At Desiring God today they put up a post I wrote which they titled, “Four Kinds of Churches Worth Leaving.”
My original title was “Pastor, if you claim to believe the Bible and you say this to a family like mine, I will personally punch you in the nose.”
The content editors at Desiring God appreciated my passion, but wisely made the change. They also took a 1400 word post and shaved it down to 600 words. That was a good thing as well. There was a lot more heat than light in what I sent them!
I hate, to my core, the stories of churches that tell families like ours to leave – until I started thinking about the churches where that would be a kindness and came up with four.
For the churches who do dumb things out of love, I have a lot more patience. May God grant us the wisdom to see when churches and leaders are pursuing our good in wrong-headed ways out of love for God and affection for us and confidence in the Bible! And may we respond with kindness and confidence that God is good – along with a thought or two about what might actually be useful.
The Works of God 
Thank you for what you have written. I am a father of 3 children who have autism, two are severe and one is moderate. We cannot find a church and have been told one way or another that we are not welcome. This is difficult as all my chilfren (7 total) need to be part of a church family.
Great initshg! That’s the answer we’ve been looking for.
Mr. Knight,
I don’t usually comment on someone’s blog because of something I found on the Aquila Report, but I wanted to say thankyou for your articles on children and disability in the church. We just recently changed PCA churches in part because of this issue. Our situation wasn’t nearly as difficult as yours or that of the previous commenter, yet we still felt we needed to move on. One category of problematic church that is related to #4 would be those on the family integrated church movement. The NCFIC, led by Scott Brown and others, has heavily pushed keeping one’s children in church during the whole service from infancy onward. Our former church put a high premium on children past toddlerhood being very well behaved the entire time. We have a 6 year old autistic son who is actually on the lighter end of the spectrum, yet he can still be a challenge, and we never know from one Sunday to the next just how things are going to go with him. I understand they will be finally adding a nursery, but I can tell you that the pressure is still there to not use it once your child is past a certain age. For a long time we were the only family in said church with a disabled child, and I simply got discouraged with the pastor’s wife coming up to ask us to take him out, the dirty looks from others around us, the occasional snarky comment. The constant worry about what others were thinking of us as parents whenever he started to get noisy. Thank God for the new church He has provided, where we are all put up with with much grace and christian love.
Nancy Goldsworth