Family Faith Builders: Young Life Capernaum at St. Andrews Church
For Amber Lewis and the members of Young Life Capernaum, the term “friend” is not to be used cavalierly: Friendship is serious business.
“The idea of Capernaum is not to be event-based but to be relationship-based,” says Lewis, who directs the Little Rock program designed for young people with disabilities. “It’s fun to have a dance party and it’s nice to have events where young adults can have fun, but they can do that anywhere. Our desire is to provide lasting, lifelong friendships.”
Young Life Capernaum targets one of the sobering facts of life for young people with disabilities—the relative lack of interaction within a larger community. It’s necessary for forging healthy and lasting friendships, yet something their able-bodied peers largely take for granted.
“Our friends with disabilities maybe have friends that they’ve gone to school with, if they are in a self-contained class or something like that. They have caregivers that are paid to spend time with them, they have parents and they have instructors. They don’t have relationships outside of that for the most part; they’re missing that community. They have people, but they spend a lot of their time at home and it’s lonely.”
Young Life Capernaum provides that community for youth ages 14-22 with disabilities. The group’s leaders receive special training in order to effectively interact with persons of varying levels of functioning. Other volunteers, called buddies, also lend support at the group’s various events.
“Buddies can vary in age,” Lewis says. “We have some older adults who come and help serve meals and who will help clean up. Then we have high school buddies who come to our events and make sure that no one is left out. They dance with our friends and sing with them and get to know them.”
Lewis says that interacting as one would with any other friend makes the biggest social or spiritual impact, both one-on-one or at the group’s different activities: “Our leaders are people who are trained and who desire this relationship, wanting to teach our friends about Jesus, wanting to walk with them through that, see what that looks like and dig deeper,” she says.
The group gets its name from Mark 2 and the story of the paralytic whose friends carried him on his mat to Jesus, even when it required cutting a hole in the roof of the house where Jesus was teaching. Lewis says she not only sees her leaders and her volunteers at each corner of that mat, but the larger St. Andrew Anglican community as well.
“St. Andrew’s has opened up its doors to us completely,” she says. “We have friends who make a lot of noise during church or get up, or some who refuse to put their phone down and it’s just OK. They accept them as members of the community, and don’t treat them like they’re kids and they need to go to a Sunday school class away from everyone because they’re disruptive. They accept them as adults.”
“I always say, ‘If they’ve made a place for my friends, they’ve made a place for me.’ And they really have. It’s so beautiful.”
Building Blocks
Little Rock’s Young Life Capernaum is part of the international network, Young Life, which hosts weekly faith-based clubs for youth around the world.
- Young Life was founded in 1939.
- Young Life Capernaum began in 1986.
- Young Life Capernaum Little Rock started in 2014.
- 273* Schools and other outreach ministries participate in Young Life Capernaum around the nation.
- 4,262* kids per week attend Capernaum Ministries nationally.
*Numbers provided by Young Life; based on the 2014-2015 school year.
For more information or to get involved, visit LittleRock.YoungLife.org or SACLR.org.