and welcome to the personal touch in peter's township my name is tony snow koski and i'm the host for the show were so glad that you could be here at the personal touch and to learn about how many of our wonderful residents are reaching out to help others both within the community of peter's township and also outside of it many of us are blessed and we're fortunate to have the time and talents in the means to provide a helping hand to others today show's going to highlight one special way in which one local church is reaching out to a specific segment of the population the deaf and the hearing impaired according to pennsylvania's statistics in the census department about a point six percent of pennsylvania needs are either deaf or hearing impaired they have no specific information or data as to how many people within the different counties so they tell you to apply that eight point six to the population of each to get an average so there is a definite need for the deaf community to have access to things such as a church service so it's my choice here today to welcome pastor jeff vander hoff and member caleb boy saki from trinity united methodist church right here in peters township they have partnered together along with the members of trinity united methodist church to provide a worship service specifically aimed at welcoming those who would need an interpreted sign language service and this helps them to also engage in the worship service so i want to welcome both of you today we're glad to have you here and to learn a little bit more about this unique and initiative you have that trinity united methodist church i think pastor jeff will start with you if you could we want to learn a little bit more about you and caleb prior to getting into knowing more about the ministry could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what brought you to trinity and i am methodist sure i have been a pastor for about eighteen years and have been moved around a little bit i served a few churches in ohio and in western pennsylvania and we most recently came to peter's about a year ago we started in july of two thousand and sixteen the way the methodist church works our bishop pretty much tells us where we're going and so we go there but we have love that i have three of my four children that are in the peter township school district and my father was a minister and so i've kind of followed in his footsteps and went to penn state university and started out in marketing and business did a couple of years in retail management and then felt a calling to pursue ministry so i went to seminary and became a pastor and have been pursuing that call ever since and  loved every minute of it and we're so glad to have you here peter sound chip language to you and your family caleb i've known you all the way back when you were a little guy in school so it's great to reconnect with you also and how about telling us a little bit about what you've been doing since you graduated from peters township all right so i graduated from pierce township in two thousand and twelve and i went to the university of pittsburgh and i graduated from there in the spring of two thousand and sixteen with a degree in linguistics and a certificate in american sign language and after that i went to work for presley ridge school for the deaf it's more of a special needs school more troubled children so i worked there for about a year and a half and then i transition into interpreter for various agencies around the pittsburgh area pittsburgh has a pretty large deputation so that services in the great need so you have your passion and what you're certified in doing with the deaf community and you're a member at trinity united yes i remember for and so now we have the deaf community that you mentioned in the pittsburgh area can you tell us who the people are that comprise this community like how do you label i want to say label but how do you identify somebody as being deaf so the people who identif deaf generally use sign language as one of their forms of communication if not their main form of communication and there are many deaf people who can speak and hear to an extent as well with new technology and hearing aids and co implants but inside the deaf community there are many different levels of hearing loss and signing ability you have anywhere from somebody who is hard of hearing who wears hearing aids and can hear almost perfectly but they still sign they learn sign language they're involved to somebody who's completely deaf and doesn't speak at all and only uses sign language so that's a pretty wide spectrum of people and those people just are involved in the deaf community they like being deaf they enjoy the deaf experience and they embrace it and take it on as their own as opposed to people are not in the deaf community people who kind of reject that and want to be part of the hearing world want to speak and just hear and not and they may know a little bit but they don't use it often or participate in the deaf community so when you talk about signing now are there different types of sign language just like we have different type of linguistic languages what about in the deaf community they have a variations so yeah  the united states there are there's kind of like a spectrum of sign languages there's one called cued speech which is a sign language that has signs that match the  sounds i don't you know that one it's a very specific type of sign language and then in american sign language there's anywhere from english matching the structure and words of english all the way to american sign language using the your space structures specific to american sign language yeah so it's a it's a pretty wide spectrum and so you are using i tend to match whoever i'm interpreting for so if i'm how do you start this whole process of getting this ministry at troon the united methodist how did you guys connect and come up with this well first to say it wasn't me it's been a great idea i wish i could claim credit for  it but we have a disability awareness committee at our church that has been wonderful and every year the united methodist church has a disability awareness sunday where we focus our attention on disability awareness and someone had mentioned that we have caleb in our church who does sign language interpreter and so the committee asked him if he would be willing to come and interpret a service now at that time we didn't have any deaf people in our church and just wanted to do this as a maybe we could do more than just one sunday a year with this and so our disability awareness committee began to meet and pray about it and just thought let's see if kayla be willing to do this every week and what would that look like is there a need for that in the community do we have the funding for that and is that a an avenue of ministry we'd like to pursue and it was so we started looking into it and it came about so what has been your length of time that you think this process has gone on to leading you to now offering it at your church i think it started in the spring of two thousand and seventeen and so it's moved pretty quickly for from from that time  the the folks on the disability awareness committee just started looking into an establishing that there is a need there are not very many churches that offer interpreted services and so there are a few in the pittsburgh area  church church on mt washington other than that there are a few who hire interpreters as needed but a lot of deaf people can't get that turpin there are a lot of interpreters that don't do religious services because they don't know the vocabulary and are comfortable in the setting so you need to know that also right with wow so this is just more than bringing an interpreter in for that hour of service yeah ok so now the next step is then what did the people do within the church to prepare for this so you have a committee that says we're going to do this and caleb is a resource but did you have to do any work with the congregation as well yes we did we started talking about it's because it's not just the type of thing you just say next sunday we're going to start this so we we began to talk about it and share with people that we wanted to do this it would involve having someone up at the front of the sanctuary every week having some special seating and letting people become aware that we're going to be adding a new ministry  we also had caleb offer for classes throughout the summer and we scheduled those and had to sign up sheets and we had over twenty percent of our congregation common and take part in the classes that is really went  well he did an outstanding job as a teacher jean he really did yeah we did basic finger spelling in the alphabet and he introduced us to some ins and outs of deaf culture  helped us with some of the terminology and that's been a blessing to us so the people in the congregation that came could they come just out of general wanting to know more an awareness or was  also for some specific training that they're going to do or was it both it was yeah it was both it was these are people who may be coming to this church soon this is what i'm going to offer to them and this is what you should know about them and their backgrounds in general and then it was also well how do i connect with these people how do i communicate with them because the biggest part of when you meet a deaf person most people that they meet can't communicate with them in the way that they communicate with sign language and so teaching the church how to effectively communicate with people who are deaf even if they can't sign was an important part of welcoming them to our congregation and our church did you teach the people any basic signs that they could use a different person came to the church to be able to communicate a little more than just kind of talking and listening yes so the the most basic form if you can't sign at all and you're unwilling or can't really don't really have the time to learn is just writing notes back and forth usually people have decent literacy and they can read and write the next level would be finger spelling so that's just the alphabet on your hands and you can spell literally anything and then the next level above that is basic science basic vocabulary and basic structure which was  about as far as we got in the classes so you've had people in the church embrace this they're supportive of it and then will be time to start to ministry so we're going to pursue that and actually learn what you are doing at the church for this ministry but first we're going to take a brief break and take a pause here for a little  e together we can change the news find out how it's safe kids dot org methodist church here in peter's township who are telling about telling us and sharing with us about their new initiative of providing a service that is signed in sign language for the hard of hearing and also the deaf community so i'd like to start out with what do you all hope is going to be the outcome of providing the service what we would like to create a worship space where the gospel can be communicated in a way that is understood  by people that don't hear either because they're death for because they're hard of hearing and we want to create not only a worship space but also a place where they can find some connections and be in ministry and from the beginning we tried to call it a ministry with the deaf rather than a ministry to or for the deaf and hard of hearing because we really want to be in ministry with them and we want to find ways that they can engage in living out their calling  disciples and as children of god that's wonderful and so that they will then become a part of the community that's the whole india being deaf and hard of hearing is not going to impact them being able to participate actively within your community yes in eternity and so do you know of anybody specifically within our community or within the general but i should probably say greater pittsburgh area yeah there's a there's a schools but the adult population is harder to pinpoint so in this specific area there are a few in the great if it's very area there are a lot of people who are in need of these services so how are you getting the word out about the services again the disability awareness committee did a great job we started out at peter's township community days at the park with a booth for the church and we handed out flyers then we have also connected with some different facebook groups and we contacted the local paper word of mouth there's going to be an article coming up in november in south wales living magazine and just really trying in as many ways as we could to get the word out to people and hope that it finds someone who's looking for in charge and i know that this is already started so  already signing is a service and did you get a response yeah we did our first service was september seventeenth and so we were really hoping that somebody would come and we did we had one person come all the way from jefferson hills and she has come every week since she told us that there she was thrilled to find a church that was offering this service she has brought family members with her and just continues to come  we've got one person so far along with her family now and we're hoping that it will grow from there and so when a deaf person or a hard of hearing person comes to trinity methodist what can they expect when they arrive at your church well i would hope they would expect to be greeted and warmly welcomed just like everyone else would we try not to treat anybody differently than anyone else although we recognize that communication is going to be something that we need to work on so we have caleb here every week we have another volunteer named karen who started the ministry like this in another church she was fat and she has been coming every week just to facilitate and be there to interpret and there's times where i've said hey karen c'mere i want to say something and show interpret for me while while i talk we also have pads of paper for people to write things down if they need to and  we hope that we might be able to offer some more classes and get people more able to communicate through sign language and so everybody comes into the sanctuary gets ready for the service and i'm sure you have for every you're going to be speaking from what you do at the church and caleb were you in relationship to all of this during the service so when he's when he's preaching he likes to move around a lot and i don't really want to chase him so i stand right next to the the pulpit we have usually a worship leader who makes announcements as the service keeps evolving so usually i stand right next to them it's on the right side in the front  very visible can't miss me and do you sign all elements of the service for instance if there's a praise band or a choir in there singing a song do you so  s so what's it like now to have somebody there kind of imitating that kind of being in the you know behind you in the background or in the foreground depending on where you're standing it's great  it has affected my pacing sometimes i have to slow down a little or pause but i don't really have to do that i just do that as a way to make sure that caleb is is keeping up and i've never noticed a law he does a great job with that it's funny because sometimes i'll compliment him and i realize he has to compliment himself three signs i wouldn't and so we have a good time with that yeah it's been great do you give caleb anything in advance so you know what to expect kind of can do a little rehearsing or anything practicing before hand yeah i try to give him all the songs so he has all the words for those and announcements i don't write out my sermon i preached from an so it's usually a challenge for caleb to know where i'm going to go i try to give him a few key words and some themes overall to prepare him but some of it is spontaneous and he he just he has a great vocabulary and he does a great job just out of curiosity and we haven't talked about this but how are the children reacting do they follow you intently and watch you or are they trying to  mimic what you're doing when i'm interpreting i don't really focus on that that if i focus on that stuff i get distracted i fall behind i'd try to focus on the speaker and translating it accurately if i try to focus on something else or focus on someone else i really get off yeah yeah i kind of just like zone everybody out so i can't really answer that question i don't know what the children are doing so i will say t that we did have some teenagers come to our classes with caleb oh that's wonderful and so certainly some of the youth in our church are interested in my son john has learned some sign language on his own just through you tube videos  and and he was able to communicate with our visitor and he's looking forward to working with caleb to learn a little bit more so certainly the youth are some of our youths are learning about it and it is a great way to spread awareness because i know you have multiple services so yeah we have two services and this is our nine thirty service which we kind of call it an informal service at eleven o'clock we have a traditional service where we sing hymns and have a little bit more back we have a lot of families that come to that service a lot of kids that's where we do the children's message at that service and so nine thirty is our main service and that's where we're offering this ok that's wonderful and it's open to anybody you don't have to be a member of trinity correct you don't have to live in peter's township right in the movie who would like to come and worship and learn more about the gospel and the good lord absolutely that's great and could you also let us know that if people have any questions about the service and what goes on how would they get these answered yeah they could contact us at our church our phone number seven two four nine four one four seven seven because our address is five thirty central church road in mcmurry so there's a few different ways to contact us and we would love to hear from you and welcome you in well that's great and we know that this is a wonderful ministry here peter's township in pastor jeff and caleb i want to thank you for the vote of my heart for sharing all this great information with our audience here peter's and surrounding communities and we hope that you too will spread the good word about what's going on here with this initiative at trinity united methodist church for their new outreach program so i also want to let you know that i want to thank the students here at peter's township high school as well as their teacher robin hodge and prick and kelsey sylvester and ryan bond from peter's township cable channel seven for helping us put this program together it's wonderful to know that there are people in our community who are willing to step up and work together to help those who are disabled and it mais oui and they may seem at times disenfranchised from us but your congregation is search certainly going above and beyond demonstrating that a personal touch does exist in peter's township and we thank them for their service to others so thank you for viewing the show and remember that you too can