On Sunday mornings, Abby Vlahos’s day begins before most people are awake. She rises with her nine-year-old son, Cosmas, who wakes at dawn. Then it’s full speed–active play, movement, conversation, a walk–before most people have had a cup of coffee. And now, the Divine Liturgy has found its way back into their Sunday routine.
Abby is a mother of three—two grown children, and Cosmas, who has a genetic syndrome and is autistic. Her husband Peter is a church chanter, which has meant that for her entire life as a parent, she has come to their parish of St. John the Baptist in Des Plaines, Illinois, alone, managing the children while Peter serves the church.
Before Cosmas was born, Sundays looked different. Abby arrived early to church. Her older children attended Sunday school. She sat in the nave. She says now, “Those days have changed.”
With Cosmas church services were challenging. Cosmas cannot sit through the Divine Liturgy. He moves constantly. Noise is part of his communication. Abby’s time in church was limited, because “that’s all I can handle,” she admits honestly. They light candles. Cosmas kisses the icons. He greets familiar faces and they spend time in the cry room, sometimes walking in and out, sometimes pacing the halls.
“It’s easier to stay home,” Abby says. “Much easier.”
For many families with children with disabilities, staying home is exactly what happens–not because they don’t want to be in church, but because church can feel unwelcoming, exhausting, and even impossible.
But now, because of the determination and diligent advocacy of several parents–including Eleni Anast, Abby’s co-leader of the parishes disability ministry, who is also the parent of an autistic teen–a Sunday School class specifically for children with developmental disabilities is a part of her parish’s ministry.
It began when Abby learned of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s Fully Human initiative–a disability inclusion ministry with a mission to welcome all to the chalice, creating and adapting so that all families feel welcome.
After contacting the program’s director, Presvytera Melanie DiStefano, Abby began a conversation about the potential to design and begin a class in her home community specifically for children with disabilities for whom inclusion in a typical Sunday School class would be challenging.
Every parish has children with developmental disabilities, Abby says. “If you don’t think you do, I would tell you–they are there but they’re probably not coming.”
She knows well how others think and feel when they don’t share her experience. Years ago, she, too, was inexperienced with autism and other disabilities, and remembers when her mother once asked her to help with a disabled child in church. She felt uncomfortable, because she didn’t know what to do and didn’t know how to help. Now, her own experience has taught her that when disability “becomes your whole life, you see everything differently.”
Abby had always cared about inclusion, helping make her parish accessible and working on projects related to disability awareness. But experiencing disability every day—navigating therapy schedules, school systems, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, public misunderstandings, opened her heart in a way she hadn’t expected.
“It’s like breaking your leg and having to go to church in a wheelchair for six weeks,” she says. “All of a sudden, you think, oh, I didn’t know.”
This realization of everything she hadn’t known is what eventually led Abby to ministry. When Pres. Melanie began sharing the work around Fully Human, Abby reached out immediately. She remembers thinking, “Let me do what I can.”
What followed was not a job, but a labor of love. Abby began volunteering at multiple levels–parish, metropolis, and Archdiocese–joining many others working together around the country toward true belonging for people with disabilities in the Orthodox Church.
What started at St. John the Baptist quickly expanded to other parishes in the Metropolis of Chicago that also wanted to be part of disability ministry. And something miraculous and uplifting happened–people came.
At Abby’s parish, visibility changed everything. Once the ministry existed—once it was officially named and made public—families who had stayed at the edges began to show up. Children appeared. Parents who had stayed away felt seen. “Sometimes you have to start the work,” she says, “and then you see who comes.”
The class in her parish meets after Holy Communion and continues for 30 purposeful, well-designed minutes when children can learn, pray, sing, belong, and learn.
While the program is indeed momentous for children, it is also beneficial for parents. It is a chance for parents to stay in the nave and experience the Divine Liturgy–with no distractions. “It’s respite,” Abby says. “I can just sit. Or pray. Or breathe.”
Parents are not required to stay in the classroom, but may if they wish. Volunteers provide one-to-one support for the students–young adults, special education teachers, teens like Abby’s daughter Areti and her friends, and other parishioners who were once unsure where they fit into church life. Somehow, every week, it works out.
The class is lively. “Rocking and rolling,” Abby laughs. The children are all autistic; some don’t sit, some don’t speak, and some never stop moving. It is a joyful chaos.
The lessons the children learn can move them to familiarity within the Church, and for some they offer the small steps that lead to a big step–receiving Holy Communion, perhaps for the first time. This, Abby says, is nothing short of grace.
The heart of the class is built around simplicity and respect. Lessons follow the Gospel, the saints, or the liturgical calendar. Learning is hands-on and sensory, including costumes, spinners, magnets, music, and movement. Palm Sunday, for example, might mean paper flying through the air like palm branches laid out to welcome Christ.
Music also plays a central role, guided by the class’s teacher Nick Petrus, a volunteer whom Abby calls a “godsend.” A musician with years of experience and a commitment to working alongside people with disabilities, Nick leads through attentiveness, patience, and compassion.
> Read more about Nick: How a Sunday School became a sanctuary for children with disabilities
“He has respect,” Abby says. “He doesn’t assume he knows what a child wants. He steps back and observes.” This means everything to a parent who is accustomed to cajoling, prompting, and pushing.
Another key partner is Summer Kinard, a theologian and religious educator. She helped develop a curriculum that is theologically-sound, accessible, and practical—simple enough to fit on a single page, and with enough detail to guide teachers who may not have formal theological training. The Hellenic Foundation in Chicago funded the development of the curriculum, which will be freely shared with other parishes.
“Every Sunday school teacher should be teaching this way,” Summer often says—through embodiment, creativity, and hands-on faith.
Abby believes this work transforms not only families with disabilities, but entire parishes. When volunteers get to know children personally—learn their names, their personalities, their joys—the awkwardness and fear fades, and compassion grows. People learn how to help because they know who the person actually is.
That compassion, Abby believes, spills outward to the wider world. “People aren’t unkind,” she says. “They just don’t know.”
Abby says one small thing that would help those families who struggle with developmental disabilities is something simple: when a family walks through the church doors, someone should just say: ‘You’re welcome here. We’re so glad you’re here. If there’s anything we can do, please tell us.’
“That would go so far,” Abby says, her voice softening. “So far.” She pauses and adds, “Actually, that’s what we should say to everyone who walks through our church doors.”
Abby also wishes for more inclusive youth ministries, programs that do not rely on parents alone to initiate change, of children growing up seeing disability not as something separate, but as something already present in the Body of Christ.
“People with disabilities have value not because of what we do,” she says. “But because we just are.”
Now, Abby says, she and Cosmas feel and experience love every Sunday when, “we are welcome at the chalice.”
For more information on this ministry visit: www.goarch.org/autism-awareness.
St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church in Des Plaines, IL is a pilot parish for the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America’s initiative “On Behalf of All: Toward an Accessible Divine Liturgy for Children with Disabilities.”
If you or your parish would like more info about St. John’s ministry please click here. Find information about the Metropolis of Chicago’s ministry here.
