Robby Kiley on Creating Inclusive Community and Welcome

The biggest surprise was that community is what drove anything that was happening. And anybody that was really serious, anybody that was really being successful in this space, it wasn't just “Hi, you're welcome at Mass.” It’s “Hi, you’re welcome at Mass, and because of this, we’re going to advocate in this space, we’re going to create space for you to have community here, or we’re going to make sure that welcome extends beyond the physical worship space and the trappings of worship and into our social spaces, into the way that we even register people into the parish and the things that we think about and ask about, and what we put on our surveys, and all of that. Those communities were drivers for welcome, belonging, inclusion, but then they continued to ensure that that kept growing.

From the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, you are listening to Public Worship and the Christian Life: a podcast that amplifies people and stories that share wisdom and wonder about Christian public worship. I’m Kristen Verhulst, producer and host. In this season’s episodes, I share conversations with project directors who participated in the institute’s Vital Worship, Vital Preaching Grants program, an initiative which provides funds and encouragement for worshiping communities across Canada and the United States, in order to design and engage year-long projects that connect public worship with Christian discipleship and faith formation.  
In this episode, I talk with Robby Kiley of Saint Pius X Parish in Granger, Indiana, where he directed a project that explored ways to serve people better, especially those across the spectrum of abilities in the Catholic Mass. Welcome to the podcast.

Robby, it’s just great to meet you and talk with you today about your work in the Vital Worship, Vital Preaching grants program. I wonder if you can just tell us about your worshiping community and the grant project that you helped lead.

I work at Saint Pius X Catholic Church in Granger, Indiana. We're a parish of about three thousand families, and among our families we have a decent-sized population of individuals with special needs, whether it be adults and then children and their families that we serve. So I actually got my start at the parish volunteering, working in a religious education program for children with cognitive disabilities and continued then as the DRE, the director of religious education at the parish for the last ten years after that.

We really wanted to find a way, both in our parish and then in our wider diocese, which is South Bend, Fort Wayne, and all the spaces in between in Indiana, how do we find ways to serve people better, especially in the Catholic Mass? I get to work with a lot of wonderful friends in Protestant circles, and there’s a lot more adaptability depending on your worshiping community with what you can do with the liturgy. The Catholic Mass isn't always that space. We kind of have a formula we need to be in. So we wanted to figure out, how do we work around those margins? And how do we create community and other spaces in there to welcome people, even if we have specific moments, obviously, that we’re going through in different ways, that we need to be with people. 
So through the Vital Worship grant I had the opportunity to visit eight different Catholic communities across the Midwest and meet with parishioners there, meet with leaders, meet with folks served by the various programs that we saw, and really just gather best practices that we can bring back both to our parish, our diocese, and then hopefully share with others as well.

Was there a moment of opportunity or a challenge that sparked the idea that maybe you should think of a project, or what was the initial impetus for the project?

Léon Van Ommen is a theologian out of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland that works on autism and liturgy, and he comes from a Protestant background. I went to a talk with him with a former professor at Notre Dame, and we started talking about what he had seen in his space, and he had a beautiful encounter in Asia with a church that had—they had an autistic church, and they had completely redesigned the liturgy to work around the needs and the capacity of the autistic individuals within that community. And it was beautiful and really wonderful. So we just asked, “What can we do in this Catholic space? How do we do it?” And my professor, actually, is one of the folks that helps read all the grants with Calvin, and she said, “You know what? This is the space to do it; let’s go explore. This is what we need to do in this space, and you have the community and the resources to set out and see what we can do.” So she is really great—Kim Belcher. She’s kind of pushed me and said, “Go see what you can find.” So I have a wonderful parish that gave me a lot of freedom. I normally work Sundays because I do all the after-school religious education, but they were able to help me find a couple Sundays off to go travel and see Masses at other parishes and other communities, and it was really lovely just to see so many things that were the same, but so many things that were different and beautiful, to meet the needs of people with disabilities.

Is there a particular visit that really stood out for you and was really encouraging as you think about your own community.

I mean, each one had really lovely things. I loved being with the SPREAD community in Chicago. That’s their special religious education program through the diocese, the archdiocese, and they do a liturgy just for their community members and their families twice a month—once in English, once in Spanish—and that was just such a beautiful space where often when we’re in this space of accommodating for people, especially with cognitive disabilities or autism, if we want to be sensory friendly, is the term we’ll often use, it’s, How do we shorten things? How do we just minimal, minimal, minimal? And that absolutely makes sense when we’re thinking about sensory overload, loud music, triggering things. But what’s great about SPREAD is that they were able to bring so many components of their religious education program into the liturgy and use that to enhance it. So instead of the Mass [being] a full hour, maybe more, . . . a lot of sensory-friendly Masses will try to cut them down to a half hour and eliminate. But the things that they really highlighted were things that helped the people with cognitive disabilities in the space to engage and participate more in that Mass. So some things were still shorter, but some things were actually longer because they were able to bring in a lot more symbolism or a lot more kind of rich symbols to help build out that Mass so that the preparation of the altar took fifteen minutes and had like every single member of the community doing it. But it mirrored the way that their class would prepare a table for dinner in their classroom. So it made really strongly that connection of a shared Eucharistic meal together in that space that was really beautiful. So they were great to see.

There was also St. Augustine’s in Cleveland, which started as a deaf community and then, as they began to develop sensitivity and care for the deaf individuals there and siblings and other spaces, they also created space for first the blind community, and then individuals with disabilities as well. And so it just became this snowball where there was one means of inclusion and then more and more and more and more out of that. They just kept asking: What can we do next? And the community kept welcoming in more and more people, which was really beautiful to see, and still one of the coolest Masses I've been a part of. I’ve never seen Mass where they had someone signing for the pastor, the priest, but then also someone who was deaf helping the congregation to signing all the communal responses and pieces. So beautiful liturgies there too, and everywhere else. I mean, it was great to travel around, but those are two that stand out in my mind.

Thank you. And for your own parish, how did you introduce this project to them, and how did they respond?

Well, we have a great staff that’s really engaged. And so part of this was kind of taking this out and bringing it back, and so meeting with our staff, especially our liturgy team, but also then all of our community members, inviting them in and just sharing the fruits of what we saw and really trying to synthesize it in a way where we could talk about what was happening. Folks were overcoming obstacles, right? There were certain things that were a problem for people fully participating, and these were creative solutions that overcame those obstacles. So we had to name what the obstacles were. But then we just got to share those best practices and realized that something might work for our community; something that we saw might not work for our community. But really the backbone of all this was just creative solution and listening to the people in front of them. And so some of this too is just saying, “This is what we saw. What did you hear? What can we listen to you now that you’ve seen this that you want to have happen, whether it’s something that you saw that we can just do one for one and take out of this rich library of best practices that we’ve created, or something else entirely. I had a family that came just the other week, and they said, “You know what would really help us engage in Masses is if we could just get the music ahead of time, because my kids—often we find for kids with sensory processing disorders maybe the music is too much. But for their kids, they love the music. It’s just that they can't process it reading the sheet music live when they get into church quickly enough, so can we get it ahead of time through the week and we’ll live with it so we can actually participate and do that. And that wasn’t something we had seen anywhere else, but it was an easy request. They said, “Well, this is how you can help us.” So somebody was just like, “OK, this is the framework; these are the problems, and these are some solutions we’ve seen. But what else do you need?” And that openness to hearing folks, to let them speak into that space.

Yeah, that emphasis on deep listening so that people can express what they need is so important. When you kind of look back now over that whole grant year, what were those surprising moments? Like, you thought the grant project was going to do this, but then actually something maybe a little different happened that was an unexpected joy.

When we set out, the language that we used when we applied for the grant is we wanted to find visible markers of welcome, of belonging, of inclusion. What do we see at these places that communicate to someone on the outside that this is a place where someone can belong with a disability, and we found those for sure. But I think the biggest marker—and it wasn’t a marker; it was just something that we saw everywhere—the biggest surprise was that community is what drove anything that was happening. And anybody that was really serious, anybody that was really being successful in this space, it wasn't just “Hi, you're welcome at Mass.” It’s “Hi, you’re welcome at Mass, and because of this, we’re going to advocate in this space, we’re going to create space for you to have community here, or we’re going to make sure that welcome extends beyond the physical worship space and the trappings of worship and into our social spaces, into the way that we even register people into the parish and the things that we think about and ask about, and what we put on our surveys, and all of that.

Those communities were drivers for welcome, belonging, inclusion, but then they continued to ensure that that kept growing and continued to support it.

The last parish I visited, St. Augustine, they had just gotten a new pastor, and their work of inclusion, especially with the deaf, had been going on for forty years, and it was all driven by this pastor and then the staff that he hired. And the new pastor they brought in was great, but he didn't have that institutional knowledge; he didn't have that vision. And he was close to retirement, too, and there were some things that he wanted to do that were his way. And what’s beautiful is that community is so established, so intact, so bought into that vision they're like, “Guess what, Brother, you’re doing it anyway!” Sometimes it was staff leading the charge and pushing that. But that was this beautiful example of this community that’s fully bought into “This is who we are. We are a community that welcomes people with disabilities, whether they’re deaf, blind-, if they have a cognitive disability—whatever the case may be, this is what we do. This is part of our DNA, and we're going to continue to push for that even if the person at the top isn’t fully bought in. And I mean no slander to what he's doing. He’s just a new person in that setting, and that staff made sure that that was what they did there.

How are you in your own parish now that your grant project has concluded but you’re going forward? In what ways are you keeping these energies around this alive, these best practices, and even that sense that the community, the parish, has owned this deep inclusion? What are some of those small ways you’re keeping that fire going?

I think what was great about this project is that it just foregrounded the need for us, right? It made it more visible and it gave us an excuse to bring these communities together, the people from the community, to listen to them. And so there’s some beautiful things that are going to come out from this even in the next few months. We do a speaker, a witness on prayer every year. And our witness in November, who’s going to do that is a mom of three children with disabilities. And she’s kind of sharing some of her story of slowly finding more and more welcome in the parish to the point where they at first didn’t always feel comfortable being at mass together. They slowly moved from being there one parent and then the other parent, to they would bring their kids but only in a cry room. The way she shares it, it's beautiful. One day they came and all the cry rooms were full, and they looked at each other and said, “You know what? We’re going to just try and be in with the congregation today. There’s accessible pews right up by the altar; we’re going to try those out.” (Because two of their kids are in wheelchairs.) “And so we can sit there and do that. That space was created for us. So let’s try it.” And now they will proudly tell you that they are “inside the church” people. So getting to share their story with the rest of the community is going to be really beautiful.

And hopefully around that same time we’re able to announce a few structural things that are changing in our parish. We have a relatively brand-new church. It’s seven years old, the new space that we have, yet there’s not a space that has those sensory accommodations. And so the goal is, alongside that speaker in November, we’re going to announce that we’re creating a sensory room solely devoted for folks that aren’t able to be within the congregation but want to be participating as much as they can or need a space to step out or do something like that. Not a cry room; not an in-and-out. We call them calming rooms, but I’ll use “cry room” since that’s more familiar, perhaps, but it’s dedicated for folks with sensory processing issues. And I’m really excited about that, and just kind of the momentum. Each step that we make in that space, springboards more and more steps, and I think that’s what’s beautiful in that space of  inclusion, but also belonging. We’ve seen the community, we’ve met these people, we know they’re here, and so we know they need to belong. And so what else can we do? What more can we do? How do we make sure that the next person that’s in that same boat also has that same spirit of welcome and belonging.

What encouragement would you give to someone listening right now who also wants to embrace this inclusive community but maybe just doesn't know how to quite approach perhaps the leadership or just take that first step? What kind of encouragement would you offer that person?

Part of it’s just finding someone that’s willing to listen and come alongside you, because more voices are better. It’s been a privilege to be here as a staff member that’s got to be a champion for this, but in most parishes I’m an exception. My pastor for twenty-three years here had a younger brother with Down syndrome, and so he was always very thoughtful about how do we do welcome for people with disabilities as well. But that's not necessarily the norm. So definitely find community. What we noticed was that community was what drove a lot of this in any of the parishes we went to. So find those other people you can stack hands with and come together, because a request from one person is great, but if I’ve got three or four, then suddenly I understand it’s not just an isolated concern. It’s people out there.

And share your stories. I think it’s just so important. Every time I go and talk with ministry students or liturgical directors or other folks, here’s the real stories of the families that I see and the challenges they’re facing, because it’s this place that allows us to have empathy. Folks don’t get into work in the church because they want to say no all the time; they’re empathetic people. They care about people. And so how do we really let those stories come out?

And then also just a reminder that this isn’t something that necessarily is going to cost millions of dollars to change. It’s not something that has to disrupt everything we do. It may just be simple, small changes. One of the things that we recommended coming out of this is that parishes [be] upfront and just say, “Here are all the accommodations that we can make,” and put it on their website. I was writing that for our parish last week. Here’s everything we have. Let’s be honest about what we don’t have. Let’s be honest about where we’re going, because for a lot of folks there’s that anxiety even before I can get there—would I be welcomed? And so I can’t tell you how many people have become a part of our parish because we have a ministry for people with disabilities, with common disabilities. They’re just searching for that for their kids. They find us on Google and they're calling us there, but they’ve searched ten other places before they found us, or they’re willing to drive and come here and do that. So just be open about that, and put it in places where people can see, because that takes nothing special, no special training. Anything like that, it just takes a willingness to step out and to be into that. So, you know, share what you have. Some of these things are not onerous; they’re not going to take up the whole church budget to do. There’s small things that we can do. And we’ve got some resources—folks, come over to our parish website in November. We’ll actually even have “The Top Ten Things You Can Do Right Now” on our website and encourage folks, because there’s some small, easy things that you can do.

Well, Robby, it's been great talking with you and to hear your deep enthusiasm and love for including all people, and it’s great to hear about your community there in Granger, Indiana.

Well, hey, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. This grant was just a great opportunity for our community to grow, and I hope this is just an encouragement for others to know that they don’t need to solve everything today. But especially for our parish workers, our church staff listening, start with the person in front of you and ask them what they need. That’s how all this started with us too. There was someone that came, and they had a need, and we responded to it. And then we just kept finding out more and more ways we can respond. So find that person in front of you. Start there. And it can grow and grow and be a beautiful thing.

Learn more about the Vital Worship, Vital Preaching grants program through the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at our website: worship.calvin.edu.