Championing the cause
Crossroads Church leader Lorry Gail Malcom, pictured, will debut a new ministry for children with special needs.
Lorry Gail Malcom approached the giant, glowing tablet on the wall with enthusiasm one afternoon.
She said she has looked forward to demonstrating the colorful feature in one of the classrooms designed especially for the new Champion’s Club at Crossroads Church, 8901 S Shields.
The club officially will debut on Sunday as a ministry program for children and youths with special needs. Malcom said while their parents are attending the church’s 11 a.m. worship service, these “champions” will be treated to a fun and scripturally based curriculum tailored just for them.
The ministry is designed so that children and youths with special needs may participate fully in the typical children’s ministry classes.
The Champion’s Club is prepared to minister to a wide range of special needs, including autism spectrum disorders, deafness/ hearing impairment, deaf-blindness, developmentally delayed, emotional disturbance(s), intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, orthopedic impairment, other health impairments, specific learning disability, speech or language impairment, traumatic brain injury, visual impairment (blindness).
The Rev. Ted Miller, senior pastor of Crossroads Church, said the Champion’s Club was founded in 2008 at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston. Miller said the ministry’s founder, Craig Johnson, has a child with special needs.
Miller said several years ago, he realized that some church members could not attend services because there weren’t any programs designed for their special needs children and youths.
Miller and Malcom said parents either switch off attending services so that one comes to church one week while the other stays home with the child, and they switch the following week. Some parents just don’t feel they can attend church at all.
Miller said he recently spoke with one parent who had been missing worship services because of his child with special needs, and he knew the church needed to expand its programming
to include ministry for these young people.
The preacher said he shared the idea with the church, and the congregation was overwhelmingly in favor of it. He said money needed to renovate classroom space for the Champion’s Club was raised in just a few weeks, with the last large donation given by a church family who loved the idea for the ministry even though their grandchild with special needs will never be able to be part of the program.
Miller said the church had a soft launch of the Champion’s Club in July and after one child had attended for a few weeks, he began speaking to his family for the first time. Miller said the child’s father had said he wanted to pray with others at the church that his child would be able to speak. He got that opportunity to pray with other church members because he could finally take his child to church. He told Miller that the new ministry is also an answer to prayer.
“It still brings tears to my eyes,” Miller said, recounting the story.
‘Kingdom’s pride and joy’
Malcom, who serves as the director of the Champion’s Club, said the ministry’s founder Johnson worked with a special education professional to design the curriculum. She said about 50 churches have started the Champion’s Club ministry across the country.
Malcom said she based Crossroads Church’s Champion’s Club ministry on the message version of Luke 18:16-17 which says “People brought babies to Jesus, hoping he might touch them. When the disciples saw it, they shooed them off. Jesus called them back. ‘Let these children alone. Don’t get between them and me. These children are the kingdom’s pride and joy.’”
“I asked the Lord what verse would we live out over these kids, and that’s what came up,” she said. “In the Scripture, Jesus places value on them (children), and we want to see that modeled here.”
Malcom said parents will be asked to fill out a detailed intake form so that she and other trained volunteers may learn important information about their child. She said youths who participate in the Champion’s Club ministry will rotate through four different classrooms each Sunday.
At the end of the class, each child will get a coloring sheet with a letter to his or her family on the back. A family devotional book will be distributed so that families may discuss the week’s lesson with their “champion.”