Our third article in this series comes to us from an Ecumenical connection, Sr Kai Bland a Youth and Children's Minister for the Methodist Church based in Leyland.

Kai shares with us how to create a welcoming space that enables worship for people who have neurodiversity. I wonder what we can take from this article that may inform the way we create Church and ensure it is a space that all feel welcomed, included and loved?

We thank Sr Kai for providing us with such an inspiring article.

We've all been in a service with that problematic family - noisy, disruptive, shouting, screaming - you know the type. But maybe you've been that family, with every eye in the room on you, desperately trying to fit in, while just trying to find God in worship with an autistic child in meltdown.

Maybe there's that odd guy who's often at church. He just doesn't 'fit'; never looks anyone in the eye and always says the strangest things. Or maybe that's you. Maybe the social conventions of shaking hands while looking someone in the eye or being expected to sit still for 15 minutes at a time, while still worshipping cause your entire nervous system to freeze.

At Leyland Methodist Church, in Lancashire, we have experienced these examples, and we wanted to do something different, something that would really help the whole range of neurodiverse people who come through our doors.

This is the backdrop for Diverse. Its tagline is 'All loved; All unique; All in God's Kingdom', because we believe that whoever you are, there should be no barrier to you accessing worship and experiencing God. As churches, we have all embraced the access ramp, the induction loop, the large print or even braille reading material - these things happened a while ago and are working well on the whole. But what about for people whose disabilities are less obvious, or even invisible; the ones for whom the solution is not a quick fix?

The project took around a year from the first green shoots of an idea to the first act of worship taking place in June this year. It took a lot of consultation with a range of individuals about their experiences, experts including the amazing Lynn McCann from Reachout ASC and SENDCos. We gathered a neurodiverse and passionate team and set out to face the range of needs and people we could be catering to. We began by considering the space and resources we had - how could we reduce the unwanted stimulation (smells, noises, bright lights, busy walls)? How could we make it intentionally welcoming, without putting an expectation of social interaction in place? We created a quiet, sensory space, we created an active space, and we arranged the main worship area in such a way that it allowed people to sit with or away from people as desired.

We published the order of service and attempted to keep to this in order to create routine and predictability, while allowing some freedom within this.

We have very much lent into a 'spirit led' approach, which is my professional term for 'giving it a go and seeing what happens'. We have attempted a number of things, some of which have worked, and some of which haven't, but the biggest thing we've learned is that this community is very diverse - hence the name! There will never be a single approach that will meet the needs of every neurodivergent person but is has been so important that we have listened to feedback and have been willing to give things a go.

This may sound overwhelming. You may be thinking 'how on Earth could we do this?!', but there are things your church can do.