Episode 1

Alisa Hinkle introduces herself as the host of a special needs community podcast. She shares her background in special education and how she became involved in leading the special needs ministry at her church. They have been running the ministry for two and a half years, with a range of activities including messages, worship, dinner, and fellowship. The ministry serves a wide age range and includes group homes. Alisa expresses how blessed and grateful they feel after each service, seeing the love for the Lord in the special needs community. They have future plans, such as organizing a conference for moms and featuring guests on the podcast. Alisa hopes that listeners will be encouraged and uplifted by the podcast. Hello, this is Alisa Hinkle, your host, and this is our very first episode of our special needs community podcast. And I wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So I have been in special education for 15 years, and it's always been something that God has put on my heart. And when we started going to our church, the Edge Church, well, before it was the Edge Church, it was called Good Shepherd, and now it is the Edge Church. And I remember our pastor came to my husband and I and said, I would like for you to take this evangelism class. And of course, I've never heard of evangelism class, but I thought, okay, you know, let's see what it's all about. So my husband and I prayed about it, and we decided, okay. So we took the class, and after we took the class, our pastor came up to us and said, okay, this is what I would like for you guys to do. I'd like for you guys to lead the special needs ministry at our church, and we have been doing it ever since. We're going on two and a half years. In November, it'll be three years. And we absolutely love it because we have such a great team of volunteers. We do different things. We sometimes will have a message, a short message, and then we'll have praise and worship, which is always the favorite. And then we have dinner and fellowship. And we do this every second Saturday of the month, and it's from four to six. And we have an age range of about, oh, I would say anywhere from seven to 68 years of age. We have a lot of group homes that come, and I will tell you this. My husband and I and our team are truly blessed. We come out blessed every time we have a special needs service. And it's just such a wonderful experience, especially when you experience the love that they have for the Lord and watching them worship. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that, than seeing the Holy Spirit in our special needs community. And we love our families. We love to do things for our families. We've got some really cool things coming up that I am trying to incorporate for our families. One is for the moms, I'd like to do a conference. I have another special needs ministry that I've been in contact with, and they have a lot of resources, and they have a lot of videos for conferences, and we're just trying to put that together just to really pray about it and see what that looks like and what God wants us to do with that. But that's just in a nutshell a little bit about our ministry, and we just really hope that those that are listening to this would be encouraged and just be uplifted, and hopefully it will help you guys. I plan on having guests on here. A lot of the guests I think we will be having are parents of children or adults with special needs, caretakers, interviewing our pastor, and his vision behind it as well. And anyway, I thank you guys for listening, and can't wait to get this podcast going. And thank you guys so much, and God bless you, and we will talk at y'all soon. Bye.