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Club Kangaroo
On Sunday, you'll find us at church, and at church, you'll find us at Club Kangaroo.
I guess it's been about 3 months now since CK officially started, but I think God's been planting the seed for quite some time. CK is our program for special needs kids. We have a classroom for those kids aren't able to be in a classroom for any reason (and there are a wide variety of reasons), and we have one-on-one buddies for the kids who are able to be in a class. It has been such an incredible experience to serve in this way, and we certainly hope to do it for a long time.
As parents, we know how hard it is to bring your autistic child somewhere, including church, and hope that they can "make it". It really isn't fair to either the child, or to the volunteer staff. So, we started CK with the strong backing, encouragement and full support from the pastoral staff, especially the children's pastors and the senior paster. In addition, we team up with a great couple as we each lead one of the two services, and our volunteers have been just incredible.
I wish you could see the joy, the relief, on a parent's face when they realize that they can drop their child off and know that this child will have someone's full attention, teaching them, playing with them, and protecting them. Even more exciting, we see the children grow in an environment tailored directly for them.
Club Kangaroo on Sundays - what a cool place!
2 comments:
WOW! We have NOTHING like that at our big church. My husband and I usually get nothing out of the sermon because one of us has to take Riley out or we just take turns going to church at all. Lucky you!
Church is the most frustrating time of the week for me, too. Isn't that sad?
I hear you - we were in the same place. Really long story short... we had never heard of such a program until we came across one while researching a move across country. As we soon learned, this was "a God thing" and we knew that we were to start such a program at our church.
We also had no idea how many kids at our church needed help, or how many kids weren't coming to church because their parents didn't think they could bring them to a regular class. It's been an amazing time working with these kids and parents.
I would highly encourage you to look into starting such a program, or start asking around to see if others would be interested. For example, we go to church in the 1st service while another couple runs the program, and then we switch in the 2nd hour. As we advertised for helpers, we met some great people that we would never have met otherwise.
Also, there are some awesome books and sites for helping to start such a program. I will list them here soon.
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