Lamar Hardwick’s shoes - and message represented one of the most impactful moments of our conference in 2022.
The name won’t be the only new thing at Key Ministry’s national disability ministry conference. We’ll be offering new ideas, new connections —and—new speakers.
Disability and the Church 2023 (formerly known as Inclusion Fusion Live) will take place on the last weekend of April and will again be hosted at Bay Presbyterian Church in suburban Cleveland. As was the case in 2022, next year’s conference is being presented in collaboration with the Tim Tebow Foundation.
Tim Tebow was able to join us by video in 2022.
In our efforts to make Disability and the Church (hashtag: #DATC2023) the largest gathering of disability ministry leaders in the US, with the broadest scope of training for leaders doing disability ministry and the most impactful, we’re implementing significant updates to our conference schedule and programming.
The first change is that prior to the “official” start of the conference on the morning of April 28th, we’re adding an optional third day of ministry intensives on the afternoon April 27th. The ability to experience three days of training provides an additional incentive to attend for those traveling from a considerable distance. In addition to intensives for leaders seeking to start or grow a “special needs” or mental health ministry, we’re planning a new intensive for mature Christians who feel called to serve in disability ministry but lack opportunities to do so within the structure of a local church.
Second, our team is hard at work in carving out more time in the conference for Christian community, collaboration and conversation. While one “blessing” of COVID was the explosion in use of technology to facilitate ministry training events, our team has very much missed the regular opportunities to gather in the physical presence of like-minded Christians serving in disability ministry that have gone by the wayside in the last 2 ½ years. Translation: we want to be able to hang out with “all y’all” as the folks who attended school with my kids in the South might put it.
Another change—actually, a restoration of a practice from past conferences that had been abandoned in 2021 and 2022 following the onset of COVID—is the return of our deeply discounted “family ticket,” good for Saturday of the conference, when presentations of interest to parents and caregivers of persons with disabilities will be offered.
Attendees at DATC2023 will notice a shift away from purely “didactic” presentations to trainings that offer multiple perspectives and are more interactive. We’re planning several all-conference gatherings, featuring main stage symposia on topics of critical interest to the disability ministry community that will be conversations, and incorporate audience participation. The Program Committee I lead that assembles the content of the conference strongly encourages workshop submissions including presenters from multiple organizations offering a variety of perspectives on the topics being discussed, or at the very least, multiple presenters from a single organization.
Ryan Faulk of Joni and Friends took part in the conversation among ministries contributing to the Tebow Foundation’s Shine On initiative.
One attribute of our conference that has not changed and will not change, for as long as Key Ministry hosts the event, is that we will have an open invite to ministry leaders with important ideas to share with the disability ministry movement who serve the church in relative obscurity and lack the connections or social media platforms to make themselves better known. I wish to personally invite ministry leaders who themselves experience significant disabilities to apply to speak at DATC2023. We hosted nineteen first-time speakers at our conference this past April. None were more inspiring or impactful than Brandon Gaskin, who spoke of the challenges members of the deaf community experience in processing the content of a worship service in the absence of qualified sign language interpreters with the depth of understanding of the Bible to faithfully communicate the preaching and teaching presented.
Brandon Gaskin speaking at Key Ministry’s 2022 conference.
If you wish to be considered as a speaker for DATC2023, please complete the Speaker Proposal Form available here. The deadline for speaker applications is Friday, December 16th. All speakers will be notified of the status of their applications no later than Friday, January 6th, and the speaker lineup will be publicly announced on Monday, January 9th. A complete schedule will be released when “early-bird” registration opens on Tuesday, January 17th.
We’re accepting proposals for two different presentation formats:
“Quick Takes” (our version of “TED talks”) are brief, main stage presentations lasting no longer than fifteen minutes on topics of interest to the church related to disability, involving a single presenter. These talks are part of the free livestream made available to those unable to attend in person and are made available following the conference on a variety of Key Ministry online platforms.
Kimberly Britt discussed resourcing peer leaders to launch mental health ministries in her 2022 Quick Take.
Workshops are 75 minutes long and ideally provide an in-depth look at important disability ministry concerns from multiple perspectives and may include as many as four presenters. Workshops are NOT part of the conference livestream and video will not be available following the conference.
Tory White from All Belong presented a workshop on ministry with persons with memory impairment.
Speakers will receive free admission to the conference for themselves and an invitation to dinner on Thursday night.
The 2022 speaker dinner.
We are specifically interested in proposals that will advance the disability ministry movement through content that is innovative, creative, inspired, and non-programmatic. Some topics of broad interest include:
Disability in ministry leadership
Inspired ideas and strategies for outreach
Approaches to mental health inclusion/ministry
Engaging lead pastors in promotion and implementation of disability ministry
Innovative community partnerships
Ministry with persons impacted by trauma
Underserved populations in the disability community
New and impactful family support models
Disability, gender and Biblical sexuality
Housing and vocational ministry
Research on ministry “best practices"
Inclusion in Christian schools, colleges and universities
Ministry with persons experiencing disabilities of aging
Advancing ministry through use of technology and social media.
Our team believes that integrity with data is critically important to our ministry movement, during a time when the credibility of so many in positions of authority impacting the disability community has been called into question. Speakers are required to include references in slides or printed materials for any statistics cited in their presentations. Missing or inaccurate references will impact opportunities to present at future conferences and events organized or sponsored by Key Ministry.
If you’re interested in being a speaker at a large gathering of disability ministry leaders in Cleveland on April 27-29, 2023, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re interested in growing your capacity as a disability ministry leader or a family member or caregiver of someone with a disability, consider this your “Save the Date” notice for the opening of registration for #DATC2023 in January.
