compassion, even on that grocery store aisle, because she had had an experience at church where she had seen a family and a kiddo kind of struggle in a similar way and understood that it was disability related. And so it’s just such a teaching opportunity and an opportunity for us to welcome those families and acclimate them to our environments, but also make our own changes to what it can look like.

31:13 - Caring for the Caregivers

Matt Tully
One of the things I love about your book is the way that you focus not just on individuals who themselves have special needs or disabilities, but you also have a chapter talking a little bit about the loved ones of those people, who day in and day out are often caring for them—parents, siblings, someone like you. What does it look like for a church to care well for those people?

Sandra Peoples
One of the sayings that we have at our church that’s a really helpful framework for this is we kind of think, What is hard for a disability family, and how can we make it easier? And so there are lots of little things that a family experiences that is harder because they have a loved one with disability. For example, we do respite nights four times a year, and that’s a night where disability families can bring their loved one and even the siblings, if they want to. They drop them off at the church, we have three hours of all kinds of fun for them, and the parents can go have a date night or go home and take a nap—whatever they want to do.

Matt Tully
That’s probably something that, again, unless you have that experience, you might not think about the fact that it’s probably harder to find a babysitter.

Sandra Peoples
It is. James is eighteen. I can’t call just any teenage girl.

Matt Tully
A sixteen-year-old girl down the street probably is not going to be well equipped to do that.

Sandra Peoples
And so these respite nights are a great way to do that. And then on the recent one that we did, we thought, What else is hard for special needs families is decorating for fall. Like mums and pumpkins, and they might not be able to do that. And so we went and bought like twenty something mums and we brought them to the church, and then when they left respite night, they could get mums and pumpkins and take that home. And so it feels like a small thing, but it’s just kind of like, well, this would be hard. It could be hard to get the family to the store to buy the pumpkins or the mums, or to a pumpkin patch, or whatever that would look like. And and we do that around Christmas too. One thing that’s hard for special needs families is getting family photos taken. It’s hard to find a photographer that’s patient and can take enough pictures. And so we at times have done an outreach where we’ve gotten a photographer, we’ve let our special needs families sign up, and we say, "Okay, we’re going to do family photos for you at this time." Some churches have these big photo backdrops. They’ll have it at Mother’s Day or Father’s Day or something like that, or even Christmas. And so we can invite the special needs families to come in maybe the night before the service and do the pictures then so that they’re not having to do it on a Sunday morning in the lobby with all the other families looking at them.

Matt Tully
That’s maybe the hardest time to do that.

Sandra Peoples
Yeah, the hardest time. And so as a mom and as a sibling, it just means so much to feel seen and to feel recognized and for somebody to just kind of think, What small thing could we do here that would make their lives easier? And for us, we will never be empty nesters. James will likely live with us forever. My sister passed away a few years ago, but she lived with our parents until she passed away. They’re over seventy, and their daughter still lives with them. And so there are just differences about a family like that and what kind of considerations and what they’re able to do. And so when churches step in and just offer different ways of care, it just means so much.

Matt Tully
As a part of a family that’s affected by disability, what’s the difference, in your mind, between merely being included and truly belonging?

Sandra Peoples
That’s great. I think part of it is are we missed when we’re not there? Or are they relieved that we’re not there because we take some extra work? And so if I walk in on Sunday with James and they’re like, "Oh, y’all showed up again. Well, let me take you to your class." You can kind of pick up on that vibe. But if they’re excited to see us, if they just can’t wait to see James and to be with us and there’s a place for him and there are people who care about him, they speak to him even if he can’t speak back, all of that speaks to belonging and being known and understood. When families at our church reach out to me maybe because they see a headline in the news that’s about Autism and they’re like, "Hey, we saw this and we want you to know that we love your family. We’re glad you’re a part of our church. If today is hard for you, we’re here for you." It’s tough for churches because you can kind of experience compassion fatigue. Say it’s a cancer diagnosis and people are showing up helping right after that diagnosis, but it’s hard to continue to provide long-term care, which is what disability families need. And so that’s why a church family is so well designed so that the burden isn’t falling just on one person.

Matt Tully
It is more than just a meal train one time. That’s where you start to need to have even a long-term strategy for how to serve in these different ways.

Sandra Peoples
Yeah. And just people that are sharing that, so it’s not all falling to one person. That’s why churches can sometimes say, "Should we have a Sunday school class or a discipleship group just for parents of kids with disabilities?" Well, that is helpful, but also we bring gifts into other small groups. And if the small group is the primary way that you’re caring for each other in a church (where it often is), you can’t have only people who are drowning saving other people who are drowning. That doesn’t always work. And so building those communities and having opportunities for belonging, like you said, means so much.

Matt Tully
I also imagine there might be a desire to, at times, not only be viewed or treated in this category of disability, as if that’s the only thing about your family,

Sandra Peoples
Right. I grew up in the same town my mom grew up in, and it is the same town my grandfather grew up in. I was the fourth generation. I looked just like my mom, and so everybody knew that I was her daughter. And then they also knew I was Sybil’s sister. And there were lots of times I didn’t even have a name. I was Theresa’s daughter and Sybil’s sister. But at church I was Sandra. The youth group was the place where they saw me and they knew me. They identified gifts in me. They encouraged that giftedness. They would reach out to my parents and say, "Hey, we know y’all don’t usually come on Wednesday nights, but can we come pick up Sandra and take her?" That was foundational to who I am now, because I wasn’t just Sybil’s sister; I was fully myself. And I think our church has done that really well for our older son, David, too. I think he has been seen as a unique person and had his gifts encouraged and developed as well. Which is why he, now entering his young adult years, still loves the church and loves Jesus. It’s because he had these positive experiences as a sibling and the church loving him well.

Matt Tully
It’s amazing the impact of your home church growing up, the way that the people in that church probably had no idea about where this all might lead and how God would use that. Those simple expressions of love has now paid dividends for generations.

Sandra Peoples
They didn’t even have a formal disability ministry. They didn’t call it that back when we were growing up. They just welcomed our family, and they welcomed other families that had members with disabilities. That’s just what they did.

Matt Tully
There’s something so simple there. You can get into a lot of the terminology and specific ideas and tactics for helping, and all those can be really important, but at the end of the day, it does seem like it’s pretty simple. This is a call to love.

Sandra Peoples
Yeah.

39:22 - Practical Next Steps for a Church

Matt Tully
Maybe as the last couple questions, I wonder if you could speak to the pastor or the elder or the ministry leader who’s listening right now. Maybe they feel a little bit of conviction and say, “I would like to take a step forward in being more proactive, being more intentional in these areas. But I don’t know how to do that. I am short staffed already. We don’t have a lot of budget. We have very limited resources, and I feel stressed already beyond capacity. What am I supposed to do? What’s the first step that I can take?”

Sandra Peoples
I think that’s a great question. A lot of it comes back to a theology question. How does my theology form how I see people with disabilities and whether I believe that they are welcome in our church? I like to tell churches, especially normal-sized churches, that you don’t have to—

Matt Tully
What’s normal in your mind? That’s a good question.

Sandra Peoples
The church that we were at in Pennsylvania was 125 people. The church we’re at now is about 450 people. So I guess when you’re talking about a more normal-sized staff, maybe it’s you and a couple others. You’re not a church that has a disability ministry director. You have the children’s minister or you have some volunteer that’s over that role. And I think one thing that can hold them back is thinking, Well, we can’t do anything because we can’t do everything right. They imagine, If we welcome one family, then they’re all going to come. They’re going to overload us, or We can’t make accommodations for somebody who needs a sign language interpreter, so we’re also not going to make accommodations for somebody who needs noise reducing headphones. So, if we can’t do everything, we’re going to not do anything. Instead, you just get to know the families who are part of you already. We talked about the stats. Are there families that are already part of your church and maybe you only see the husband and the typical sibling? You notice that the wife and another sibling are never there. Well, that’s a sign that there’s a reason that they’re not there. And so you sit down with that family: "What are we unintentionally doing that’s making it hard for you guys to attend as a family?" You come up with solutions for that one family, and then it’s easier to come up with solutions for the next family and the next family. Most churches are not going to be overwhelmed by people with special needs families. They’re still lost people with church hurt, and so you’re still doing the work of evangelism and discipleship, and that can be slow work. We’ve had our disability ministry for eight years. It’s continued to grow over those eight years, but we’re still not at a capacity level that we can’t handle. I think God has provided volunteers. We’ve trained volunteers. He’s provided special education teachers that didn’t even know that we needed what they were specialized in to come in and help us. And so God weaves church families together in ways that benefit the whole body. And so even at our church in Pennsylvania that was 125 people, he had already placed people in that church who could meet the need once the need was made known. And so part of that, if you’re the pastor, is just that trusting that God has gone before you. He’s made a path for you to easily say yes to these families and at least help them take the steps of belonging and accommodation. That doesn’t mean that every step is going to be easy or that there aren’t going to be things that you’ll need to come back and evaluate. But the sense of wanting to be welcoming, that attitude of welcoming, is even more important than all the accessibility steps that you could take. Do I feel loved here? Do I feel welcomed? That helps me overlook people saying the wrong words or something not being in place for us when we need. It’s just saying, "But I’m loved here. My son is loved here, and we’ll figure out all the rest of it together."

Matt Tully
Sandra, thank you so much for writing this incredibly helpful book that’s going to bless many churches and many families, and for sharing some of these insights here today.

Sandra Peoples
Thank you for having me.

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