In today’s episode, Beth Golik and Catherine Boyle interview our founder, Dr. Steve Grcevich. Together they reflect on the past twenty years and share plans for the future—including the 2023 Disability and the Church Conference!
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Quick Links:
Special Needs And Disability Ministry Leaders Facebook Group
Disability and The Church Conference
Disability and The Church By Dr. Lamar Hardwick
Mental Health and the Church by Dr. Steve Grcevich
Transcript:
Beth: This is Beth Golik, one of your co-hosts of Key Ministry: The Podcast. I'm joined by one of my co-hosts, Catherine Boyle, and a very special guest who we'll introduce in just a bit.
Just a few days ago, on Christmas Eve, Key Ministry celebrated a very special birthday: the 20th anniversary of the founding of Key Ministry.
So today we welcome Dr. Steve Grcevich, President and Founder of Key Ministry. Welcome, Dr. G.
Steve: Well thanks, guys. I'm just honored to be able to serve in this fashion, and I am proud to have you guys on our team. You have been outstanding, and a lot of the success that we've been able to achieve in 20 years has been through your leadership and your faithful service. We wouldn't have had the opportunity to have the impact that we’ve had without Beth, without your fabulous work and everything that you've contributed over the last six years, as well as Catherine.
Beth: We appreciate the privilege of serving in this capacity. Catherine, would you like to start us off with a question for Dr. G?
Catherine: Absolutely! So, Steve, I think for people particularly who may not know much of the back story about how Key Ministry came to be, they'd be curious to hear what led you—a child and adolescent psychiatrist—to come up with this idea, for starting the ministry that we now know as Key Ministry?
Steve: I think some folks are familiar with our story. It was 25 years ago now that I was sitting in an elder board meeting, and Libby Peterson, who was one of our early board members, and at the time the children's ministry director at our church, had come to a board meeting and talked about some of the challenges that the church was experiencing in terms of serving and supporting like long-standing families, who had been highly committed and connected the church, who—back in the 1990s, after the fall of the Iron Curtain—brought these kids, had adopted these kids from Russian and Bulgarian orphanages, who came back with a variety of emotional, behavioral and developmental challenges, all compounded by the effects of trauma.
It was sitting in that board meeting and then going back to our practice at the time, and recognizing that it wasn't just these kids who had profound autism, or kids who had experienced severe deprivation and severe trauma where folks were experiencing challenges attending church, but it was also middle and upper-middle-class suburban Cleveland families. The kids with ADHD, kids who had problems related to anxiety, kids who had mood disorders, and families who had kids on the high end of the autism spectrum, were the routine kinds of things that would bring people into a child mental health practice—and were to a very large degree getting in the way of them being able to be part of a church.
It was the awareness that there was this much larger need out there.
After spending time out on the lecture circuit, talking about some of the other work that I was doing from a research standpoint, the barrage of requests for help that our church had received as a result of my having an opportunity to start speaking into some of these issues that led to the creation of Key Ministry.
Catherine: You've talked a little bit with us about some of the early kind of chance encounters that you had, specific points that later informed the ministry. Would you just share a couple of those? Maybe specifically a meeting that you had early on in Nashville.
Steve: I can think of two, and it was in some ways a chance encounter that led to the incorporation of our ministry. We live 37 miles away from the church that we attend, Bay Presbyterian, where Beth serves on staff in her role managing disability inclusion ministry. The meeting that led to the creation of the ministry was a sit down that I was having with Hu Auburn, who was our senior pastor, and an elder in the church. We had two young daughters at the time and the meeting was to talk to him about the fact that because they needed to have a Christian peer group, we were no longer going to be regularly attending the church. So it was sort of like a goodbye meeting, in terms of our family having to step away.
So we're having the conversation, it was toward the end of the meeting, [and I said] there's just one thing that's kind of bugging me, that we had this idea for going ahead and doing something for supporting families beyond and outside of our church. That’s the one thing I don't feel right about leaving; we never did anything about that. It was Hu’s response to that question, ‘we need to go ahead and get this rolling now.’ As a result of that meeting, he made some phone calls and recruited several of our original board members, including an attorney who helped us get incorporated.
This was 2 years before—part of his [Pastor Auburn’s] 25th anniversary of ministry as the senior pastor of the church, folks had contributed a large sum of money to something that he had established in an emerging ministries fund. Our church had long had a reputation for supporting entrepreneurial people in the church, who had visions or ideas for unique things ministry-wise. One was a free health clinic for people who were working class on the west side of Cleveland, who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid but couldn't get health insurance. There was another that was an innovative inner city model for children's ministry. So there had been this money set aside and pledged. A significant portion of what had been contributed for his 25th-anniversary celebration helped the start the ministry, and even more importantly, his wife was an experienced leader—in terms of having started or helped start several parachurch ministries in Cleveland, including one that was started by a guy named Andre Thornton—back in the early 80s [he], was the only respectable hitter that the Indians had on their team for a period of time!
So in addition to finding board members to help start this [Key Ministry] and contributing money that had been set aside for him by the people that the church used to help launch new and innovative ministries, Hu contributed to his wife. She became our first executive director and got the ball rolling.
When I think back to Jan's contribution, one of the things in the first year or two of the ministry was—we're trying to figure out who else was out there, that might be doing this kind of thing. Are there other people with similar passions and interests? I remember Jan coming to a board meeting, after having extensively researched this, and I think that we found 7 people or organizations, churches, etc, using what people used to search the internet in 2003, who were doing this work. When I look back now and think about our impact, 20 years out, the fact that we went from finding or being able to connect with 7 different people or organizations in 2003, and we have almost 2500 members of the Special Needs And Disability ministry leaders group that we facilitate on Facebook (SNAD Leaders), I think that that's evidence of what God has been doing in this whole area.
You mentioned the meeting in Nashville. This was probably 8 months, 9 months after we kicked off the ministry. Again, we're just trying to figure out who else is out there. We hadn't done a whole lot at that point, in terms of generating specific resources that we were giving out to churches. I'm not sure that we even had a website up and running at that point. So, through a mutual friend, who had arranged for a speaking trip I was doing in Nashville [with churches] we got together with the person leading the children's ministry at her church, around speaking into these issues. I got the impression that the leader I was talking to was doing this as a personal favor to my colleague who set up the meeting. All of her body language and facial expressions suggested her level of disinterest, shall we say.
In the end, she asked the question, ’Well,’ (in sort of a skeptical, sarcastic tone), ‘how much does this cost?’ I really had never thought about charging for any of this stuff!
I started learning some interesting things about the ministry world at that point. I go, ‘Well, nothing! I mean, why would we charge for this?’
At that point, there's this expression of surprise on her face. I got my first lesson in what people in Children's Ministry have to deal with from folks who are constantly bombarding them with things that they're trying to sell. One of the things that became very fundamental to, particularly the first 10 years of our ministry, and continues to be a really important value today, was that we weren't going to let money get in the way of folks being able to grow this ministry. To as great a degree as possible, one of the things that I clung to was the notion that we were going to make available the stuff that we were doing for free, because the last time I read my Bible, Jesus didn't charge anybody for what He had to offer; why would we, as the Church, introduce something like money as a barrier for folks to be able to access churches where they could come to know Jesus, hear the gospel preached regularly, be able to enjoy Christian community among other Christ followers, and be able to get into a place where they would be able to use their gifts and talents as individuals and families impacted by disabilities to impact the Kingdom?
Catherine: I think that chance encounters like that happen early on in what God is calling you to can end up being so fortuitous; they can be so critical, in ways that you would just never imagine, until much later down the road. What I hear and what you're talking about in that time period is there was this building—I mean slow going for sure, but this building momentum that was happening, starting with those 7 churches. Then these chance encounters and these meetings that people would take. And then in those early few years, Lon Solomon from McLean Bible Church was really starting to do some significant things with disability ministry. And then you had a meeting with Colleen Swindoll and met her dad. And then Chuck, her dad, started speaking out about disabilities because of his grandson.
And then social media comes along. By the time we get to Key Ministry’s 10th birthday, we've established a little bit of a social media presence. We were kind of ahead of the curve. And that led to, by the spring of 2013, these six key strategies that have persisted, in more or less being our operating strategy. So talk for a few minutes about how you got to those six key strategies, what those are, that we're still using today.
Steve: What I think about—one of the formative things that occurred about 10 years in—this was 2011. One of the things that we were very intentional about, a couple of things that we had launched in 2010, in that year, was that we purposely launched several different blogs at that point in time, largely to try to develop influence among pastors, and influence in the children's ministry community. One of the places where I think that we were blessed early on is that we had made some connections, and ran into people who were sort of pioneering this in the church. We were able to get ahead of the curve and developed a presence in social media wise, that other organizations didn't have in this space. One of the things that drove that—again, back in 2010, one of the strategies we were looking at was trying to get into, to penetrate and build influence through going to different children's ministry conferences. Among people who were on our staff at the time, they started getting—a couple of our staff people started getting invited to speak at some fairly significant things. One of the challenges that we ran into penetrating that world, at the time, was that because we were giving away everything for free, that rubs certain people the wrong way, shall we say, people where this [ministry] is something that they were doing as a career. They were looking at developing resources and speaking into this whole area of disability ministry, at the time, as their livelihood.
So we ran into some interesting things. After one of our staff members, in particular, had spoken at a very prestigious children's ministry conference, there was a person in that community who suggested that she [the Key Ministry staff person] needed to leave us, and go off and develop some other things. When she [Key Ministry staff member] had said no, there was a conference that was taking place where she [Key Ministry staff member] was the featured speaker. When I went back to look at the conference, just to get some information to promote it, they had taken her off of the program entirely, without bothering to tell her. She’d been promoted as like, the big person at this event. All of a sudden, the event website had been stripped of any of that [information about the Key Ministry staff person].
I ended up deciding to drive down; I think this conference was taking place in Kentucky. I decided to go down and have some pointed conversations, shall we say, with people in the children's ministry community. One of the things that that experience led—again, I think has been formative, for sort of the second decade of our ministry, and one of the most impactful things going forward was that we decided that we were going to have to start our own conference if we were going to get the word out. One of the first rules of our conference was that we were going to open up the opportunity to speak to anybody in the Christian community who had content of value and ideas of value to share with the larger Church.
We started sort of figuring out that a lot of what was going on in ministry—sort of the underside that I'm not too excited about—is sort of, ‘friends taking care of one another’s friends,’ and it is a very closed club. We were not going to be that way.
We came across a guy, Jeremy Collins, who was a children's pastor in Lexington, KY at the time. He was exploring technology, and he helped us do our first Inclusion Fusion conference, purely online. There was so much interest, there were 1100 people who registered for the first one; the servers crashed in the first half hour of the conference going online. At that point, I think we knew that we were definitely on to something.
The people that we met and the folks that we came to discover by opening up the process of applying to this conference and giving people who are doing great work a platform for being able to share that with the church, I think was incredibly impactful, and has very much resulted in our influence and the direction of our ministry over the past ten years.
Catherine, you mentioned some of the things that have kind of shaped us. When I think about this stuff, like when I think about the guiding or operating principles of our ministry, the first one is the notion that we're going to give away as much of this as we can for free, the result of the chance encounter in Nashville.
One of the things I think we've been very intentional about, and as someone coming in, looking at the ministry world as a physician outsider, is that the whole Christian cult of a personality thing, from the very beginning, rubbed me the wrong way. We’ve always been intentional about ‘we do this as a team, it's not about the one-person model.’ The only person who's worthy of that is Jesus. When He started the Church, it was based upon a team originally of 12 apostles. It’s never been about any one personality on our team. One of the things where I think you guys have greatly contributed is that Key Ministry has always been a collective, as opposed to something that was built around one person. That’s part of what we conceptualized, in one of the board meetings in the first ten years. Julie Jones, who was one of our early board members, was very helpful in this. We perceived ourselves that we provide a service, but we were also leading a movement. So that’s part of what we've been trying to do.
We’re always looking at expanding the circle, how can we draw more people with great ideas into the world of disability ministry to a significant degree? This is something that we do now with our annual conference.
You look at Disability and The Church. This started with—the idea of doing this in person started with an idea that Beth had in 2015: put together a little regional conference for folks in northeast Ohio, or in disability ministry. We did it in combination with a respite night, which I believe Beth will never try to do again, the night before putting on a conference! Her little one-day conference that she had expected to attract 50 people attracted 300! It became very evident that there was a need for this, and there was a hunger for in-person training. So that's where Inclusion Fusion Live came from, which is now Disability and The Church going forward for 2023.
An example of the impact [of the conference] and our ability to discover people, and then our ability to be able to help them develop other relationships within the disability ministry world to get their message out—I think Dr. Lamar Hardwick is a classic example of this. Probably five years ago we were doing our conference, we have this open application process. Lamar, who is an African American pastor of a mixed-race church in Atlanta, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 35, I believe, presented at our conference. It’s one of these wild moments. Lamar has now gone on—he's written this book, Disability, and The Church—which I think is going to be the most influential work in our field over the next 10 years, in terms of impact and how people do disability ministry. The fact that we were able to meet Lamar—God was going to use Lamar regardless of anything that we did—but perhaps we were a catalyst of maybe making his work more visible, and giving him opportunities to meet with a lot of different ministry leaders at once. I think we can take credit for maybe helping it happen a little quicker than maybe would have happened otherwise. But God was using Lamar in big ways; Lamar is going to be a star in this field.
But it's the ability to be able to bring people together, and especially in the aftermath of COVID, to have these face-to-face relationships that are really impactful.
The thing that I have gotten the most satisfaction out of in our first 20 years is seeing the way the speakers react and folks react when they come to our conference when they never had an opportunity to talk about some of these things outside their immediate local audience—and giving them the opportunity for their voice to be heard in front of the larger church is the most gratifying part of the whole ministry from my perspective.
Catherine: As somebody who has benefited from that, I can tell you that I appreciate that tremendously. My last question for you, Steve, before we wrap up, is going to be about mental health ministry. That's how I got familiar with Key Ministry in the first place because Key Ministry was one of the very few organizations that were really talking about the need for a mental health ministry. I have in one of my files a printout of one of your blog posts, it was sometime in 2014 that I had come across this; either late 2014 or early 2015. I was really interested in what the organization was doing. From 2015 till now, we've had a lot of movement in the mental health ministry. Steve, your book, and I think our organization has really been instrumental in a lot of ways with mental health ministry as a movement. So talk if you will, just a little bit, about the last seven years or so with mental health ministry: what that's meant for you and where you kind of see that going.
Steve: I think the disability ministry movement at this point, has gone through two stages and is entering a third.
The first stage—and this was championed by Joni Erickson-Tada, was the notion of looking at barriers to the inclusion of people with physical disabilities. Think about the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and churches. There are a lot of places Joni—being in a wheelchair—can't get, because churches didn't have ramps, churches didn't have elevators. So the initial focus of this was on people with physical disabilities. In the second phase, 2002 to maybe 2008 to 2010, there was this radically increased awareness of the presence and impact of autism in the larger society, and the development and rapid expansion of what people refer to now as ‘special needs ministry;’ that was the second phase.
I have a friend who has an interesting story. He was a pastor in Western Michigan who quit his job to become a drug rep. We met because he was working for a company that was funding some research that I was doing at the time; he had to quit his job as a pastor because he and his wife had adopted several kids who had some significant disabilities. His work as a pastor didn't pay him enough to be able to support the services that they needed. When we talked about this, one of the things that he told me is that he thought at my core and that the core of our ministry is that we are evangelists.
From a statistical standpoint, especially if you take a look at just the explosion in the prevalence of mental illness over the last 10-year period of time—greatly accelerated by COVID—what got me into this was that I greatly appreciated and have been richly blessed to have been part of a church where my kids got exposed to great teaching; I received incredible support in terms of being able to use my gifts and talents, to be able to serve. I want the same thing for the kinds of families that I was seeing coming through our practice.
When you think about 75% of all kids with disabilities have a primary mental health disability—you know, the whole Willie Sutton line, ‘why do you rob banks? Because that's where the money is.’ The ongoing passion for this whole issue around mental health is that's where the people are right now who aren't able to be part of a church, because of a disabling condition.
In the time, Catherine, that you've been working with us, I think part of what has held this up is that the way we traditionally think about mental health ministry all involves supporting people who are already part of the church. Some churches have different sorts of counseling ministries, and support ministries, for folks who are already Christians, and are struggling. But the vast preponderance of folks impacted by mental health concerns doesn't have a church. So where I think we will continue to do the things that we do for the foreseeable future, in terms of helping to grow the overall disability ministry movement—I think that the unique thing that we have to contribute to it is to help churches be able to recognize this incredible need in their local communities for churches that are able to connect with, and then welcome and ultimately disciple individuals and families who are impacted by mental illness. I think if we can come alongside people who are doing mental health ministry now and help incorporate this whole evangelism and inclusion piece, that is where I see God most impactfully using us in the years ahead.
The whole Mental Health and the Church book, and all the resources that we've created around that, came from the recognition that one of the reasons why I think so many churches did special needs ministry was that there were replicable models available to them, in terms of how to do buddy ministry? Our compatriots—in terms of sharing the 20th anniversary—like Marie Kuck and Nathaniel’s Hope—you have hundreds of churches that have learned how to do respite ministry and respite events; there were models out there to show churches how to step into and to do special needs ministry well. There was no model out there for churches looking at how to do mental health outreach and inclusion well.
I hope that what we have created is a foundation that other people will build upon, in terms of being able to welcome and fully include and show Christ’s love to that large segment of our population that's struggling with mental illness, and ultimately bring those people into the Church, with all of the gifts and talents that the Holy Spirit has given them, to be able to show Christ’s love to the world, and to be able to help the Church go beyond where we are now in terms of our understanding of mental illness, and our care for the families we're impacted.
Beth: Wow, that's a lot that's happened in the last 20 years! So December 21st, 2002, I mean even just…
Steve: December 24th. It was Christmas Eve, in between the Christmas Eve services at Bay Presbyterian that the various board members got together and signed the original documentation that created the ministry.
Beth: That's amazing. For our younger listeners, the internet did exist, but things were so much different back then. Social media wasn't even a thing! Online conferences: that was not a thing.
So it's just been amazing to hear from you today, Steve, about the last 20 years. As we enter 2023, we have really exciting things up ahead. We're working on our conference, Disability and the Church, that will be taking place on April 28th and 29th.
We're full speed ahead with planning for the ministry for the next year and more, so really quickly—you definitely touched on this, but could you tell us, as you look ahead to this next year, and look back at the past 20 years, what do you consider a ‘win’ for this ministry?
Steve:
I think that a win for our ministry is anytime the family of children with disabilities has a meaningful connection with the local church, as a result of any training or education or consultation that we have shared, or our like-minded partners in the disability ministry movement have shared. That's the win.
It can be something as simple as parents being able to go to church and listen to a sermon. Here's some great teaching; even if their child with a profound disability doesn't learn anything out of the encounter, their ability to be there, because there's someone there to care for and support their kid, that's a win.
Whenever parents get an opportunity to have a night out, to enjoy dinner together and have a conversation together because their church offers them that ability by being willing to care for their kids for an evening, or to care for their kids for a weekend, to enable them the ability to have some space to work on their relationship, when otherwise the challenges of raising a child—especially kids with more severe—mental health or developmental disabilities—becomes overwhelming, that's a win.
Whenever we have an opportunity to identify someone who has gifts and talents and a passion for being able to honor God and serve Him and build the Kingdom, through working with and caring for people impacted by disability—whenever we can help them to get their message out, or give them opportunities to use their gifts or introduce them to other people where there are synergies created; something greater through the power of the Holy Spirit comes together, for building the Kingdom, and helping people to experience a little bit of heaven here, that's a win.
As a physician, as a doctor, one of the things that I get bogged down in sometimes is that when you go to medical school, you go to pathology class; you don't go to health class. Our focus tends to be on problems. When you're involved in a leadership role with an organization like this, I tend to look at problems and how to fix them. But I think about 2500 disability ministry leaders getting together to share ideas in an online forum, where there were seven of them 20-25 years ago. There's been an awful lot of wins, too. It's kind of like—to share one of my sports analogies—people have a hard time figuring out, especially certain people in ministry who aren't into sports—our football coach at Ohio State has borne a lot of criticism because for the last two years we haven't beaten the team up north. But the guy’s won 90% of his games! I think that looking ahead, with this being our 20th birthday this month, that recognizing—thanks to the power of the Holy Spirit and the privilege of serving in this way—we've won a whole lot of games. The other folks serving with us have some incredible wins as well. It's an honor and a privilege that God gives us the opportunity to do this stuff that we do, with the prayer, encouragement, and financial support of the folks who have been there for our ministry all along, many of them from the very beginning. So thinking about the wins on days when things aren't going so great is an incredible blessing.
Beth: I'll say ‘amen’ to that for sure! Thank you, Steve, for your time today, but really for your vision, for your perseverance, and the gift Key Ministry is to so many people. On behalf of the Key Ministry team, I want to thank our listeners today. Please share this episode with a friend or a colleague. All of the different references that have been made will be in the show notes that you can find at key ministry.org/podcast.
