Joni's House Serbia opens for families living with disability

On Sundays, the doors open wider. The ministry says worship services at the centre will be open to the surrounding community every week.

Sladjan Milenkovic said the opening wasn't the end of anything. "When we walk through the doors of Joni's House Serbia, we do not see the completion of a building project," he said. "We see another beginning."

The ministry says the house will be "a place of community where every person is accepted, welcomed and loved according to their God-given dignity."

Why Serbia

The need is well documented. Human Rights Watch's summary for Serbia doesn't soften it: "People with disabilities remain confined to overcrowded institutions with inadequate care." In its World Report 2026 chapter on Serbia, Human Rights Watch says the country has made little progress moving people out of institutions, "leaving nearly 18,000 adults with disabilities in underfunded state institutions with reports of neglect and abuse." Supported living, it says, reaches only 27 people in the whole country. "The government provided little support to the over 350,000 families with children with disabilities, and many children remain in segregated institutions."

Joni and Friends points to the same report and says there's little in the way of community-based services. One house is small next to those numbers. But it's the kind of local, year-round help the report says is missing.

A family's own story

The Milenkovics' road to Opovo runs through their own hard times. In 2010, through the Christian Trust Belgrade, known in Serbian as Hrišćansko Udruženje Beograd, they hosted a retreat for families of children with disabilities. They thought it'd be a one-off.

Then, in 2012, their daughter Sara was diagnosed with cancer. The family moved to the United States for her treatment, and groups including Joni and Friends stood by them with encouragement and support, the ministry says.

When Sara recovered, the couple wanted to give other families the same help they'd had. They started Camp Hope, a five-day summer retreat modelled on that first 2010 gathering, and it kept growing. This year, with Joni and Friends' backing, Camp Hope served hundreds of families over eight sessions, two of them for children with cancer.

But one question stuck with them, the ministry says. What happens to these families the other 360 days of the year? Joni's House was their answer, a place offering practical help and spiritual support all year round.

Sladjan Milenkovic said building it was a way of passing on the grace his own family received. "When we were broken, others carried us. When we needed hope, God surrounded us with people who became His hands and feet," he said. "The ministry is not our way of paying God back. That would be impossible. It is simply our response to His immeasurable mercy and to the extraordinary kindness that so many people, including the Joni and Friends family, have shown over the years."

A father at the ribbon-cutting

Christopher Sue, the chief financial officer of Joni and Friends, went to the grand opening in Opovo. He's the father of a son on the autism spectrum, and the ministry says he valued worshipping next to Serbian families who know that life too.

His takeaway, according to the release, was that the joys and fears of raising a child with a disability are the same wherever you live, and so is the need for a Christ-centred community. "Joni's House has become a place of belonging," he said.

Part of a wider network

Serbia is now one of 14 Joni's House programs in 11 countries. Each one's shaped by local need, the ministry says, from disability services to physical therapy and economic development. Joni and Friends has also opened Joni's Houses in Brazil, Nepal and El Salvador.

The ministry was founded by Joni Eareckson Tada, who has lived with quadriplegia since a diving accident in 1967. On its website, she writes that God "sometimes permits what he hates to accomplish what he loves." For more than 45 years, the ministry has worked with people living with disability around the world. Its other programs include Wheels for the World, which hand-delivers wheelchairs and Bibles in developing countries, plus family retreats, disability ministry training for churches, and daily radio and podcasts. The ministry's website sums up its vision as "a world where every person with a disability finds hope, dignity, and their place in the body of Christ," and it quotes Jesus' parable of the great banquet from Luke 14: "Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame."

Governments are leaning on faith-based partners for this kind of care, too, as when the US State Department named nearly $2 billion for faith-based health and disaster partners, World Vision and Compassion among them.

For the families of Opovo, the change right now is simpler. There's a place with therapists, a counsellor, a bed for the hospital stay and a Sunday service, and it doesn't cost a thing.

Sladjan Milenkovic said he wants every family who comes through the door to hear one message: they're not alone. "When the church opens its arms to those who are overlooked, the beauty of the Gospel becomes visible," he said. "Because that is exactly what Christ first did for us."