Pastor Steven Bowman
His Compassion for Each and Everyone of Us
“When He saw the crowds, He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” This is from Matthew 9:36 which describes Jesus Christ’s deep compassion for us all.
You see, in the eyes of the Lord, we are all in special needs! You and I all need the Good Shepherd in our lives to take care of us, especially the least among us.
CBCGB’s Post-Covid Opportunity and Challenge
By God’s grace the attendance at CBCGB has been slowly creeping up post Covid-19. In fact we recently reached post covid highs for both sessions in children’s ministry on Sundays. These numbers are approaching pre-Covid – praise the Lord!
It has been a challenge for all of us to adjust our ministries during and post covid. In children’s ministry we have adjusted our programs to accommodate both less children and also less coworkers. Since reopening we have also noticed something else: more and more children, from younger and younger aged are coming to church, have special needs. This is a tremendous opportunity for the church, but also a tremendous challenge.
The State of the Mustard Seed Ministry
We are especially experiencing this challenge in our Mustard Seed ministry, which serves Toddler through Kindergarten children aged two to five-years old. Our teachers have been doing an awesome job taking care of all the children but we are faced with handling the ever increasing spectrum of special needs, especially autism.
We started our post covid Mustard Seed having all 2 to 5 year-olds in one room, then we moved to two rooms, and now we need to start a third room. We desperately need more coworkers to accommodate three rooms for six sessions, all the while handling more young children with special needs. Please pray for us!
Vision for Special Needs Ministry
God is bringing these precious children and their families to His house, so it’s up to us to shepherd them. Along with our Philly Ministry we need to expand our ministry to meet those with special needs amongst us.
Our Philly Ministry has met the needs of 8 to 10 families over the years, meeting the needs of primarily older children from 1st grade up to young adult. It is clear that we need to start providing special needs care starting at 2 or 3 years old, for children are being diagnosed with autism from as young as 2 years old. We thank God for the blessings He has allowed CBCGB to share over the years, and thank you especially to Dr. Nancy Tran and Pastor King-Fai Choi for their vision.
It is time to increase the special needs ministry at CBCGB. The children’s ministry leadership team has been reaching out to special needs organizations in our community for counsel. We will be having a Special Needs Awareness Training at CBCGB on Saturday, May 6, 2023, hosted by the May Institute. It will consist of two sessions: one session educating us on the wide variety of special needs these days, especially autism in children; the second session will teach us how best to minister to them.
We hope that all children’s ministry coworkers, families with special needs, Stephen Ministers, and the entire church will attend this training. We covet your prayer as we in the children’s ministry hope to pass this vision of ministering to all in special needs from cradle to grave.
About the author: Pastor Bowman is CBCGB’s Children Ministry Pastor. CBCGB has several programs for kids 0-12 years’ old on Friday evenings (AWANA) and Sunday mornings. In particular the Sunday programs include the Mustard Seed ministry, which serves kids ages 2-5; and the Philly ministry which serves families with special needs children. If you are interested in learning more about these ministries or would like to serve as a coworker, please contact Pastor Bowman (sbowman@cbcgb.org).
Edited by Jian Shao, Hei Man (Grace) Yeung
Translated into Chinese by Hei Man (Grace) Yeung