On their own, the leader of a church's special needs ministry can't meet every need of every volunteer or participating family. But that leader can model service in a way that caring becomes contagious.

When you nurture and prioritize relationship for the volunteers, the volunteers become the ministry's greatest recruiting tools, because they tell others.

People don't expect perfection, but they do appreciate when they see leaders who sincerely try to improve and ask for help in areas where they might be weak. You don't have to be good at everything to lead, but the best leaders are honest about where they need assistance, working to fill in those gaps, while also taking action and responsibility for areas of personal growth.

It is important that the church think outside the box, actively pursuing a relationship with the family, just as Jesus Christ pursues a relationship with each of us.

No one has ever seen the wind. We've only experienced the effects and the results of the wind. And none of us have ever seen God. Just like the movement of a pinwheel makes us sure that the wind exists, we have ways to be sure that God exists.

As a result, the success of the ministry volunteers is often every bit as important as the success of the participating kids. And the skills of the ministry leaders do impact the accommodation plans that are developed for participants with special needs.

By and large, the special needs ministry leader is a translator of sorts, responsible for understanding and bridging the gap between two very unique cultures: the church and the special needs community.

In many cases, special needs ministry is a "business-to-business" ministry. The ministry exists to support other ministries and to help them successfully include the individual with special needs. When full inclusion is happening successfully, the work of the special needs ministry may be invisible to many people including the individual with special needs, much like the role of a business-to-business entity is invisible to the end customer.

The churches with the strongest special needs ministries seem to know the secret: a ministry leader who values their relationship with their volunteers almost as much as they value their relationship with the families they serve.