Safe Harbor
“The vision of the special needs ministry at First Baptist Starkville is two-fold:
• To provide a safe and loving environment for children of all abilities and needs to hear the Gospel in an individualized, unique way that is full of meaning for each one, as well as to provide a place of belonging and acceptance within the church family.
• To minister to the families of our special needs children, ensuring that each family finds acceptance, the ability to participate in church life, the support of community, and a place of service.”
The Harbor Ministry as we know it today began in 2016, but the faithful volunteers who run it and the families that they minister know how God’s plan played out through years, even decades, of prayer. You won’t find any coincidences here, but you will find individual stories of people who saw a need in the church, prayed for God to raise up workers to fill that need, and watched God bring them all together as they took a step of faith. And it all began with the Welch family.
Planting the Seeds
Casey and Martha Ann Welch shared a little of their prayer testimony with First Baptist Starkville last year during the church’s focus on prayer. In a multi-part interview, the couple shared about their struggles and prayer life after their young daughter, Emma, was diagnosed with a disorder that brought their family squarely into the world of “special needs.” At the time, the church didn’t have a ministry specifically for special needs children and their families, but that would change soon enough.
For the first few years of her life, the Welch’s were able to continue attending Sunday morning services knowing Emma would be taken care of, thanks to Charity Gwaltney, the Preschool Director, and her volunteers. But although the preschool volunteers loved Emma and were more than willing to accommodate her family on Sunday mornings, Martha Ann realized that other families with special needs children would not be as likely to walk into a church on a Sunday morning until they knew there would be someone that could take care of their child.
So Martha Ann began to pray and talk about her desire for a special needs ministry at First Baptist Starkville. She mentioned to her mother, Tricia Daniels, that she felt like God had put this specific desire on her heart, and in turn, Tricia began to pray for God to create this ministry as well. Although she jokingly admits that it took her a little longer to pay attention to God’s nudging, as Tricia continued to pray, she also began to notice the people God pointing out specific people in her life. Like a coworker named Jan Houston.
Along with her husband and family, Jan had spent several years working as missionaries in Central America. In 2010, the Houston family moved back to the U.S. and began attending church at First Baptist.
Jan worked alongside Tricia Daniels at Family-Centered Programs with the Starkville school district and eventually went back to school to get a degree in Special Education.
If Tricia wasn’t having conversations with her daughter at home about starting a special needs ministry, she was chatting with Jan at work about the same desire. Jan would stop by Tricia’s desk, and the two of them would get to talking about how First Baptist Starkville needed a special needs ministry. During one of their conversations, when Jan was confiding in Tricia about how stressed she was with all the work she was putting into becoming a special needs educator, plans for this ministry began to unfold.
“I remember it clear as day,” Tricia recalls, “Jan was standing in front of my desk, saying she must be crazy for doing this. And I told her that I’m not so sure it’s crazy; after all, we’ve been talking about a special needs ministry, and this may be part of God’s plan to make that happen.”
As it turned out, the Lord prepared Jan to play a specific part in the special needs ministry at First Baptist Starkville. A couple of years after Tricia had encouraged and affirmed Jan’s path, Martha Ann and Casey were asked to facilitate a group on Sunday nights for a churchwide summer study. If Jan Houston had not heeded God’s call, there may not have been anyone prepared to care for Emma so that her parents could serve in the church as well. This was yet another moment where everyone involved could already see God’s hand moving to build up a special needs ministry.
Signs of Growth
While Martha Ann and Tricia continued to pray and have conversations with specific people at First Baptist, over on the other side of town, God was preparing Traci Campbell to take a giant leap of faith. Traci has been a special educator in early childhood since 1995, and in 2006, she began teaching at the T.K. Martin Center, where she has gotten to know not just Emma and her parents, but other special needs families in our church.
Traci, along with her husband and two daughters, had attended and served at Meadowview Baptist Church for nearly 18 years. Although they were very involved with church life, early in 2015, Traci began to feel God preparing her to serve elsewhere. She and her husband spent the summer in prayer, reaching out to the ministers at her church for counsel and seeking guidance. By the time school had started back in August, they had visited other churches in the area but were still uncertain where God was leading them to serve.
That is, until God lead her right into a conversation with Martha Ann. One day, when Traci was taking Emma down to her mother after class at the T.K. Martin Center, Martha Ann was talking with a fellow church member, Judy Duncan, who worked at the Center as a caseworker. As Traci turned to head back into the building, she overheard Judy mention that she and her family had recently visited First Baptist Starkville.
“I remember telling them that we had, and we weren’t sure why, but we knew God was calling us to move,” Traci says, thinking back to that day, “And then both of them looked like they were starting to tear up, and they looked at each other and were like “Well, we know why.’” That’s when they told her about the interest group they had formed over the summer and their prayers for God to bring them a teacher.
“Well, of course, when they told me that, I just started bawling and told them that I had a meeting that night with my pastor to let him know our family felt like we were being pulled towards First Baptist,” Traci says. Of course, it was no coincidence that this conversation occurred right before she and her husband were supposed to meet with their pastor. Traci went home after work that day and told her husband that she knew now why God was leading them in the direction of a new church; He was on the verge of building up a new special needs ministry.
This new ministry just needed one more thing–its own space. But just like everything else, God was already taking care of that detail. While these women met to make plans and pray for their own special needs ministry, another group of people met and made plans for a new children’s building.
Even before anything had officially been done, Leah Frances Eaton, the Children’s Director at the time, had already designated an area of the new children’s building specifically for children with special needs. “When I joined the staff, and we realized there were families with children with special needs, we knew we wanted to create a space for them as they grew,” says Leah Frances. The track was being laid; now, it was just up to everyone to jump on board.
Bearing Fruit
And everyone was eager to jump on board and get started ministering to these children and their families. In no time, the Harbor ministry had experienced volunteers to help during the worship hours and Traci Campbell to teach during the community group hour. The call to serve in the Harbor ministry even lead one volunteer to change careers. “The Harbor literally changed my life and the path I was on,” says Brook Reynolds, who loved serving so much that she went back to school to get a degree in special education. Everyone involved with the Harbor runs the gamut of experience, from special education teachers to occupational therapists to grandparents and parents of special needs children.
The students in the Harbor ministry run the gamut of needs as well. Harbor volunteers work closely with the parents to provide support in whatever capacity they can, whether it is a child that needs extra care and attention or a child that needs a buddy to accompany them to their age-appropriate classroom. And it is all done with one goal in mind: “to provide a learning environment where each special needs child will be able to learn and grow spiritually at his or her level.” That is the Harbor’s mission.
“These students deserve to hear about Christ just as much as any other child does,” Traci Campbell says, “you just have to do it in a different way.” Each Sunday is a new blessing; one week, you may have a child with autism who barely speaks repeat after you in prayer, or see a child put their hands together in prayer for the first time, or when you ask them where God is, they look up.
Each week, Traci uses the same bible study curriculum as the preschool ministry, adapting it to each individual child’s understanding. Using her 20 years of experience in special education, she finds ways to engage with her students, breaking down the lesson, talking them through it, and adapting to their individual learning style.
“We don’t know how much they can understand, but they may have that moment where they understand enough to accept the Gospel, so we, as a church, had better prepare them.”
The care and ministry does not go unnoticed by the Harbor ministry parents. Amy Knight, who has a son in the special needs ministry, says that it is so unique in the disability community to have a place where their child is not looked at as less than or different, but as a child of God. “On Sunday morning, those kids are getting the Gospel spoken to them,” she says, “they’re not just babysitting them for an hour and letting them play on the floor. These volunteers are teaching our children about God and His love for them.”
The Harbor ministry doesn’t just provide a safe learning environment for special needs children to hear the Gospel, but they also seek to minister to families as well. “In our mission statement, it says we want to see families ministered to, but also released to serve in the church,” says Jan Houston, “and we have seen that for several families. While we care for their children, the parents are able not just to attend worship but also serve!”
Branching Out
The Harbor has also started ministering to parents through a parent support group facilitated by Amy Knight. After getting involved with the Harbor ministry and the ministry-sponsored Parents Night Out, Amy sought out Martha Ann to talk and pray about having an outlet for other parents in the Harbor to meet with other people who understand the specific decisions and struggles that they face.
In true Harbor fashion, if God is laying the need on your heart, then He is leading you to serve in some capacity. As soon as Amy began to pray about a group for Harbor parents, it became apparent that she needed to lead it, and other volunteers quickly affirmed that decision. The group began meeting once a month in the fall of 2019 but hasn’t been able to meet regularly because of COVID.
Many families that we can get in the door for a Parents Night Out are not parents that will come on Sunday mornings. “There’s a lot of hurt in disability families that comes from not understanding why God would allow this to happen to their child,” says Amy. Her intention for this group was to provide a comfortable place for parents, especially those from the community, to meet while their children are cared for in the Harbor.
First Baptist Starkville’s connection with the Joni and Friends ministry has helped the Harbor ministry reach out to the special needs families in the community. They’ve provided gifts at Christmas for the Harbor to give out to their special needs families and helped them come up with COVID-safe outreach ideas, like the Drive-Thru Ice Cream event this past summer.
In this way, the Harbor ministry can reach out to the community and connect with parents who aren’t ministered to and let them know that they have a place to come and be welcomed. “A lot of it is connecting parents,” says Amy Knight, “when I meet a mom at therapy, I can connect them with other parents with a similar story or with one of our events or with the ministry on Sunday morning.”
The Harbor ministry’s story is God’s story, one that He has been writing on the hearts of these volunteers and families for a long time. All it took was for a few obedient women to pray for a need and faithfully follow God’s lead in creating a place for special needs children and their families to feel included and equipped in the church.
