A ministry born from loss
Kelly and Ryan Breaux founded Red Bird Ministries after experiencing the deaths of 3 children. Since 2018, the ministry has supported more than 1,300 people through peer-led ministry and professional guidance. The community gives grieving families somewhere to remember their children, find resources, and build relationships with people who understand child loss—supporting different stages of grief and faith rather than expecting every family to follow the same path.
Why traditional platforms fell short
Kelly knew the isolation of child loss personally. "When I lost my daughter, I knew no one who had experienced the loss of a child," she says. "There's so much isolation and depression that can really take over one's life." Families needed communication to be clear and simple, particularly when grief made concentration difficult—"Your brain is broken in grief," Kelly says, "Disciple is very easy to use, and that has been a gift." Facebook brought adverts and unrelated content into moments that required focus, and another community platform was confusing to use and too expensive for a donor-supported non-profit. "We're ministering to people who've had to bury their child. The last thing we wanted was to have a financial burden that could limit families coming in to receive support," Kelly explains. "Disciple was both a better product and more cost-efficient for us as a nonprofit."
A sanctuary built around how families grieve
The Red Bird Ministries app organises support around the different ways families grieve. Prayer and meditation groups allow spiritual exploration, separate groups support mothers and fathers, and memorial spaces give parents somewhere to share photographs and stories of their children. "Steam rooms" allow raw emotion to be expressed among people with shared experience, and professional resources, courses, referrals, and digital and in-person events sit alongside the peer community. The app is designed to support human care, not replace it; as Kelly puts it, technology used well is "not to replace human touch and human connection, but to be a bridge that builds to form relationships between people." Families can take part at their own pace and choose the spaces appropriate to where they are.
Connection that reaches beyond the app
More than 1,300 people have received support through Red Bird Ministries. The clearest example of the app closing the isolation problem involves 2 families—one in Louisiana and one in Kentucky—whose infants died on the same day. They found each other through the community, began talking in private messages, and met in person the following summer. "They were able to form a relationship through the community," Kelly shares, "and the following summer, they actually met in person. There's so much good that's being done, even if we're not even aware of it sometimes." That relationship is the result Red Bird wants technology to make possible: a bridge to another person who understands. As Kelly describes the space, "This is a place where people can come and honor their child openly and freely," where "families find others who truly understand—who know exactly what this journey feels like."
