Keisha and Mike Martinez’s special needs child, Elion, struggled mightily to adapt to the environment at Mitchell Berean Church, so the family stopped going to church on two different occasions. Keisha, however, was determined to help not only her son but also other special needs children adapt well to going to church, and she’s done just that through a successful program she created about two years ago called Limitless Special Needs Ministry. Elion is now thriving at Mitchell Berean Church because of the program, and so are eight other special needs children.
JEFF FIELDER Editor
MITCHELL – As much as Keisha Martinez loved going to Mitchell Berean Church on Sundays and seeing her son, Elion, in church, too, she couldn’t help but feel frustrated every time she went there.
The reason, she said, is that her 8-year-old son, who was born with special needs and struggled to adapt to the environment at church, wasn’t getting much, if anything, out of church, and neither was she.
“It was terrible,” Martinez said. “All Elion would do was cry and scream. I couldn’t listen to the sermon because I would drop him off at [the nursery] and five minutes later I would be called to go calm him down. He didn’t want to be there because it was overstimulating for him, and I wasn’t able to sit through church and listen to the sermon. It just seemed pointless for us, so we stopped going to church.”
Elion was born with sensory processing disorder, which Martinez said is on the autism spectrum. He also has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Consequently, Martinez said it’s hard for her son to process the amount of stimulation coming into his brain.
“Things going on around him make it hard for him to settle down long enough to listen,” she said. “Being in a place other than his home can really be frustrating and hard for him.”
That includes church, although Keisha and her husband, Mike Martinez, didn’t realize just how difficult it would be until they started bringing Elion to Mitchell Berean Church shortly after he was born.
They quickly learned, though, that the environment at church was difficult – maybe even impossible – for their son to adjust to.
“Either the lights were too bright, or they weren’t bright enough, or there were too many people by him or not enough, or he would get overstimulated just by people walking by – everything bothered him,” Keisha said. “It was just constant stimulation for him, which made it very chaotic and uncomfortable for him. He cried all the time.”
When Elion was about 6 months old, the Martinez’s made the difficult decision to stop going to church.
“We love God, and we feel it’s important to be in church and we wanted to be in church, but it just became too much for all of us,” she said. “We had that kid who was a handful, and no one had the training to help. So, for us, going to church was a nightmare.”
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