Ministering to Children With Disabilities Nazarene Theological Seminary’s ‘Nurturing Care’ Initiative Increases Inclusivity at Area Churches

When Michael Palacio was born 18 years ago this month, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, tuberous sclerosis, which causes epilepsy and autism. And Michael now has both.

As his parents began to respond to Michael’s needs — and continue to parent Michael’s two older siblings — one issue that arose quickly was whether their church could create an atmosphere in which Michael could thrive.

As it turned out, the Olathe, Kansas, family left two churches before happily engaging at one of the three Grace Church campuses in Johnson County, where Michael is thriving in a ministry for people with disabilities.

“It was like a weight was lifted off our shoulders that we would be able to attend church again as a family, with all five of us attending the same service,” says Michael’s mother, Holly Palacio.

To support its ministry for people with disabilities, Grace Church receives some funding from the “Nurturing Care” initiative at Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.

Some of that funding comes from the Lilly Endowment of Indianapolis, which was created in 1937 “for the promotion and support of religious, educational or charitable purposes,” as its website explains.

Around the country, Lilly funds the effort to support ministries for people with disabilities through the “Strengthening Ministry with Children” program overseen by Indiana Wesleyan University’s School of Theology and Ministry.

Dean Blevins, who leads the Nazarene initiative, calls Lilly’s funding “a major investment into the spiritual lives of children.”

And for Nazarene’s president, Jeren Rowell, who has a 7-year-old disabled grandson, the school’s effort is both professional and personal: “Most essentially for me it’s about the intrinsic value of persons, the intrinsic value of my grandson.”

Holly Palacio expresses a similar theological understanding of why faith communities are called to do this work: “My son has taught me more about how my God sees me than probably anything else in my lived experience. The world sees my son as ‘other’ or broken or thinks just that something is wrong with him and asks, ‘Is there a treatment? Is there something to fix?’

“We just know him as Michael. He’s our son. We love him. We don’t love him more or less because of the additional challenges he has. And that is the way I believe God sees all of us. God loves each of us for our own individual strengths and weaknesses. At the end of the day, he loves us individually and wants to know each of us individually.”

Another congregation that receives funding through Nurturing Care, the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection based in Leawood, has “Matthew’s Ministry,” which it established several years ago and named after the congregant who inspired the program.

“We are using the grant money to create materials that will help train volunteers to provide better care for children (with disabilities) at Resurrection,” says Marna Terblanche, Matthew’s Ministry director. “This grant specifically focuses on children with autism. but we are creating the material in such a way that we can scale it and use it in all the areas of Matthew’s Ministry.”

COR’s founding pastor, Adam Hamilton, recalls that early in COR’s history (it was founded in 1990), he met a boy with autism.

“I remember his mother telling me that every other church they visited told them they couldn’t accommodate their son. He was, I think, 3 years old. I told them we would do whatever it takes to be their church. She began to cry.” And that family still is active at COR.

Origin Story of Matthew’s Ministry

As for how Blevins was moved to explore ways churches could better minister to people with disabilities, he says blame it on karaoke. Some years ago, his wife, Jo Ann Blevins, lead nurse for Camp Encourage, asked him to help with a camp event and run the karaoke machine.

That evening, he met a 13-year-old boy who asked to sing: “He was very quiet, withdrawn, but as he started to sing, he changed. His demeanor changed, and he was transformed. That hit me. I asked myself, ‘Why can’t we be doing this in churches?’”

Despite progress with that, Blevins recognizes that the need for ministries serving people with disabilities far exceeds what’s available:

“I think when congregations start to get it, when they don’t feel like it’ll be a massive undertaking, it is just learning to be adaptive, then the hospitality starts to fly. What we’re doing at one level really is modest, compared with what ought to be done, but let’s just see where God will take us with this.”

At Grace Church, which the Palacio family attends, Tessa Bontrager, special needs director, says something similar: “The disability community is very, very under-represented in church communities, even in churches that have disability ministry programming.”

And the need will grow as the frequency of diagnoses grows. As the Centers for Disease Control reported earlier this month, the latest surveys show that one in every 31 children now is being diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, up from one in 36 in 2020.

The good news? Faith communities are responding more frequently, too, whether it’s through Lilly funding or some other means. There’s now even a national Autism Faith Network.

For Holly Palacio, having a church that helps minister to Michael means she and her husband don’t have to support him alone:

“That difference, where you’re not only meeting the physical or medical needs but also the spiritual needs of the child — it makes all the difference in the world. He’s in class learning about the gospel and the Bible.”

But she, too, recognizes how much others need help, too: “If a church wants to be able to offer or invite more members of the community to bring their families” a lot more volunteers are needed. “You either need more churches or you need the larger churches where we have more volunteer opportunities.”

And those volunteers need training to understand people with autism and other disabilities. Which means getting to know Michael. And that means, for instance, learning, his mother says, “that Michael defaults to strange greetings, such as ‘Happy Father’s Day,’” which he’ll say to anyone — male or female — no matter what day it is.

And as the stepfather of a son with special needs, I can tell you that the joys and rewards are almost endless. More congregations need to know that.

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website, book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com.