TRUTH: BELONGING TO GOD’S COVENANT

As my colleague, Professor Doug Kuiper, pointed out to me recently after he had read many different articles in various church magazines and books on the topic of special needs children, no one talks about the covenant! We have been given a precious heritage in the truth of God’s covenant and we need to consider it in connection with special needs members.

The covenant of God is not a contract, treaty, or pact as has been widely taught (and what would that mean for special needs individuals?), but the warm relationship of friendship that God establishes with His chosen people in Jesus Christ. In that relationship, God loves, saves, and protects His people as His friend-servants, and by His almighty grace, they love, worship, and serve Him as their Friend-Sovereign. God promises to be the God of us and our spiritual seed in the line of generations. Our brothers and sisters with physical or mental disabilities belong to this covenant of God as much as anyone else. Whether as adults or as children, those with special needs also enjoy the family life of God.

Many aspects of the covenant are important to think about in connection with special needs members. I will only mention three. First, God’s covenant is gracious. We are not adopted by God and incorporated into the fellowship of Christ’s death and resurrection through our own meritorious will-power, strength, or intelligence. God’s covenant is not a relationship of worthiness whereby the “strong” and “honorable” can earn their way in and keep themselves secure in God’s love, while “those members of the body which seem to be more feeble” (1 Cor. 12:22) and “which we think to be less honourable” (v. 23) are left on the outside looking in with sad eyes and a drooping countenance because they do not have the same willpower, strength, or intelligence. Of ourselves, we are all spiritually disabled and Christ is now and forever the full sufficiency of everyone in God’s covenant.

Second, the covenant is friendship. The staggering truth of the gospel is that the Most High God, who dwells in light unto which no man can approach, is our Friend for Jesus’ sake. We can dwell together with Him in intimate communion, knowing Him as we are known, loving Him as we are loved, and speaking with Him as He speaks to us. This is also true for special needs members of the covenant. Sometimes certain disabilities make communicating and relational interactions with others challenging. However, there is always a way of access open to the heavenly Father so that we can speak to Him in prayer even as He speaks to us through His Word. Even when some saints have significant intellectual disabilities and very limited, non-verbal communication, we should not underestimate God’s power to communicate His love to their hearts and minds through the simplest expressions of the gospel spoken and sung.

Third, the covenant is servanthood. God is not only our Friend but our Sovereign whom we are obligated to love and serve in the unique position and with the unique abilities He has given to us. Special needs members are not exempt from service. If they belong to God’s covenant, then the demands of the covenant come upon them also. Each according to his ability is called and privileged to serve God and others. As they are able, special needs members also find great joy in serving even in the simplest tasks in the life of the church. For those most severely disabled, their act of service may often be more passive as they serve the church with illustrations of God’s grace and as precious objects of affection. PROGRESS: CHANGES FOR GOOD

In the last several generations, God has brought significant progress in the way His people view and treat special needs brothers and sisters. This progress can be illustrated from the book Elim: A Chicago Christian School and Life Training Center for the Disabled.1 Author Robert Swierenga provides a detailed history of Elim, the first Reformed Christian school in America dedicated to providing specialized education for people with mental and physical disabilities. The Dutch Reformed in the Chicagoland were “pioneers in this newly emerging field of special education,” for when Elim began in 1948 it was still “the dark ages for the disabled” (p. xvii). After Elim began, it grew rapidly by riding the crest of the wave of special education consciousness in the 1950s and mandates from the federal and state governments that by 1968 required special education in public schools. The stories from this book featuring the Christian Reformed Church likely mirror the history of many Christian churches across denominational lines and show two areas of significant progress.

First, special needs children were formerly ignored out of ignorance or shame. Swierenga notes that until the 1940s it was common for parents to keep children with special needs hidden behind closed doors for their entire lives. For example, he tells how one child was told to hide whenever the doorbell rang (p. 2), and among the five boys and two girls who made up the first seven students at Elim, “…several had not even been away from home before. They did not recognize objects as familiar as a child’s swing” (p. 3). Imagine that—a child so concealed from the public that he or she has never seen a playground!

How thankful we can be that God has brought Christians to see that special needs children are not objects of shame to hide, but valuable and cherished saints—fellow members of His covenant! God’s friends! Why would we hide God’s friends, when He is not ashamed to be called their God (Heb. 11:16)? Upon those “we think to be less honourable” we are called to “bestow more abundant honour” (1 Cor. 12:23) by bringing them into public view for our friendship, attention, service, and care.

We can be thankful for events such as the following in our Protestant Reformed circles (and there are plenty of other efforts that could be mentioned):

• “Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Day”

This is an annual event at many of our elementary schools to help raise awareness for mental, physical, and other disabilities. There is usually a chapel and throughout the school day the students participate in activities to help learn about different disabilities.

• “Serve One Another Day”

This was a new idea for 2025 PR Young Peoples’ Convention, located at a camp relatively close to the Grand Rapids, MI area. On this day, individuals with special needs came to the camp to join the hundreds of conventioneers for free-time and specially planned activities. It was a great opportunity to put the convention theme “Free to Serve” into action. The photos on the front cover of this magazine capture well the spirit of the day.

A second area of significant progress is in eduction. When Elim began in the 1940s, there were no teachers trained in special education and so it was a struggle to find qualified and willing teachers. At the time, the college of the CRC, Calvin College (now University) offered no degrees in special education. The first two teachers at Elim were exemplary Christian women, one a nurse, the other employed by a bank, but neither had any formal training in education, let alone special education (pp. 2-3).

How far the Christian church, including the PRC, has come by God’s grace! God has given to us the Society for Protestant Reformed Special Education for over 40 years! It was established in 1983 with “the mission to provide God-centered education within the Christian school structure for those with special educational needs, whether they be mental or physical” (from the 2025 PRSE Newsletter). Currently, seven men from the West Michigan area serve on this board with subcommittees for education, publicity, technology, finance, building and transportation, and fundraising.

Significantly, the Society’s four foundational principles are grounded in the truth of the covenant, the final stating, “In His infinite wisdom God has given to some covenant parents children who are mentally and/or physically handicapped. They too must receive covenant instruction according to their ability. This instruction is the solemn responsibility of all God’s people” (from PRSE website). The doctrine of the covenant demands that if our children cannot benefit from the regular instruction given in existing Christian schools and they need specialized care and instruction, we work to the utmost of our power to provide them what they need. Under God’s blessing we have aimed to do this, and He has given us devoted teachers, para-pros, and assistants who faithfully serve in special education programs and in other ways at various schools, carefully tailoring instruction and support to the needs of each child. Moreover, in God’s providence, many Christan colleges and public universities currently offer a degree in special education.

NO TERMINATION: INFANTICIDE AND ABORTION ARE MURDER!

But we would never have the privilege to know, cherish, and serve these special needs friend-servants of God in His covenant if we disposed of them. There is something worse, much worse, than hiding or ignoring them: terminating their lives by murdering them. What a dark and depraved world this is!

The November-December 2025 issue of Reformed Perspective, a magazine that goes out to a primarily Canadian audience, featured an article entitled “Veya’s Story.” Veya Hope was a darling little girl born to her parents on December 4, 2023, and taken to glory on August 1, 2025. She was born with Down Syndrome and because of a heart defect requiring surgery, was eventually transferred to SickKids Hospital in Toronto, one of the leading children’s hospitals in the world. But Veya’s parents got the distinct impression that the staff at SickKids had no desire to fight for the life of little Veya. Veya’s mother recounts how the medical team there tried to “stealth euthanize” Veya by denying her life-saving measures, such as a necessary liver transplant for her undiagnosed liver disease. She stated, “…you could just tell through the conversations with the doctors that they were really just trying to wrap things up with her and kind of coerce us into letting her go rather than help her” (p. 19). Based on this experience and her survey of the national landscape, Veya’s mother concluded, “Canada has become a death culture” (p. 21).

Veya’s story was picked up and featured in an article entitled “Practicers of Infanticide” in the January 2026 issue of First Things, an inter-religious magazine whose founding editor and current editor are Roman Catholic. The author of the article, Alexander Rainkin, cites various studies to show that “SickKids has historically been at the forefront of letting children die of their disabilities, especially children with Down syndrome” (p. 44). Moreover, he argues that the practice of selective nontreatment based on disabilities is not unique to SickKids Hospital but “accords with the direction of the field of medicine over the past century. The preventable deaths of children with disabilities occur, for the most part, without media interest” (p. 45). According to Rainkin, we know very little about what the medical world is doing to special needs children because we are not told.

Jeremy and Megi Feenstra of Hope PRC, Redlands, CA came face to face with this culture of death in the United States in a proposal for termination. Their special needs son, Tanner John, was born on June 8, 2019 at the astonishing small size of 1 lb. 2 oz. Before Tanner was born, an ultrasound revealed something very disconcerting and so their doctor advised that they terminate the pregnancy. When you get to the end of this magazine, you can read a little contribution from the Feenstras about Tanner (almost 7 years old now!) and their interactions with their doctor regarding abortion (see p. 313).

Termination? Termination is not medical care but murder. God forbids murder, especially the murder of precious children born to believers! Ezekiel 16:21 comes to mind: “That thou hast slain my children, and delivered them to cause them to pass through the fire for them?” My children! When the Israelites wickedly devoted their children to the fire as sacrifices to an idol, God was indignant and charged them with murdering His children.

“Termination” is not only murder, but theft that robs our Christian communities of the special privilege of cherishing, serving, and learning from all the wonderful special needs members of God’s covenant. We do not despise, disregard, or dishonor any of our fellow members, and certainly not the most severely disabled, by “terminating” them. Rather, we “bestow more abundant honour” (1 Cor. 12:23), even as “God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked” (1 Cor. 12:24).

1 Robert P. Swierenga, Elim: A Chicago Christian School and Life-Training Center for the Disabled (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005). All page references to this book will be included in parentheses in the body of the article.