Indispensable People
Transforming Lives through Compassionate Faith Practices
Embark with me, Tracie Corll, as we explore the heart of church ministry, where altering behavior takes a backseat to nurture a transformative spiritual journey. In our engaging conversation, we tackle the delicate balance between guiding behaviors and inspiring a deeper connection with Jesus. Learn how behavior modification techniques, particularly positive reinforcement, can be applied thoughtfully within the ministry without overshadowing our core mission. As we examine the four types of behavior modification, we uncover strategies that respect individual needs while fostering an environment where every soul can flourish in faith.
Embark with me, Tracie Corll, as we explore the heart of church ministry, where altering behavior takes a backseat to nurture a transformative spiritual journey. In our engaging conversation, we tackle the delicate balance between guiding behaviors and inspiring a deeper connection with Jesus. Learn how behavior modification techniques, particularly positive reinforcement, can be applied thoughtfully within the ministry without overshadowing our core mission. As we examine the four types of behavior modification, we uncover strategies that respect individual needs while fostering an environment where every soul can flourish in faith.
Hi, my name is Tracy Coral and welcome to Indispensable People. I'm a wife, mom, teacher, pastor and missionary, and I believe that every person should have the opportunity to know Christ, grow in Him and serve Him with the gifts that he has given, no matter their ability. Over 65 million Americans have a disability. That's 25% of the population. However, over 80% of them are not inside the walls of our church. Let's dive into those hard topics biblical foundations, perceptions and world-changing ideas. Hello and welcome to another episode of Indispensable People.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk about behavior modification. This is a topic that, within the church context, maybe you won't hear a whole lot about, and I'm going to explain why. But first we really need to dive into what is behavior modification? So behavior modification the definition of it is the alteration of behavioral patterns through the use of such learning techniques of biofeedback or positive or negative reinforcement. Their term might be behavior therapy and if you're serving in ministry or in education or anything like that, you probably have heard these terms from your parents, and maybe they're talking about the things that they're taking their children to and or how they're helping them with different types of behaviors, or maybe they're giving you suggestions on how or what to do when you're ministering specifically to the kids. Now, why don't you hear this term regularly when it comes to ministry? Simply because our goals are different. In ministry, our goal is to make Jesus accessible, so that every person has the opportunity to know God, to grow in him and to serve him with his gifts that he has given them. So behavior modification to some degree sounds like oh yeah, that would work within our ministry context. However, again, our goals are different. They're trying to change their behavior from an extraneous kind of way. Right when we work through and do with God, we're doing a heart change from the inside out. Neither of those things are a bad thing. Both of those things are great helps to that particular individual. It's just not our technical need within the church. Well, the behavior modification that they're working on outside of the church benefit the inside of the church for sure. So again, neither of the things are bad. Neither goal is bad, neither can, neither should really work against each other. However, listen, I can be a good person and I can make great choices, but that doesn't mean that my eternity is secure. So, as the church, we want to make Jesus accessible, because that changes lives for eternity and then what we can pray and hope for is that the behavior change comes together as a part of that. So don't get me mixed up.
Speaker 1:In talking about regular experiences with children who you're trying to teach right from wrong and all of those kinds of things, we are referring to children with special needs, adults with special needs who may struggle with behavior, not because they know or don't know what's right or wrong, but because there is some processing, some intellectual disability or some type of emotions that can't be regulated, that are typically had that cause these behaviors. So it's not the same thing. I can't go into these children and just teach them right or wrong and expect that that change will happen. However, the strategy in teaching them the behavior modification is very similar to anyone else really. So there are typical four types of behavior modification, and that includes positive punishment, negative punishment, positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. If you're a parent, you've done this in some capacity, so you have positively reinforced a good behavior by maybe saying great job or giving a reward, and you have most likely given negative punishment, where you have maybe asked your young child to take a timeout or your teenager might lose their cell phone for a certain period of time, or they might be grounded and can't go anywhere. Here's the different ways of thinking. That sounds like the normal ways of handling everything for anyone.
Speaker 1:However, within behavior modification I'm gonna give you another definition. It's generally thought of as the process of changing patterns of human behavior using various motivational techniques. So these patterns in our kiddos or adults or teens with special needs are so ingrained that they need special training to help remove those patterns or to change or modify those patterns. So in accommodations to teach those patterns might include visuals or social groups or experiences that help them to set them up, to have the experience that the behavior might occur within, so that they can walk into the new behavior pattern. So how is this helpful? How does it engage us further in ministry in positive ways? How can we grow from this knowledge?
Speaker 1:Well, just recently I was training a church. I was working with their childcare volunteers, their children's ministry, and one particular individual raised their hand and they asked a question that was really very, very important, and she prefaced her conversation with the fact that she is involved with ABA therapy and so that's a behavior modification type therapy, and I had actually had a conversation with her prior to the training starting while she was just sitting and waiting and I asked her how she got involved in this ministry and she shared a little bit about her job and I asked her a little bit about it and how she felt about it. Because ABA therapy some people think it's terrible, some people think it's great. It's kind of in a back and forth kind of thing right now in its pendulum shift, and so she said that her initial thoughts and experience with it said she felt kind of like it was a bit harsh, and she said that the training videos that they watched almost made it look like they were programming the students. And she said I really wish those training videos would change, because that's not really what we do and it really boils down to teaching children the strategies or again, adults, teens, whichever teaching them the strategies to cope in situations in which they had already built a negative pattern with. So if you think about it that way, I mean we all should be doing that in different parts of our lives. This is just to a different extreme, and so let's look into how does that work within the context of ministry.
Speaker 1:So are we going to have behavior problems in ministry? You betcha it's gonna happen. First of all, no human being is perfect. That's why we needed a savior, and that is why we are in the process of sanctification for our whole life, because we will always need to get better. We will always need to work towards perfection, and reaching that is an impossibility until the day we enter heaven with Jesus. So, in that respect, can I do the same things as a behavior modification coach? No, first of all, that's a full-time therapy session job, and they are highly trained individuals who receive certifications and licenses to do what they do. So are your regular volunteers going to fall into that ability? No, they're not. So we should not try to do something that is outside of the realm of our abilities. That's not going to help the child. That will only hurt the person that you are working with. So can we use some basic positive reinforcements to help that person to work better within the environment that they're in? Absolutely. Let me give you an example One of the kids that I worked with a few years ago.
Speaker 1:He had two problems while he was at church typically. One was that during a certain period of the service, he would try to escape out of the room. Some people would refer to that term as elopement, and it was a little bit different in his case because we were able to find the source of the cause. So what we came to learn is that the music really bothered him. It was too loud for him and during that time he would try to leave the room. He just wasn't able to communicate that. We were able to kind of do some figuring out and realizing what that was, and we were able to offer him some noise-canceling headphones. And before that, before we were able to figure out what the actual source of the problem was, we took him into our sensory room during that time and that seemed to help. And then we graduated to the noise-canceling headphones and then onto some other things when he became comfortable with the environment.
Speaker 1:So the second problem that we experienced with this particular person is that focus and attention work very, very difficult for him, and whenever we would try to do something he would become distracted, and it wasn't that he just wasn't listening. He would try to do another activity or something like that. So then he was also disrupting the children in the group that he was a part of. So what do we do? There's a couple things. First, we find the source, like why is he doing this? Is it preference? Is it focus and attention that he doesn't have the ability to do? Is it the fact that he is not understanding what's being talked about or what he's being asked about? Those give you a couple of different things. If it is just preference, then we teach a little bit of respect. We help them to understand that during certain times we'll listen and participate, because when someone else is speaking to us, we give them that respect of speaking back. You can teach some of that, some positive reinforcement, by encouraging words. You can do that with stickers, and every time you notice them listening or participating, you can reward that with a sticker. They could work towards something.
Speaker 1:What we started with that particular person was he loved basketball, and so the time in our gym, at our church, was very valuable to him, and so we set up a reward system where, when he did a certain few things, then he would go and shoot a basket or two. That wasn't the full source of the problem or the behavior that we saw. What we were able to find is that he couldn't continue his focus and attention after a certain period of time. He just wasn't able to regulate that at that particular time, and so we had to find ways to help him to regulate that, and what we came up with is what we called a transition box, and that box was full of things that he liked, he preferred. He liked Legos and he liked superheroes. So there was a small coloring book with crayons. In addition to that there was some silly putty that he could fidget with with his hands.
Speaker 1:So those items were things that he could and knew, because he was taught about that box and how he could use it, that he could use that during his time while he was trying to listen, and what we started to notice was that while our children's pastor was talking and teaching, she would ask questions like well, what do you think about this? Or who was the person that did this? Or some things like that, and under this child's breath he would say the answer real quietly to himself. So we noticed that the transition box was beneficial to him. It didn't further distract him, but it gave him something to do with his hands, that he could now listen, help and stretch out the time to focus even longer. One thing that also was a benefit to him was the opportunity to draw out the story. So in the children's ministry room there is a giant chalk wall, and so during the Bible story he would go over to the chalk wall and he would draw out the story.
Speaker 1:Now, all of this that I'm saying to you is not the responsibility of the children's pastor, but of the special needs ministry director or coordinator or someone like that, who then assigns a buddy with that individual and that buddy would do those supports to help them. Now are we doing intensive therapy and teaching different strategies to handle those different things? No, what we're doing is we're using positive reinforcements to help them to participate in what ways that work best for them within the context of ministry, and so sometimes that doesn't always work. Sometimes they need to be taught in a separate way, differently, using more visual accommodations or maybe a hands-on experience, or if it's just the need of having less people in a room, less distractions Any of those kinds of things can make a very big difference when reaching and teaching someone who needs some extra support. Now, I didn't talk to you about negative reinforcements. Why didn't I talk to you about negative reinforcements?
Speaker 1:Here's the thing especially when children are young, we want to make sure that they have church in their mind as a place that they want to be, a place that they enjoy, a place that they feel safe, a place where they feel like people care about them and feel valued. And if we heavily focus on the negative reinforcement, then we're going to lose them. And we're already talking about children who, or adults who, have difficulty regulating their thoughts and their behavior. So if we cause them to feel unsafe or anxious or not enjoying church, they're going to have some behaviors that's going to make it difficult for their parents to get them to church. So, yes, we push them a little bit at a time to help them to enter into different types of ministry. However, we don't push them so far that they don't want to come back.
Speaker 1:So, 10 negative reinforcement be used absolutely. It's not off of the table and there should be consequences, especially for certain behaviors where we hurt someone else or we use unkind words or things like that. But it should be in a little bit of a gentle way that helps them to understand the situation, realize that what they had done was not okay. Maybe there's a consequence for it, but if we can keep it positive, which means we're heading off those behaviors before they become a huge issue or before they get out of hand, so that we can all still walk out knowing that we've created a safe space, that we've not provided a space full of anxiety and discomfort, but that we have a trusting relationship between the buddy and the child and the children's pastor or the youth pastor, whoever they might be being ministered to up under. And so we want to make it the most positive experience that we can within reason, because we need to also know that if we allow certain behaviors, those behaviors can grow and become worse, and so positive first, negative is your second option.
Speaker 1:And then one thing that we definitely need to consider is when things get completely out of hand and that safety could be a risk. And so if a child or an adult or a youth starts having some behavioral things that are happening and it's putting the other people in the room in an unsafe situation, here's a very brief, easy way to take control of that situation. One you remove the rest of the people from the space. That takes away an audience if this is an attention-getting behavior, or it removes the embarrassment of maybe not being able to regulate an emotion that now others aren't watching and escalating the behavior. That also makes sure that all of those people that were in the room are safe, and so you've just taken them out into a different space.
Speaker 1:And then what you need to also do is, if there is some physical harm that's happening, you want to remove everything from that space that you possibly can. Kids are unbelievably strong, so we don't even have to consider the strength of a teen and an adult in this type of situation. It can cause damage to themselves and damage to anything that might be around them. So if you can move that whether it's furniture, chairs, tables if you can push them to the side and out of the way and give that person space to help themselves come back and regulate to a typical behavior, that is what would be most beneficial for them. So, in that respect, you're also then going to go ahead and get their parents. Someone's going to go ahead and get their parent or their caregiver so that they can further address, because at no time should you put your hands on them, should you try to restrain them.
Speaker 1:Again, that's training outside of our expertise within ministry. So we never want to push those things that, again, we're not trained or licensed to do. And if you are trained and licensed to do, it's not within the context of the church. So you'll want to make sure that you check within your church's policies and procedures in their different ministries to make sure that you are doing proper procedure in those contexts. But that is the best way to keep everyone else safe, the individual safe, and to be sure that you have maintained as much of their dignity as possible within that situation.
Speaker 1:So again, behavior modification. We're not therapists, we're not doing the intensive things to do a behavior change. What we're doing is we're giving them opportunities to learn some positive reinforcement within the context of ministry that is minimally invasive and done again by their buddy or someone who is assigned to them so that they have the proper support, and we're giving them opportunities to engage in ways that work best for them. Why do we do this? We do it so that every person has an accessible gospel, so that every person has the opportunity to know Christ, to grow in him and to serve him with the gifts that he has given. Do I know everything about disability ministry? Do I have all the answers? Have I done everything perfectly? I have absolutely not. We are going to continue this conversation so that people of all abilities can have the opportunity to know Christ, to grow in him and to serve him with the gifts that he has given them.