The noise is boisterous. The joy is unbounded. And the teaching is not only fun, it’s straight out of the Bible.

This is how it looks when a bunch of people with intellectual disabilities (along with their families, carers and anyone else who feels like coming) get together for Jesus Club Church – a service created just for them at St Paul’s, Castle Hill. 

“We have so much fun at Jesus Club Church!” says Heather, a member of the parish’s Jesus Club, which is one of 24 such groups held at mainly Anglican churches across the country for adults who have intellectual disability. 

The Castle Hill group has been running for more than a decade, and its 10th anniversary celebration late last year was the catalyst for the church service.

“Julie [Horgan, who runs the St Paul’s Jesus Club] had organised a live band,” explains the Rev Keith Baker, the parish’s discipleship minister. “She’d asked some of our musos to come and play songs the Jesus Clubbers normally sing with a recording on the screen, and they were so excited and filled with joy about singing the songs they loved with a live band. I said, ‘These guys need church!’”

This year they have held two Jesus Club Church services, and Mr Baker says parents love being able to attend a service with their children and see them “fully engaged”.

“Parents don’t go to Jesus Club – they drop their kids off and pick them up – but this is church so everyone can come, and they get to experience their (usually adult) child having fun and learning from the Bible talk at the same time as they are. They can talk about it together, they all experience it together and they have the joy of seeing their child engaged.”

The service includes lots of singing and prayers read by the Jesus Clubbers, the Bible is opened, read and explained, and everyone spends time in fellowship before and afterwards. 

“It’s accessible language and accessible teaching forms, so no long monologues,” Mr Baker says. “Teaching via the means of a puppet makes things very concrete and, because it’s fun, that also allows you to include all kinds of teaching. 

“It’s the kind of teaching that Colin Buchanan is the master of; with ‘Isaiah 53:6’, you remembered the Bible verse because it was fun to learn it. That’s one of the principles: make it engaging, and make it fun – and hang on, we’ve just finished an hour of church!”

All in the family

With an adult son, Nathaniel, who has an intellectual disability, Mr Baker and his family have thrown themselves into Jesus Club Church. Mr Baker leads the service, his wife Beck voices the purple puppet Razza, and his sons Josh and Isaac play in the band.

Nathaniel gets so excited about Jesus Club Church that he counted the days down to the second service in late August, and he was all-in – singing onstage, doing the actions and putting his hand up to share the memory verse.

Says Mr Baker: “I asked, who could remember the memory verse to tell Razza the puppet so she could understand what kindness was, because she was having trouble with it. Nathaniel put his hand up and I thought, ‘Oh, hello’... but he was just locked in to ‘I’m speaking to Razza; Razza’s my friend’, and it was just great. Disbelief fully suspended!”

For the moment the church service is being held once a term, and his hope is that God will be glorified through the diverse people coming to worship him. What greater joy could there be than hearing a Jesus Clubber like Grace say, “I like Jesus Club church because you can bring your friends, learn more about Jesus and there’s a puppet”.

Anyone is welcome – it’s just another St Paul’s church service. However, Mr Baker says, Castle Hill’s vision of “is to reach every community with the light of the gospel, and this [people with intellectual disability] is a community that exists amongst us and has access to our services in name and in theory but not really in practice. And so, this makes a place where that’s possible.

“Our local area is our primary base. [The service] is open to anyone from anywhere, but I’d rather get families from our local schools, who maybe would like to go to church but it won’t work for them, or families who we reach through Jesus Club and then the bridge into church life is via Jesus Club.”

He adds that if anyone from another parish is interested in running their own Jesus Club Church, they are welcome to come to St Paul’s to get any ideas that might be useful, then do it in whatever way works best for them.

“It’s not like we’re following a manual – we’re making it up as we go,”