Every Child Welcome: Cooking Up Special Needs Inclusion
Katie Wetherbee and I first met at a special needs ministry conference around 2010. She made a beeline to my book table and introduced herself. I attended Katie’s workshop and loved what she had to say. Before the end of the conference, we exchanged email addresses.
We quickly became good friends.
Maybe because we had a lot in common. We were both the parents of kids with special needs. We were both former public school teachers. We both had special education backgrounds. We shared a similar philosophy about inclusive education. We discovered that we had used many of the same strategies to create inclusive classrooms for our students. We also decided that if God had every granted us the opportunity to teach together, we would have been an administrator’s nightmare.
We also both loved to cook.
So we should have known, when we cooked up the idea to co-author a manual to equip children’s ministry volunteers to make every child welcome in their programs, that one of us would suggest using a dinner party theme to make the book hang together.
That someone was Katie. She’s the creative one.
After all, she explained (and I nodded my head enthusiastically), “Everybody eats. And chances are, church volunteers like Sunday school teachers and mid-week church club leaders and others who work with kids know a little bit about cooking and dinner parties.”
So the dinner party theme made sense to us.
But just because it made sense to us, it might not make sense to you. At least, not yet. So in the spirit of inclusion and with my teaching-to-different-learning-styles hat firmly in place, here’s a peek at Every Child Welcome‘s table of contents:
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By Jolene
Jolene Philo is the author of the Different Dream series for parents of kids with special needs. She speaks at parenting and special needs conferences around the country. She’s also the creator and host of the Different Dream website. Sharing Love Abundantly With Special Needs Families: The 5 Love Languages® for Parents Raising Children with Disabilities, which she co-authored with Dr. Gary Chapman, was released in August of 2019 and is available at local bookstores, their bookstore website, and at Amazon.
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Kathy,
I’m sorry that statement bothered you. The last thing Katie and I want to do is make anyone feel excluded. My son was tube fed for a very long time also, so I know what you are living with. But I always viewed the tube feedings as his way of “eating.” Katie and I used the theme of a dinner party because most people can relate to it, so it provides an effective analogy for delivering unfamiliar content. And if your church is developing a special needs ministry, this book would be helpful.
This content looks great. The theme didn’t resonate with me though because my son is strictly g-tube fed. The statement “everybody eats” is not true in our house. It felt exclusive. I’m going to try and get over that though. 😉 In spite of the theme, the content may well be helpful for our church’s developing ministry.