Autistic Boy Banned from Church-Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Earlier this week Good Morning America ran a story about an autistic boy who had been banned from attending church. The usual tone of this story started to unfold: once again, an "evil" institution has wronged someone. Sometimes stories like this bring about change and awareness of problems and help others understand situations. This story leaves me with extremely mixed feelings. Before I was a stay-at-home mom, I was a social worker at an agency that served mentally handicapped people. One of my jobs was to distribute meds at lunchtime. We would always do this job in pairs and fortunately for me, this was standard procedure because one afternoon an autistic worker approached me from behind and got me in a choke-hold. Thank goodness my partner turned around and helped get our client off of me. This particular client was not very big, and was not particularly violent, and I don't think he really wanted to harm me, but nevertheless, I could have been choked until I was unconscious or worse.
So, back to the boy in Minnesota. He is thirteen years old and already is a big fellow weighing in at over 250 pounds and six feet tall--no match for most kids his age, and bigger than a great number of others who might be attending church. As far as we have come with issues of inclusion and tolerance, this sort of issue continues to cause upheaval and discontent. The mother of the boy insists that the boy belongs in church, and indeed needs to be there because he needs more of what God can give him. Unfortunately, I disagree with this mother and have to side with the church (even though exclusion is not usually what I tend to agree with). It sounds like the priest at the church has done everything in his power to provide worship opportunities for the boy including mediation, video feed in another room, home worship--all have been rejected by the boy's mother. I think the mother is only thinking of her son being excluded and not even considering the consequences of what would happen if he hurt himself or someone else. The boy has apparently had violent outbursts in addition to verbal outbursts at the church before. How could this mother want to put her son, the church and herself at risk of being sued, or having some tragedy occur? The church had no other choice and I would venture to say that even though the family has found another church that will accept the boy at services, all it will take is one incident, and the new church will be forced into making the same difficult and painful decision to turn the boy away. God can be present in all places, not just a building called a church,
God wants us to come to Him, but He knows our hearts and can be present with the boy regardless of his attendence in a building.