Commission on Special Ministries

1. Commissionon SpecialMinistries

3. WELS Special Ministries will help you reach your community with the Gospel

4. Your church has something to offer your community that no one else is doing for them

5. WELS Special Ministries materials are great for outreach!

6. Outreach to people who are visually impaired: • Have your church’s website meet criteria for the blind with internet readers • Advertise that your church can provide large print worship resources. • Offer to bring a blind person to church, do errands for them or come with them to a social event • Help a visually impaired neighbor obtain the free braille and large print materials from WELS • Offer to email your church’s worship folder’s digital file to the blind to convert to Braille • Invite visually impaired people to church and sit with them to explain what they can’t see

7. Does your church’s website plainly say whether your church is “looped,” has assistive listening devices or interpreted services? • Provide printed sermons or Bible study material or captioned videos on your website • Obtain an interpreter whenever you know a deaf person will attend a wedding, funeral or Sunday worship Outreach to people who aredeaf or hard of hearing

8. NEW: Through “Video Remote Interpreting” (VRI) even isolated WELS congregations can serve a deaf worshiper who signs.

9. Outreach to people with an intellectual or developmental disability • Start a Jesus Cares Ministries Bible class and invite local group homes to bring their residents • Have your teens start a New Friends group and invite community teens with intellectual / developmental disabilities to come • Start a Special Needs Family Network to support parents whose children have special needs • Start a social group for young men and women with higher functioning Autism (Aspergers) to get together • Offer respite care on a regular basis to a neighbor

10. Have a group from your church do visitation and devotions for people who will never come to your church! • Adopt a homebound neighbor! • Offer respite care or a support group for caregivers! • Parish nurses within your congregation can offer neighborhood outreach through community health fairs Outreach to homebound and nursing homes

11. Send a Spiritual Deployment Kit to someone in service • Befriend a neighbor whose spouse is deployed Outreach to military families

12. Outreach to prisoners • Train a group to bring the Word to your local jail • Become a Christian penpal or Bible course quiz corrector for prisoners

13. WELS Special Ministries equips lay people for community outreach throughJail Ministry Team Training

14. Support his desire to get Chaplain Certification and serve the community as chaplain for the local police, fire, or health care facility. • Keep him and his family encouraged by using Care Committee for Called Worker materials Tune up your pastor for outreach

15. Outreach to people who struggle and seek help Start a Christian support group!

16. NEW: Addressing Internet porn temptation and addiction “It teaches us to say, “No!’ to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled…lives.” -Titus 2:12

17. Conquerors through Christ offers a Lutheran, Biblical, Christ-centered path of hope “Confess your sins to one another and pray for each other in order that you may be healed.” -James 5:16

18. A new website:www.conquerorsthroughchrist.net

19. Commissionon SpecialMinistries