Video Transcript: Unit 6, Video 2
Well, welcome to the next segment. Week Six is just plowing right along. We're super excited about that. So I want to talk about a great example of personalized planning in the way of mobilizing people into teams. And as I mentioned, this is coming from what Barb ended up writing in her book, but I actually wrote the section on community teams. And so that's what we're going to talk about today. And I use that language. We call it now interdependent community teams, what Barb may have referred to as wraparound support. So that's really just talking about this idea of how we come around individuals in a pretty significant way. So just like vertical habits are a great example of universal design and worship, I think community teams are a great example of personalized planning in a pretty significant way. So come with me as we talk about this idea, and then what it might look like in your context to support some individuals and families with some high needs so interdependent community teams that wrap around and support an individual. And I first wanted to share that this is not a new idea. This has been happening throughout history, and in Scripture, I want to show you a few examples, just to whet your appetite a little bit. And then I'll show you some examples from other communities and schools, and then I'll talk about what it looks like in our congregations now. So in Scripture, we have some arm holders. You see in Exodus 17, it says the Amalekites came. They attacked the Israelites, And Moses said, get some men. We got to fight and and the directions were right that Moses had to hold up his arms and that would help them to win the battle. Well, when Moses arms got tired, he needed some people to come around and to help. And so what did it take to win this battle against the Amalekites? Well, it took a team of people. It took Moses and Joshua and Aaron and Hur who helped Moses by holding up his arms. So Joshua down there fighting the battle Moses up there, holding things up, and Aaron and her on both sides of him, with a stone underneath him to make sure that the battle was being won, as long as his arms were up. So it took a team of people to win that battle, which the Lord was fighting for them. So it wasn't about the victory necessarily being dependent on a person. It's all God, but it took a team of people to rise up together and to help this be a successful moment. And so I just want us to think about how he said, hold high the banner of the Lord, and I think that's what team members can help us do for one another. So Exodus 17 a great example of some arm holders as a team. Now Nehemiah 4 is a great example of some wall builders as a team, because Nehemiah saw that there were enemies, and they were trying to stop them from building the wall. And so he said, The Jews who were living among our enemies, they came, and they warned us of our plans. And so I armed the people with swords and spears and bows, and I stationed them by clans behind the wall wherever it was still unfinished. And I told the people, the work is spread out over such a distance that we're widely separated from one another on the wall. Do you ever feel widely separated from people who are trying to help one
another? It gets tricky, so you need to bring them together, right? And have a plan for how you're going to unite everyone. So here's what Nehemiah did. He said, we're going to use the bugle. Whenever you hear the bugle, gather around me and our God will fight for us. So every day, from dawn until the stars came out. At night, half of us worked on the wall while the other half stood guard with the spears. So he divvied up the jobs, and he said, You do this with the bugles, you do this with the Spears, you do the building. And he divvied up the team, and he was leading a team, so that this was a successful operation. And I think the brilliant strategy for us to utilize, all right, one more very specifically about four people who I will call friend carriers. So Jesus was teaching right and paralyzed man, and you probably know the story that I'm talking about, because they lowered a man on a mat down in front of Jesus, and Jesus said it is because of their faith, these four friends who took apart the roof and brought their friend to Jesus, it was their faith that caused him to be healed and his sins to forgive him, and he went on his way. So it's the faith of those four friends who literally carried their friend to Jesus. Has someone ever carried you to Jesus? I don't mean that this just has to be people with physical disabilities that we have to literally bring somewhere, which sometimes that is what that looks like, but sometimes you might be the man on the mat. I have been the man on the mat who needs brought to Jesus. And it takes a team of people to bring me to Jesus. So that's what we're talking about, is teams of people coming together, bringing us to Jesus. And so this is from the Gospels, and I want to share with you some examples of this in school communities and in other communities where teams of people are getting it and they're doing wonderful things. In schools, this is sometimes called a circle of friends. So this. Is an example that an organization named all belong, that I used to work for, but now works with Christian schools all across the United States and in some other countries, and is focused on making sure that kids with disabilities have a circle of friends around them. So this this school is South Christian High, and this group created the circle of friends programs in elementary and middle school, where peers are committed to supporting students with disabilities. And then they wanted to do something unique in high school, so they came up with the lunch partner group in high school, because lunch can be a socially challenging time for any high school student, but for students with disabilities, it can be even more isolating. So this connections lunch partners. Thing was formed. It's transformed the lunch hour into a time of meaningful connection, where students can build friendships and truly belong, because these students kind of have a designated day of the week, and this is when this Lunch Bunch gets together. And so some of them sign up for multiple lunch bunches so they never have to wonder where to go sit at lunch, so that it might be focused on a student with some particular disabilities who struggle with social interaction times, but it's really been a huge blessing for all of them to have this group of people who now they get to eat lunch with every
Tuesday or whatever day of the week, and it's helped them all to form friendships. So something a little more in, I don't want to say invasive, but all encompassing in life called share the care teams. And I really do draw on this in a lot of what I'm going to talk about regarding community teams. But these share the care teams in communities really come around someone who may have a long term illness, a terminal illness, for example, and support them in a wide variety of ways. These teams of people have organized to keep a business going, to help manage someone's pets or their farm, or just really support them in their livelihood and helping with things like groceries and laundry and health care. And you'll hear some more examples of people, but the idea is that it's really coming around people to meet their life needs in a significant way, in a very organized way, like the four friends who brought their man on the mat to Jesus and organizing some people in a group of four, which makes good sense. So I'll share some more about that in a moment. But I first want to tell you one more example from an organization that's actually called Community Teams now, and this is a woman's team that we're celebrating her birthday. She's a single mom. She doesn't have much transportation. She asked for a community team to help her with transportation, just to lighten the burden of long bus rides and a lot of missed appointments. And so she says, I'm not as insecure about transportation as I once was. I feel like I have a great support system, and I haven't felt that in a long time. When looking at this particular picture, she says, I look at this and I feel normal, not like my past defines me. Instead, I feel like I'm a normal person celebrating my birthday with my friends, and these are her friends, but they were intentionally placed around her for a season of time to meet a transportation need. And so one week, one of them was her transportation. The next week, it was another person, and there were four of them, so that every week she had the transportation she needed. So when her birthday came, all four of them came together with her to celebrate her birthday as friends, not just as transportation providers, but as friends. So what a beautiful testimony to the power of building relationship as you meet a practical need. And I think that's what is this beautiful opportunity that we have with these community teams. And I love, love, love to say the church can do it too that our worshiping body can be a body all together out in real life as well. So I want to talk about that pretty specifically now and say, what does that look like? Well, there can be a spectrum of support options, because on one end of the spectrum are the at church teams. So years ago, when all belong was known as something called CLC network, and I worked for them. Then it adapted a strategy used in the school settings, like I showed you the picture of, and they called them wraparound support teams. We called these glue teams for churches, which was kind of playing on words as we stuck together, but also saying we are the giving, loving, understanding and encouraging for the individuals that we form these teams around. So anyway, we wrote a little bit
about this, and so that was the support that we were offering right at church, was to be these glue teams to help an individual participate in church. So that is one way of being a team, and that could be, that could be even your buddy system, right, having some individuals who work specifically side by side with an individual with, say, an intellectual disability, who needs some help navigating the content and the structure of the day or completing some activities, or whatever it might be. But those could be in a team of four. As a community team functioning at church to help participation at church. Now the other end of this spectrum is the being the church teams, more like that, that share the care community who's really meeting those practical needs of all of life for an individual and and so share the care is that concept where it's really kind of all all over life, taking care of someone, but I think of that really, as an opportunity to be the church we meet one another's needs in fellowship and in the name of Jesus. And there's something interesting that I noticed as we formed these teams, is a lot of them can be kind of somewhere in between. Or it could be even helping to get to church, like that transportation need, or it could be helping get ready for church or to calm down after church, or it could be meeting the needs to participate in some of the weekday things that the church is doing. And it might be a little bit of both, it's support while we're at church, during our worship services, and a get together later in the week, just to continue to build that relationship. So there is a spectrum in which these can operate. So don't get overwhelmed. I don't want you to be thinking you have to do everything all at once here, but I want to let you know that there are different ways that this can look so let me tell you a couple of stories and offer a few scenarios for what some of these have looked like. So one scenario is of let's say the Miller family and Jordan is part of their youth. So he's young man whose parents took turns coming to church with the other kids because his most common mode of communication was punching or kicking when he got frustrated. So the church's accessibility coordinator, the shredded cheese person in their church, had some responsive design plans going, and the church decided that this community team would be a good plan to help the exhausted family. So the pastor introduced Jordan, saying he was a member of the family that the congregation hadn't even met yet, and would others in the congregation please join in forming a team around Jordan? This pastor committed himself and his teenagers and his wife to being a part of the team and supporting him when he was at church. And would others please join him for this meeting after the service, to get to know Jordan and to get to know what their part in this could be. And specifically this is what the ask was, how often it would be and how long during the church service it was going to take. So very specific ask, and he was a part of it as well. And guess what? Jordan started coming to church. He did introduce a few holes to the church, but he also worships, attends youth group, and the team has continued, even as some people have come and gone off and on from it. So
Jordan's team is thriving. So that's one scenario. Now here's one literally from my my perspective, my own personal story, because Lyme disease once invaded my neurological system, and I found myself unable to attend church. My sensory system was far too overloaded by all of the input of going to a church service, and I have balance issues and dizziness and pain and all of these things that I just could not be at church. So my husband and I would watch church on a screen. So add to that some complicating factors among the other health issues in my family, and it was clear that we needed a team. We weren't going to be going anywhere for quite a while, so we needed transportation. We needed help with errands and doctors appointments and getting groceries and making meals and a lot of things. So we really had a team come around us who said, We want to love on you well, and we know that you can't go to church, so we want to bring church to you. And so that's really what this team did, and they organized it so that I would report to one person and say, yep, this is what our family needs this week. And that person took those requests and said to others, Hey, would you be willing to do this and fill in this need? And would kind of field those questions, because then people could say yes or no to that person, and they didn't have to say no to me and feel really guilty that they couldn't help out my family in that way, which is fine, and I also learned that I had to be flexible, that a doctor's appointment would sometimes have to get canceled because no one was available to give me a ride there, or things like that. But we grew so much as a community, and I have to say we couldn't participate in church for several years, but the church came to us, and those friendships grew deep and valuable to me, and so being the church is definitely where this scenario led in my life. So one other scenario I just want to bring up is one of a child who found that it would be too risky physically to have this particular child in church because of having brittle bone disease. So this church set up an around church community team, and they trained four people within the congregation to rotate going to the family's home with this child who was safer at home while the rest of the family went to church. This is a unique situation in which isolating the person, not because we want to segregate or exclude, but because of their own safety, but very much engaging in community, right? So the church is coming to them. So every week, there was one person who knew this child well, what would help them be safe and engaged and happy and participating in worship with this individual, and then the family would come home from church, from going to the worship service, and that individual who stayed with the child at home also would stay for lunch, and sometimes the rest of their family would join. And so it was a wonderful family fellowship moment after the worship service, when everybody got to be together, because there was four of those individuals and their families. Now, not only did this family have the opportunity to go and worship knowing that their young child was safe and especially as this child grew, the brittle bone disease did not go away, and so home continued to
be a safe place, but now there were four steady relationships that had formed, and people they could trust, who could they could also call when, oh my goodness, we need to quickly go see grandma in the hospital. Can you come and stay with our child? Because you already know how to do that, right? So form some wonderful relationships and support networks because of this team. So those are just a few different scenarios of how the beauty of God's people coming together in these teams can work. So I want to just kind of lay out for you what the format of this looks like. And I just call it the Ready set go plan. So here's the Ready set go plan. Ready. You start with asking questions. So you start with listening to what the individual or the family is open to. You got to emphasize your desire that they contribute to the community, as well as your joy at coming alongside them in their situation. So just ask them, you know, would you like a team? Yes or No, and it's okay for the answer to be No, not right now, and maybe they need some time before they can accept that this kind of help is probably necessary and is going to be beneficial, and they might need to learn to trust you, and that's okay if they say no right now, but ask again soon, is all I would say about that. And then ask the question of, what can the team do? How can we help? What is it that we can do to serve you? And yes, I'm using the vertical habits icons here for help and for what can I do to serve? Right? Because I think it's just, again, helpful to utilize those icons, but deserve the questions ask. Are you ready for this? And what can we do? So at this point, you may want to pass the baton of leadership of this team to someone who will continue to be that team leader, and I'll talk more about that in the moment. So you might be the one who initiates a team forming, but you might not have to be the one in charge of leading the team continuously, because there could be a lot of these teams happening in your community. So let's talk more about this, and I'll talk more about those team leaders in just a moment. So as you're asking questions, a really important one is to say, Who would you like on the team? Because the more life encompassing the supports will be, the more important it will be to involve family, close friends, even if they're not a part of your congregation. So team members can include those buddies during church, or someone from the children's ministry area or a mentorship ministry already in place in the church. If you need meals, you can draw on the hospitality team in your church, right? It depends on what the needs are. Maybe you already have a transportation ministry going, and you're going to draw upon that. Maybe you have some connections within the community, so you're going to draw upon those connections. But this individual or family needs to say who they would like on the team, and just as importantly, are there some who you would not like on the team because of their needs. As an individual, you need to think about this, because there might be some individuals who aren't safe, who don't make good choices, who are simply really difficult for this family to be able to work with. And so are there some that they don't want on the team? And so listen to them first.
And I just want to note here there is a difference between having, for example, a transportation ministry or a meals ministry that's already organized and set up and happening, and then you just sort of fill in, oh, this people, these people need added to that program. This is very much about designing around the specific needs of this individual or this family, as opposed to plugging them into a program. So you may be able to utilize some of the programs that are already in place, but you're really forming a team around them to meet these unique needs just for them. So just wanted to note that difference really quick. So as you're in the asking questions phase, I would ask this of others. So those who are going to be team members, and you're going to want to recruit some of these and we'll talk more about that. But an important question to ask them is, what do you love to do, and what would you enjoy doing for this family or this person? But also, what would you rather not do? Because I would be greatly excited to help people by offering in my skills and abilities, but you probably don't want. Me putting away your dishes because I'm very clumsy, and like I said, I have some balance issues, and I might break all your dishes, so I would rather not be the one washing and putting away your heavy dishes, right? I might be happy to mow your grass but not take out your trash, or I might be really happy to be with a child who has some learning difficulties, maybe some behavior issues, and I'm great with that, but I'm really not very good at, you know, mathematically figuring out the medication doses or whatever it might be, so asking people what it is that they are excited about contributing, and what's going to be a struggle for them being able to work the team so that each of those puzzle pieces are fitting together, using their greens and supporting their pinks. Now I keep mentioning that technology is a great tool, so I want to just mention this one is called IANA care. It stands for, I am not alone. Iana, and I've just known a lot of teams that have found this to be a useful tool. Others have used things like, you know, Google Spreadsheets, or just texting each other or emailing or just written paper versions of things, but that ianacare app is a really helpful one for coordinating a lot of things. So that leads me to this next part, which is the Get Set part, right? We did get ready. Now we're get set we need to find communication that works for the team. And so that might be again, right? Using some computerized things, some shared files, just texting or calling. It might mean emailing. It might mean, you know, chat features and using Facebook or what, whatever the tools are that God's going to present to your community that work best for you. And so one thing that I do ask in those questions is, What's your preferred method of communication, and that's going to help us to build the communication for the team that works well for everyone, because the fun part is getting the pieces put in place and seeing that God has arranged the parts of the body. This is so much fun to me. Is putting the puzzle together. It's so exciting as the team leader puts out the list of the needs, and then you see how the community comes together. Because you'll see kids get
excited about, you know, making the food to bring to somebody, or, you know, giving away some of their stuff and their time and their energy to help another person. You see people being able to engage in corporate worship, because they have these supports in place. We had great conversations on the ride to the doctor's office when I was in need of a ride, or they would take me grocery shopping and said, You know, it's really a whole lot more fun to get our groceries together. It's so lonely when I do this by myself, but this is great to do it together. I'm so glad you needed the ride and the help doing this. And so just watching those puzzle pieces come together is such a delight. So encourage you to spend time enjoying that process. So watching the pinks and the Greens come together, and just knowing that any number of factors may need adjustment. So life is messy, and the more lives that are involved in, the longer the span of the time, the messier it can get. The team's got to be a little bit flexible of how the pieces come together. People are going to come off and on the team. So it's really helpful to have regular check ins with the team of how is it going, what supports do you need? And this is why I think it's important to have a team leader who's focused on this one team, maybe a couple of teams, but this is a person who's thinking about these teams pretty intensely, because this person is who will set the tone. And so when you get together and have kind of these check ins to see how it's going, set the tone of celebration, each every group is united for a purpose, to meet the needs, and you got to take time to celebrate together. It allows the group to bond, to relate, to relax, to refresh. And of course, food helps, so serve some food, and especially as a group is getting together. Initially, serve some food, answer some questions, get to know the needs, get to know each other, get to know those communication platforms that work well. And then when you add or subtract, people, introduce them. Well, maybe have another get together, especially if the team is no longer needed, which can happen often. We outgrow the need for a team where it changes so much that it's going to look different. So celebrate that the team's no longer needed. It can be an absolute delight to have a closing celebration as well. So make sure you're having time to celebrate, and I think that's just good advice for us in general, but it's a great way of setting that tone in terms of these groups. So when you're setting the tone, it's also important just to think about the grace to give and receive help. Some people are better at asking for and receiving help than others. Some of us ask for help way more often than we actually need it. Some of us are. We tend to take as much as we can get, and some of us tend to have a really hard time asking for help and receiving it with grace, and we just continue to refuse and say no, and we're grumpy about it when people try to help us. So learning the grace, I think, and having a tone of grace that says. We're all going to just try, and we're going to have grace for one another when it doesn't work, right, and when someone brings over those groceries and it's not quite what you were expecting, or, you know, when we're working together in the
worship service, and that moment just really didn't go well, and we still had some disruptive behaviors and saw a new hole get introduced to the church, right? It's okay. This is a learning process, and we're all learning to be in relationship with one another and with the Lord together, so have grace to give and receive help. So set that tone and also flexibility. And I kind of mentioned this already, I learned firsthand that the family or the individual receiving support is going to have to understand that things have to be optional, right needs and plans and appointments can sometimes change. This is a picture of my kids and I waiting for a ride out of the library and just enjoying the library books while our transportation was a little bit longer incoming than we planned on, so we couldn't make that next stop, which is okay, so just being flexible with how our group is supporting us some of the needs that come along with with working with other individuals who have their own support needs and just enjoy, oh, to just enjoy one another. So supporting an individual or a family might it's not something you sign up to do because it's your job. You're doing it out, not out of a sense of guilt or duty, but but be aware that this, doing it out of duty, just isn't going to be a great motivation that's going to keep you going. And so you got to do this with a sense of joy that you really delight in being with this person and supporting them, and so just enjoy who they are. I know I've been a part of a couple of teams that ended up not going very well, because there was a lot of perfectionism. Somebody didn't receive the food that was brought to them because it wasn't prepared quite right, and things just started to fall apart. There was just little joy. People were bringing meals because, oh, they signed up to and I really had to complete their duty, right? So just encourage you to help people to live into their puzzle piece green area, and live into the joy and just get to know one another and spend time enjoying who they are. And that idea of setting the tone to celebrate again just really helps of enjoying enjoying who each other are, so the pieces connect, and relationships will grow, because this is how it starts. As I mentioned, you have one person each week offering that specific support. But here's what it ends up looking like. Is you have each puzzle piece interconnecting as people meeting one another's needs. And I just really love this, and that's why I use the term interdependent team, because it really is forming communities of people who rely on one another. Now, as we talk about needs for support, I want to talk about caregivers for a moment, because caregivers, whether they're paid full time workers, they’re parents, they’re children, or the spouse or another family member who's caring for a loved one with disabilities, they are often very lonely in that support, and sometimes they're supporting multiple individuals. So a community team doesn't replace a caregiver, and that's not what you want to approach this as. In fact, sometimes it's the caregiver who actually needs the support team, the wraparound support and that interdependent community team more so than the individual, because, as a caregiver, they're meeting the needs of the individual with disabilities, but
they need the support of a team in order for the rest of life to work. So a couple of resources I just want to introduce you to. There's a documentary called unseen, how we're failing parent caregivers and why it matters, and just a beautiful documentary about the needs that caregivers truly have, and sort of as a response, in a way. But it's been around a long time. It's the heart of the caregiver. And so this author, Mary Totaro, talks about from overwhelmed to overjoyed, and thinking about our caregiving as as being with Jesus. And so just a really beautiful Bible study. And she has support groups that are online. She has a follow up book called The peaceful caregiver. So great resources on there that, again, I'm going to share in the sources and the resources of the course here. But just want to think about caregivers for a moment, and how these community teams are not about replacing a person's primary caregiver, but it's about coming alongside that individual and their caregiver and the family unit that is there, and just meeting the needs in general, and again, being the church together. So the last step here is that Ready set go, and so your community and the individual or family that you're coming alongside, you're going to define how these roles look. But here are some of the guidelines to get you on your way to defining the roles of the community team. So the first one is the heart, and I'm going to use the language of the body here to talk about the roles within the team. The heart is the family or the individual, like I was, and our tasks were to communicate our needs, receive support with grace and contribute to the lives of the team Members and our church in general. So it's really helpful to just lay out here the expectations of what we're each going to do. So that was our role as the heart of the team. Now the central nervous system is the team leader. Who's I had my mentor, Barb and my mom Sarah, were a couple of my team leaders who really helped to put this together, along with another significant friend of mine, and so their tasks were to gather the information and set up and hold and share the information well with the team sometimes, to filter things like I talked about is, I have these needs, they're going to express those needs, and then they're going to organize how many of those needs get met in this timeframe. And some of them are going to have to come back to me and say, we couldn't meet these needs. I'm sorry, or I'm going to meet that need for you, since nobody else can do it this week. So they're kind of acting as the filter between me and the rest of the team, and they're they host that introductory gathering. My friend, my friend Laura, really did this in a big way for us. And thank the team members. And so a person who's good at either writing thank you notes or sending a quick text or an email or just a pat on the back and continuously saying thank you for being a part of this team. It's making a difference and so an encouraging person. So as you can tell, these tasks could be divvied up among a variety of people. If you have a set of people who create a team of the leadership of this but that team all combined would be what I call the central nervous system of this team, who's again, checking and adjusting
and celebrating with everybody. So then you have the team members, and I call this the hands and the feet of the team, who are really, you know, doing the action. And so that is the team members whose tasks are to find out those needs from the coordinator, or directly from the person and contact those other team members and handle the emergency calls and verify that the team members are completing what they agreed to do. And so this might be your team coordinator for the week. That might be one aspect of that, that maybe the leadership that gets passed off to one person on this team, but the general team lead, the general members of the team are, for sure, giving their contact and their preference information. They're being flexible with things. You're willing to learn about the individual and the family and the needs and the rest of the group offering their skills in their areas of green. But they're also willing to be honest and to say, Nope, I am not able to do that. And that is an okay answer to give, so being honest and then taking care of themselves and their own families for sure. And some of us had to step off of teams at different times because of our own family needs, which is also really healthy and really good to do in relationships. So they're all great things to just be learning as humans. So they're also looking for ministry moments and relationship building opportunities like going grocery shopping together, and how can we talk more about our growth in the Lord together as we do that? And so just looking for those ministry moments as you're in the car, my family's been a part of the transportation for a woman to our church, and those 10 to 15 minutes in the car each way have been great relationship building moments. And so don't, don't neglect the moments that God gives you as you're meeting practical needs to really grow in relationships. So that's what the hands and the feet of the team can do. And I hope that this has given you a great example, like I said, of responsive design planning that's in a pretty intentional, pretty highly invested way, in some needs, but it's also a great ministry opportunity to really be the church. So whether that's within the church walls or outside of them, I hope that this has inspired you in some ways. So next time we are going to start to talk about other examples from congregations of personalized planning. So hang on. Here we go.