Jul 29, 2013 5 min read

Whether he is sitting in a pew or standing before a congregation, there is one thing that makes Jim Agnew stand out from others at church: his gestures of faith.

Agnew, a ministry student who is completing his field education at Chartiers Hill United Presbyterian Church in Canonsburg, prays and sings using American Sign Language.

Agnew learned to sign about 15 years ago to communicate with his daughter, Hailee, now 20, who has cerebral palsy and does not speak.

“The first time I used sign language in church was at Easter time, and at the end of the service at my church, Church of the Covenant, the choir invited anyone who wanted to sing the Hallelujah Chorus with them to come up and sing. Hailee and I went up, and we signed the Hallelujah Chorus,” recalled Agnew. “People commented how much they liked it.”

The choir director asked Agnew if he’d like to sign a song or a prayer during the service, and he liked the idea and started signing with the youth choir. He continued to sign when he started to travel to local churches as a guest preacher, and congregants often stopped him to talk about his signing.

Across the country, hundreds of churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship offer sign language interpreters or captioning on screens for members who are hard of hearing or deaf.

But coming up with funding for deaf and hard-of-hearing ministry is a struggle, and Craig Kephart, executive presbyter of the Washington Presbytery, said he is unaware of any of the other 60 churches in the presbytery that regularly utilize sign language services.

“It’s a great gift, particularly for our small to medium-sized churches. It’s something you’ll see much more at large congregations, but it’s nice to be able to offer that service at a smaller congregation,” said Kephart.

A former trainer at The Meadows, who once won more than 100 races in a year, Agnew, 51, had no intentions to enter the ministry.

But Hailee – and, Agnew believes, divine intervention – steered him into it.

Agnew stopped attending church regularly after Hailee and her twin sister, Korynn, were baptized, but when the twins started elementary school, Agnew’s mother called him and asked him to take them to Sunday school.

“That was before the Church of the Covenant was renovated, so I had to carry Hailee up three flights of stairs to the classroom and then back down again. So for the first year of me taking the girls back to church, I was in the Sunday school class with Hailee on my lap, Korynn by my side, listening to all those Bible stories again and doing all those crafts and being Hailee’s helper,” said Agnew.

In what he calls a “God incident,” the church placed an ad in its newsletter for a volunteer to help with special needs students so parents could attend adult Sunday School class.

So Agnew spent the next two years studying the Bethel Bible Series, which rekindled his faith.

In 2002, Agnew reached a crossroads: He had left horse training and started working in retail, but he felt unsatisfied.

“I was going through a transition where I was in the retail business, and half of me said I need to go to college and get a degree and a better job since I wasn’t going to be in the horse business anymore, and the other half of me was saying I needed to find something now that I’d finished the Bethel Bible Series,” said Agnew, who is a third-generation elder at Church of the Covenant, where his mother and grandfather preceded him.

His solution was to pursue both. After he watched a television show about Liberty University, founded by Dr. Jerry Falwell, Agnew enrolled in the distance learning program and earned a bachelor’s degree in multidisciplinary studies with a concentration in business and religion in 2007. By then, he found his passion was religion, so he enrolled in the University of Dubuque’s distance learning program (its religious studies program is approved by the Presbyterian Church), and is on track to graduate in 2014 with a degree in divinity.

“In general, the faith journey changes you. You become more focused on the priorities in your life,” said Agnew. “For me, I’ve had to juggle work and school and being a dad, and now the field education at Hill Church and traveling twice a year to Dubuque for two weeks of intensive study. The distance learning has been great because my priority is my family, and I’m home the rest of the time to help out.”

Hailee is a student at The Children’s Institute in Pittsburgh and volunteers at the VA Hospital, and Korynn is a junior at West Liberty University majoring in speech pathology.

Agnew plans to incorporate signing into his ministry when he graduates and gets a pulpit of his own.

“I think the signing adds depth to the song, to what you’re singing and praying. The good thing about signing the Gloria Patri and the Doxology is that everybody knows them and we’re not all looking at the hymnal. But they sometimes become kind of mechanical. But whenever you see those signs, it gives it a little bit of meaning that those aren’t just words you’re repeating by rote memorization. When you see that symbol, and you know that’s a sign for ‘glory’ or the sign for ‘Father,’ it’s more significant and meaningful. I’ll keep doing it because it’s just part of who I am.”