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Reimagining Accessibility with Young Worshipers

Alexandra Jacob and Sonja Dziekciowski

Alexandra Mauney Jacob is associate pastor for families, youth, and children at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Sonja Dziekciowski is director of children’s ministries at Westminster.

Sonja Dziekciowski (SD) and I (Alexandra Jacob/AMJ) work together collaboratively as part of the Families, Youth, and Children staff in our congregation in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Over the past four years of working together, we have sought to strengthen our commitment to accessibility in worship and faith formation for our community’s youngest worshipers. This is a process that continually unfolds over time—much as our community of young people and families is shaped by the particular people who inhabit our worship and formation spaces. In the spirit of our own patterns of collaboration, Sonja and I offer our own experiences of growing in accessibility practices through a question-and-answer format. We begin in the youth suite of a local Presbyterian church in Rochester, Minnesota, in summer 2024.

Introduction and Theological Grounding

AMJ: I thought of you, Sonja, this past summer while I was away with our congregation’s middle school students on our annual service-learning trip. We had reached the final evening of the week, and I planned to surprise students by sharing communion together. As you know, our middle school youth are a delightful bunch, full of energy and vibrant silliness. And many of them benefit from accessibility tools like fidget toys in order to aid their full participation in group discussions or activities. For our celebration of communion, I wanted the communion table to reflect that commitment to accessibility, particularly after having learned so much in recent years about how our young people interact with the world in diverse ways. So, in addition to my usual table setting—a Bible and candle, communion elements, a sign from the youth room proclaiming that everyone is welcome—I added an array of fidget tools. Multicolored stretchy bands, fidget spinners, and sensory balls added a certain character to the communion table. And the image of the table itself struck me as theologically rich: we are invited to the joyful feast just as we are. 

SD: My eyes welled up with tears when you shared that image of fidget tools around the table, inviting our youth to use those tools to calm bodies to help them mindfully partake of the elements. That picture reflected the ongoing discernment process our ministry has been undergoing due to a focus on hard and holy questions. What do we hope our children are experiencing when the congregation gathers for worship? How are our children and youth invited to be full participants and leaders, rather than outside observers? What practices are not aligning with those goals?

It was through that lens that I realized that our Children’s Church did not feel like a worship service for children. Our four-year-olds through first graders parade out of the late morning worship service before the sermon for their own time of programming. Most of the children attending Children’s Church had attended Church School the hour before worship.

Arriving upstairs to a classroom for the second time that morning felt like an attempt to teach another Church School lesson with squirmy children who were not fully engaged. Once I named that Children’s Church was my least favorite part of children’s ministries programming, you stepped in with inquiry. Through setting down ego, making space for curiosity, and asking focused questions alongside committee members, we discerned a need to revamp the location and structure of Children’s Church. We designed a new worship format that centers the needs of our children for routine and movement, while inviting in the Holy Spirit and focusing on what it means to be a part of the church, God’s community.

AMJ: These intentional changes have allowed us to live more fully into a Reformed commitment to worship as an act of the whole people of God. If some of us can access elements of worship in a fuller and broader way than others, is our worship “a collective activity of the people of God and an expression of our common life and ministry” (Book of Order, W-2.0201)? One of the ways we have worked to ensure fuller participation in worship for our youngest ones has been by broadening our own practices around access and inclusion. This is hard work that really never ends, and we certainly do not get it right every time. But little by little, the changes make a difference.

SD: One of the most amazing results of changing our worship framing and structure for our youngest worshipers has been the ease with which our children display autonomy and express joy in the sanctuary. During a recent worship service, a kindergartner drew a picture for his father who was seated up front next to the clergy after being the lay Scripture reader. This child ran up the stairs with great enthusiasm to give his father his artwork, with the pastors’ expressions reflecting this little boy’s energy. Their faces lit up, as did the hearts of worshipers.

AMJ: That moment was a highlight of my spring! And those experiences are not possible without offering an eye towards accessibility for children, especially in our Children’s Church spaces. One of the principles of access that has guided our work together includes an affirmation of neurodiversity as a gift from God. Neurodiversity refers to the inherent diversity that exists within each of us with regard to our neurological wiring. A neurodiversity model of understanding resists a pathology model of neurological difference; instead of measuring our children’s needs and gifts against an imagined “norm,” we celebrate the diversity and do our best to provide multiple paths of access that embrace difference. When we talk with children at Westminster about embodied difference, we often remind them of the creation story, where God creates the world and calls every single part of it good.

SD: I love how often you remind our children and youth about God’s abundant love for us, meeting each one of us where we are. One of my favorite phrases that you use with our children and youth is “all bodies are good bodies.”

That focus on embracing differences also helps us to craft meaningful morning devotionals for our weeklong summer day camp for children and youth. With our planning, we attempt to integrate the multisensory needs of our young people, from elementary-aged campers through high school counselors. We invite campers and counselors to use fidget tools or color in devotional books if that will help their bodies and brains focus on the message. Through breathwork, embodied prayers, children’s books about social justice issues, and music with youth song leaders that incorporate movement,
we focus on specific ways that we are called to honor each other’s humanity and affirm God’s abundant love. 

A highlight of our day camp worship was when we invited local poet Joe Davis to share his spoken-word poem “Good and Worthy of Love”1 with our day camp group. Hearing a full room of fifty-something elementary children through high schoolers echoing the saying “I am good, I am worthy of love; I am good, I am more than enough” was powerful.

AMJ: These theological affirmations ground our work with young people, and it is indeed powerful to have such a profound mantra to repeat to ourselves and to one another. Another principle that helps create greater access for young people includes repetitive and simple language. For instance, in our child-oriented Christmas Eve service, we often include a simple repeated refrain in the Call to Worship, reminding children that even if they are not yet readers, they can participate by saying that simple phrase along with the congregation. It can also help to offer welcoming messaging that is both explicit (saying, “Your little one’s noises are welcome here!”) and implicit (making friendly eye contact with caregivers). 

SD: During the first year of implementing our new model of Children’s Church, one noticeable change in our later Sunday morning worship service, which is held in the large sanctuary, was that our children now come back into the sanctuary before the closing hymn to receive the charge and benediction. Several older congregants pulled me aside to express their delight in this new practice, as they loved seeing a few children skipping back to families. That practice seems to have lessened the formal feel of the service and added more warmth and joy with the additional sounds of happy feet and caregivers waving for their children to find them.

AMJ: And don’t forget the children who dance in the pews along to the final hymn. These moments of joy are evidence that children feel safe in worship. There is no such thing as perfection when it comes to accessibility for children or for those of us who live with diverse forms of embodied difference. In the words of the Opening Doors to Discipleship team, “There are as many types of disabilities and accommodations for those disabilities as there are stars in the sky!”2 But seeing a child dancing in the aisle reminds us that the small moments of inclusion are worth celebrating.

Discernment Questions for Worship Planners

When it comes to access, it can be hard for worship planners to know where to start. Below, Sonja and I reflect on the process of prioritizing. Our best strategies emerge when we begin with reflective discernment.

SD: One of the things I value most about my working relationship with you, Alexandra, is our practice of asking reflective questions about programming. What activities did we notice that our children were engaged in? What specific types of activities seem to help our neurodiverse children? What are our pain points? What activities became dysregulating and why?3

AMJ: These questions mark a subtle but important shift in thinking for our ministry area, particularly as we moved out of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our congregation has benefitted recently from the wisdom of church consultant Susan Beaumont, with whom we have worked during a season of significant pastoral transition. Susan has helped us shift our thinking from a decision-making mindset to a discernment-minded framework, asking reflective questions and trusting the slow and holy movement of the Spirit.

The first set of questions that we have found it helpful to engage are broad ones. Who are the youngest members of our worshiping body? What kinds of embodied diversity is present within that group? What do we hope our youngest worshipers will experience in our worship spaces? The answers to these questions change often, inviting continual reflection. But before we work for greater access, we have to know who is present in the community.

SD: We started to have individual conversations with caregivers about specific needs for neurodivergent children, especially for how to help little ones participate in our Children’s Church and the annual Christmas pageant. We have asked caregivers, “What type of supportive structures and activities help your child to participate?” Last summer, one parent of an autistic preschooler raised a different request: could we start a support group for those of us who are raising neurodivergent children and youth? After some discernment time, last fall we began a monthly caregiver support group, Supporting Diverse Minds.

AMJ: That group has been a beautiful, set-apart space for caregivers to support one another, and we have learned more about the needs of our young people who are neurodivergent or who struggle with mental health challenges. For instance, we learned that for our young worshipers who struggle with sensory processing, our congregation’s annual Eastertide worship service that includes bagpipes can be overstimulating. That knowledge helped us to ask questions about how we can prepare one another for spaces like that. Can we make sure caregivers know that there are extra sets of noise-limiting headphones available for use? Can we reach out and remind families that the smaller, less formal 8:30 worship service won’t include a bagpipe prelude, so that they can opt out of one experience and into another?

A second set of questions for reflection that congregations may find helpful has to do with how our worship spaces and practices respond to the unique configuration of people who exist within our community. Over the course of a Lord’s Day worship service, how are we attending to the diverse experiences of our youngest worshipers? It helps to start by naming and celebrating successes. Do children lead worship by reading Scripture, or do you offer worship activity bags for children that engage their senses? Celebrate those practices! 

As the Spirit works in and through us to help us name practices that might aid in young worshipers’ participation, it is helpful to give thanks to God for those places where access is already happening. 

SD: I am grateful for our reflection process that names the goodness of the holy moments we have witnessed with our young worshipers either engaged in worship spaces or leading in those spaces with ease. Also, sometimes our reflections bring up what feels like a calling for new practices. As we have individually reflected on programming with our various committee members, you and I sometimes notice that the Spirit is leading us to a new theme that has been weaving its way through different conversation spaces. 

AMJ: In those spaces, we address a third question: are we co-creating the kind of community where people can name their needs? This is not always comfortable, depending on the cultural norms that may exist within a congregation. Advocacy, including self-advocacy, is a muscle that takes practice to develop, and it can take intentional time and space to practice it. I have been grateful for your own self-advocacy, Sonja, as you navigate Westminster as both a staff member and congregation member. When you openly practice the skill of self-advocacy, it helps others to practice it themselves.

SD: From my perspective, the practices of naming and advocating for our needs have had a ripple effect going outward from how our Families, Youth, and Children staff and lay leader team communicate with one another and with our broader community. Before I had corrective surgery to restore conductive hearing loss, I used a hearing aid. While I highly recommend hearing aids to increase ease of communication, it is also an imperfect technology in group settings. For team meetings, my colleagues knew that I had a preferred location to aim my better ear towards. Sometimes an organ rehearsal pipes up in the middle of one of our team meetings, and our team will ask if we should quickly relocate to a quieter setting for our conversation.

In our large weekly staff meetings, authenticity and naming needs have been met with respect and gratitude. Naming that microphones need to be used in that large space to amplify voices for those who are hard of hearing has become a routine explanation to guests and new staff members. While not everyone loves talking into a microphone or waiting for one to turn back on, that pause and effort to pass microphones around displays a commitment to providing access for those auditory needs.

AMJ: This continual movement of advocating for and responding to needs has set the groundwork for moving towards greater access in our worship.

Practical Tools and Adaptive Strategies

Acknowledging that the needs of young people and neurodiverse people are as diverse as our congregations themselves, we offer below a reflection on adaptive strategies and practical tools that we have found helpful in our own context.

SD: We have several ADHD students in our children and youth programs, which is a disability that has a lot of stigma and misunderstandings surrounding it. After one of my children was diagnosed with ADHD, I started doing more research. The more I read about the traits of executive dysfunction, the more I saw myself. As an adult who was diagnosed in her forties, my diagnosis brought the realization that what I had thought were character flaws were shared traits of how my brain is wired with ADHD.

At the start of this program year, our elementary Church School teachers participated in a neurodiversity workshop. Many definitions and examples of accommodations came from the nonprofit organization Understood (understood.org). An explanation that resonated with our lay leaders was the charge to be a detective when observing behavior. Get curious! What unmet need does this child have? Instead of taking behaviors personally or interpreting them as disrespect, so much of the work is internal to keep yourself regulated and calm.

AMJ: I often think of those questions when I am in worship planning and leadership spaces, wondering how we can make subtle shifts to help create new pathways of access. One of the practical changes we made several years ago was related to our worship spaces. We were in the process of redesigning our 8:30 am worship service, which is held in an expansive, open space with flexible seating. We worship in the round for that worship service, with chairs set in a semicircle, oriented around the communion table. After talking with the families whose children would likely attend that service, we designed a simple children’s space with an area rug, soft bean bag chairs, worship activity bags, and child-sized weighted lap blankets. The space is situated near the entrance to the worship space, but behind a couple rows of chairs so that families are able to sit near and around their young worshipers. As that worship service has evolved, the children’s space has become an integral part of the rhythm of the service. It was new for our congregation to set apart a space like that for children, and it is consistently one of my favorite spots each week to check in with young ones and see how they interact with worship in their own, age-appropriate ways.

A space set apart for children may or may not work for your worship spaces, but it is worth wondering aloud with dedicated leaders and church families how there might be elements of the spaces that you might adapt to serve the needs of younger worshipers with diverse learning styles, orientations towards movement, and adaptive needs. For instance, Westminster’s sanctuary space, where our largest Sunday service is held each week, has fixed pews in rows oriented towards a large chancel. A set-apart children’s area within this space is less feasible than in our more flexible 8:30 worship service space. After a significant building renovation project, we recognized that there was an unused room in the back of the sanctuary balcony that might be repurposed as another point of access for worshiping families. With input from families with young ones, we redesigned that room to be a space where parents can nurse or rock babies, and where children can get their wiggles out and encounter age-friendly board books. The room is connected to the sanctuary with audio access to the worship service, and there is a television on the wall that provides visual access. 

Not all families make use of these adaptive spaces in either of our Sunday services, but together with worship activity bags and other tools, we hope that families with young worshipers can pick and choose the ways that work best for them to engage more fully in the worshiping life of the congregation. 

SD: Planning out the design and layout of worship spaces to meet the needs of our families, children, and youth has been a lengthy, ongoing discernment process. In our committee work, we have been inspired by Priya Parker’s book, The Art of Gathering. Parker writes, “Gatherings need perimeters” as “a contained space for a gathering allows people
to relax.”4 

We learned that adding individual carpet spots in the front of our chapel, where Children’s Church happens, helped to make that space feel more contained. That layout created a smaller perimeter to help our young worshipers feel connected and engaged. 

After events, we reflect on how the spaces themselves have contributed to the tone of our worship. Several times we have learned that certain rooms or setups have been too big for our neurodivergent younger worshipers to engage, as large group settings can be challenging. For our morning devotionals during our children’s day camp, we switched to a smaller room with tables in the back to create a smaller, more intimate worship space. That room also has built-in amplification for our students who use hearing aids and carpeting to absorb some of the background noise. With thoughtful design, we use our room layouts to work towards creating a welcoming and calming environment for all our young ones.

AMJ: Another important consideration for our young worshipers has been to subtly increase the ways we connect our worship practices to our bodies. Young ones are less likely than we grown-ups are to needlessly separate the spiritual work of our minds and hearts from the spiritual work of our bodies. You see this lived out in the wiggles, dancing, and noises of children in worship! Instead of discouraging this connectedness to embodiment, how might we encourage it within the framework of our worship practices? Are there simple body movements that might accompany a sung chorus, or might we involve children and youth in the processional or in the setting of the communion table?

I also love to remember a story you told me last year from Children’s Church, Sonja. You all were working on a breath prayer, inviting the children to breathe in a message of peace and breathe out anything that was troubling them. One astute five-year-old worshiper volunteered, “Let’s breathe in hope and breathe out uncertainty!” He was remembering our theme for a recent church art project, “Hope in uncertainty,” and connecting that message to the practice of breath prayer. What a profound moment of connection!

The intentional use of breath in our worship is yet another way to connect beautifully with younger members of the community, who tend to be far more in tune to their bodies than we older members are. A colleague of ours sometimes begins the Call to Confession by inviting the congregation to feel grounded in breathing in God’s grace. That moment of stillness is a connecting point for younger worshipers, whether or not they are readers and can access the Prayer of Confession by reading the words aloud. 

SD: Using breathwork in our worship designed specifically for children has helped us weave in an understanding of the Holy Spirit and the call for worship to be a truly communal act. Mindfulness practices are beneficial to all congregants, and especially for our neurodiverse children. Before our youngest children’s choir sang in a worship service last spring, nerves were on display during warm-ups in the choir room. Several of our preschoolers were clinging to their caregivers in anticipation of singing in the sanctuary. 

I led the group in a Butterfly Hugs prayer,5 with all of us linking our thumbs together to form the wings, placing our wings on our chests, and gently flapping those wings. I explained how sometimes when we are nervous, we say we have butterflies in our stomachs. The gentle tapping helps us get our butterflies “in formation” and ready to go! Talking with those young ones, I drew on an explanation from Adam Grant in his Re:Thinking podcast.6 By engaging our senses, we shift our thinking from the amygdala in emergency mode to the frontal cortex. Once those little bodies and minds had a chance to calm down, I led the children in a prayer while we flapped our wings. In our simple prayer, we asked God to help us get our butterflies in line to help us sing about God’s love.

This practice of an embodied prayer helped our preschoolers through second graders focus on the meaning of their song as a part of the worship service in the sanctuary. Several of our children who had been too nervous to be up front and sing during a service were able to participate by shifting our focus to sharing God’s love through song.

AMJ: Another favorite for our children is “starfish breathing,” where you hold out one hand with fingers spread out (like a starfish!) and use the pointer finger on your other hand to trace the starfish points. Inhale each time you trace one side of a finger; exhale as you trace the other side. By the end of the exercise, worshipers have calmer bodies and more focused minds, and we have worked to reconnect our minds to our bodies. 

SD: Inviting all to the table as they are requires continuous discernment to support our neurodiverse children and youth. It is a group effort that calls for inquiry, curiosity, conversation, and reflection. As you and I have evolved in our learning around strategies and accommodations to support children and youth with thinking and learning differences, our children and youth have demonstrated comfort and confidence in being their authentic selves in worship. Our discernment process has pulled in many voices—those with lived experiences, caregivers advocating for their children, committee members with backgrounds in education, and colleagues with experience in designing room layouts. Our process of weaving together threads of lived experience, strategies for inclusion, and Reformed worship principles has helped us weave together a unique and beautiful tapestry of worship in our congregation. Together, we worship as the whole people of God. 

Notes

  1. Joe Davis, “Good and Worthy of Love,” from Remind Me Again: Poems and Practices for Remembering Who We Are (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2023), 15.
  2. “Disability Inclusion for Ministry,” Opening Doors to Discipleship, https://odtd.net/disability-inclusion-for-ministry/.
  3. As a former second grade teacher, I often switch over into educational jargon. Traci Pedersen of Psych Central describes dysregulation as an emotional response that occurs “when you’re unable to manage your emotional responses. This means it’s difficult to soothe yourself when you feel overwhelmed, sad, or angry, and you find it hard to return to ‘normal’ after these feelings come up.” Tracy Pedersen, “What Is Emotional Dysregulation?” Psych Central, November 21, 2022, https://psychcentral.com/blog/what-is-affect-or-emotion-dysregulation#regulation-tips.
  4. Priya Parker, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 65.
  5. Traci Smith, “After a Natural Disaster: Butterfly Hug,” Faithful Families: Creating Sacred Moments at Home (Saint Louis: Chalice Press, 2017), 130.
  6. Adam Grant, “You Have More Control over Your Emotions Than You Think with Lisa Feldman Barrett,” ReThinking with Adam Grant, https://www.ted.com/podcasts/rethinking-with-adam-grant/you-have-more-control-over-your-emotions-lisa-feldman-barrett-transcript.
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