Alban Weekly for Monday, 8 October 2018 from The Alban at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "Practical Wisdom for Leading Congregations: We thought we'd done enough to welcome people with disabilities in our church. We were wrong."
PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Hannah C. Brown: We thought we'd done enough to welcome people with disabilities in our church. We were wrong.
The Sunday Fellowship of West Concord Union Church celebrates St. Patrick's Day 2018 with a dance. Photo courtesy of Hannah C. Brown
West Concord Union Church had had a ministry for people with disabilities since the 1980s. But the congregation discovered that truly welcoming everyone would be complicated and costly -- and worth it.
Our church had a problem: One of our congregants couldn’t serve communion.Hannah C. Brown: We thought we'd done enough to welcome people with disabilities in our church. We were wrong.
The Sunday Fellowship of West Concord Union Church celebrates St. Patrick's Day 2018 with a dance. Photo courtesy of Hannah C. Brown
West Concord Union Church had had a ministry for people with disabilities since the 1980s. But the congregation discovered that truly welcoming everyone would be complicated and costly -- and worth it.
She is one of our spiritual leaders. She is especially wise when it comes to the importance of communion. She knows how much it matters to share a holy meal together, how much it matters that no one is left out.
She can’t tell us that in words. Instead, she lets us know through the agitated movements and sounds she makes when she’s worried that no one is going to serve her. She lets us know in the amazing smiles and squeals she makes after she receives the tiny piece of bread dipped in juice that she can safely swallow. The joy she finds in communion is contagious.
But there was no way to get her wheelchair up the eight steps to the platform where our communion table stood. There was no way to get our monumental communion table down the eight steps to the floor. There wasn’t even a good way to install a mechanical lift, given the architecture of our sanctuary, originally built in 1891.
Our church had a problem: Our congregant couldn’t serve communion. Or light the candles. Or bring up the offering. A lot of other people couldn’t do those things, either. We knew that something had to change.
Who belongs in a church, or in any Christian institution? Who should be welcomed by our spaces and our practices? Who should be empowered to lead? Surely Jesus would not limit his welcome to those who are able-bodied or neurotypical. This is a lesson we have been trying to learn for many years at West Concord Union Church, where I have been serving as pastor since 2009.
The fact that this particular person is part of our congregation is a little bit of a miracle. The story starts in the 1970s, with the movement to deinstitutionalize folks with disabilities. Suddenly, people who had automatically been sent to nursing homes and mental health institutions were given another choice: supported community living.
A new housing program was launched in our town thanks to the work of an organization called Minute Man Arc. Soon, our church had new neighbors in several houses within walking distance. Church leaders welcomed these neighbors into worship. They also formed a new ministry called Sunday Fellowship that was designed to meet the needs and desires of adults with developmental disabilities.
As the ministry began in 1982, lay leader John Danner wrote: “Every person has spiritual needs and questions, and yet too often [those who are developmentally disabled] have been treated as if they had no such feelings. … We here at West Concord Union Church are hoping to alleviate that situation.”
Sunday Fellowship began as a small informal gathering. Over the years, it has offered Christian education, fellowship activities and worship. Sometimes it has been led by staff, other times by lay leaders.
In every era, it has been characterized by a spirit of celebration. There have been dances and picnics, pageants and parties and musicals. Folks at Sunday Fellowship always know how to have fun.
When I arrived as pastor in 2009, Sunday Fellowship had a worship service twice a month in our basement fellowship hall. The lay leaders were both devoted and exhausted. As time went on, more and more folks began to advocate for dedicated staff support. In 2013, we hired the Rev. Melissa Tustin, an ordained Methodist elder who had been on parental leave.
Melissa has brought wonderful changes to Sunday Fellowship. Now, in addition to hymn and church camp song favorites, the Sunday Fellowship musicians accept popular music requests like “You Raise Me Up.” Melissa has reached out beyond our immediate neighborhood to bring in folks from Minute Man Arc houses that are farther away.
Melissa also brings our community the gift of holy impatience. Why shouldn’t the folks from Sunday Fellowship be as fully accepted and integrated in our Sunday morning worship as they are on Sunday afternoons?
This was a hard question for us to face, because we thought we had been accepting. Sure, a few folks had been so uncomfortable with the presence of people with disabilities that they had left the church back in the 1980s. Sure, we still sometimes struggled to know what to do with unpredictable vocalizations or unpredictable actions -- like the time a congregant handed me a dollar bill for the offering right over the flame of a candle, right in the middle of communion.
Still, we knew and loved the folks with disabilities who worshipped with us on Sunday mornings. We had even found ways to include them in ushering, in Advent candle lighting, in our Epiphany pageant. What more was there to do?
There was a lot more to do. From 2012 to 2018, the congregation planned and carried out a major renovation. This renovation began with a need to address structural concerns like our aging roof and our peeling exterior paint. A desire to lessen our environmental impact led to new windows and doors and an array of solar panels. We also prioritized accessibility, including a new entryway that everyone could use and a fully accessible sanctuary.
The renovation cost us a lot: $1.3 million, many difficult conversations, and grief over the removal of most of our pews. We’re now adjusting to our renewed space, and the work goes on.
We’re learning to view those with disabilities among us as teachers with a unique grasp of the gospel. We’re learning that all of us need different accommodations to participate fully in community life. We’re learning to be more and more honest about each other’s gifts and challenges, decentering a false ideal that none of us can live up to anyway.
This fall, we added new tools for worship, including noise-canceling headphones (for those who are sensitive to loud sounds) and visual communication guides (for those who are nonverbal). We’re also trying to communicate more about how our differing needs and preferences can conflict with one another.
Some folks crave silence, while others need to make noise. Some folks are celebrating our sanctuary’s full accessibility, while others are struggling because they can’t see what’s going on up front now that the platform with all those steps has been taken down.
When I interviewed for the role as pastor here, members of the search committee described the community as “scrappy.” I hope that even if our building is a bit more cleaned up now, our congregation is showing more and more of its rough edges.
Church should be a place where we don’t have to hide the things that make us who we are: capacities and limitations; inclinations and identities; griefs, illnesses, addictions and joys.
Now we have a ramp that allows anyone who uses a wheelchair to roll right up to the table, and a table that can move to wherever we need it to be. Change is hard, but what’s most important is being together: at the table, in the sanctuary and as followers of Jesus.
FROM THE ALBAN ARCHIVE:
MINISTRY WITH PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES
First Reformed Church in New Brunswick, NJ, is one of the congregations described in Amazing Gifts: Faith, Disability, and Inclusion. The book tells stories of people with disabilities, their family members, and their congregations who have taken actions to make their parish, church, synagogue, temple, or mosque more inclusive of children and adults with all types of disabilities. The historic First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, New Jersey, organized in 1717, sits literally at the intersection of faith and disability. Next door is the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center, a University Center for Excellence in developmental disabilities education, research, and service and part of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. New Brunswick is also home to the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center at Rutgers University. For Pastor Hartmut Kramer-Mills, a native of Jena, Germany, who began his theological education at Heidelberg University and is married to the congregation’s American-born copastor, Susan, the church’s proximity to these institutions is more than symbolic.
“A church is only on the map of the community,” he said, “when its ministry is relevant to that community. In our diverse society, there’s never one single map. With resources like these, it was clear that, among other maps, the ‘map of special needs’ was important for New Brunswick.”
But it took one family, new to the church, to transform the congregation, whose seventy regular members often felt lost in a sanctuary that seats six hundred. Shortly after the Kramer-Millses returned from pastorates in Germany and took the pulpit in 2000, a wave of new members joined the church. Among them were a young mother and her four-year-old daughter. The woman introduced herself as Sandy and her daughter as Kathleen. Hartmut noticed, however, that when Sandy filled out her membership form, she also listed her eleven-year-old son, Walter, whom neither of the two ministers had ever seen.
Sandy explained that Walter had autism, a diagnosis of intellectual disabilities, and was nonverbal. His IQ was reported to be around fifty, which Sandy thought seemed high. What concerned her was that Walter might be disruptive to the church’s worship life, partly because of his eating habits and personal hygiene. Sandy worried that bringing Walter along to church might add another burden to her life—the possibility of rejection by a church family.
Coming from Europe, with its heritage of official state churches, Hartmut was unfamiliar with the concept of a “church family” that might exclude newcomers. He believed the church was a public institution in which there should be a place for everybody. His idealism encouraged Sandy, and soon she brought Walter to church. He turned out to be a relatively calm child, although he did have significant support needs, such as help with standing and sitting, following the service, and calming down when he became excited. In addition, Walter needed structure. He enjoyed the repetition of the liturgy and the recognizable distinction between the worship leaders, who wore robes, and those in the pews, who did not.
Susan Kramer-Mills baptized Sandy during worship on May 5, 2002. In the following weeks, the two pastors prepared for the baptisms of Walter and his sister, Kathleen. Because of Walter’s fear of confined spaces—even the church’s large sanctuary—the pastors and Sandy decided to baptize him outdoors. By custom, at midsummer, First Reformed Church held a joint open-air service with other area Reformed churches, marking the conclusion of collegiate Vacation Bible School, and this seemed a good opportunity to baptize Walter. Still, the boy was anxious about events that took him outside his routine, so the pastors met regularly with the family at the outdoor worship area to rehearse the baptism. For several weeks, they all went through the sacrament using an empty bowl on a camping table on the front lawn of a nearby farm, the only witnesses a pair of cows watching over a fence. Finally, during worship on August 4, 2002, Hartmut baptized both Walter and Kathleen, surrounded by members of five other churches, all without incident.
At this point, bringing Sandy and her family into the church family was guided by little more than common sense and the church’s innate sense of inclusion. To go farther and deeper, Hartmut and Susan needed to seek help in understanding Walter and autism and in providing the support the family required. It seemed only logical that the pastors visit Walter’s school at the Eden Family of Services in Princeton. The school’s director, David Holmes, gave them an introduction to autism and insights into the status of research on its origins, symptoms, and effects and into several schools of therapy. He also made suggestions about how the ministers could help First Reformed Church become more inclusive. Holmes’s book, Autism through the Lifespan: The Eden Model , became the Kramer-Mills’ guide in the months that followed.
The pastors also got help a little closer to home. They reached next door to Rev. Bill Gaventa at the Boggs Center and at his invitation joined the Autism and Faith Task Force, a group of lay people and clergy from a variety of faith traditions that Gaventa had helped organize as part of the Boggs Center’s work. Through the task force, the two pastors learned how other faith communities had integrated people with autism and how to apply those experiences at First Reformed. Ultimately, the couple also met with faculty members at Rutgers University’s Douglass Developmental Disability Center and Rutgers Graduate School of Education.
The next step for the pastors was to apply what they were learning. Normally, children in the congregation began Sunday services with their parents in the main sanctuary and then, after a junior sermon, left for Sunday school classes. “While it seemed impractical to set up a separate Sunday school class for Walter alone,” Hartmut wrote in the Journal of Religion, Disability, and Health , “we did not know how to integrate him in one of our classes, as all three of them consisted of much younger students. Instead, we decided to provide him with individual respite care” offered by student volunteers from Rutgers. “This would also allow his mother, Sandy, to remain in worship.” Sandy readily agreed to the plan and joined a group of church volunteers who worked to make it happen.
Soon, the congregation’s main committees were drawn into the effort, which had the collateral benefit of allowing the majority of the church’s volunteers to become quickly acquainted with Walter and his family. The Worship and Music Committee was asked to consider an “emotional reversal” of the order of worship. Until then, worship started in a reflective and meditative mode that eventually led to joy and praise. Now the pastors suggested allowing for worship to begin a bit more noisily, accommodating Walter when he needed to disrupt things, and to provide for reflection and meditation after the children’s sermon.
The change was explained in the Sunday worship bulletin. Members accepted it well, perceiving it as giving everyone an opportunity to participate in ministry with Walter. In addition, the discussions that surrounded the change gave committee members a renewed sense of their role in determining the order of worship.
Almost immediately, church members embraced Walter, and four people appointed themselves his unofficial support team. He accepted this development readily and quickly grew familiar with the members of the team. It helped that the team stayed small, never with more than four members. The volunteers stayed with Walter during service and coffee hour and took him on short walks when he was restless. Other church members confided to the pastors their admiration for Sandy’s care of Walter and Kathleen and for the fact that she made the family’s regular church attendance an imperative.
At the pastors’ suggestion, the church’s finance committee agreed to raise funds to hire a respite worker to do what the student volunteers had been doing. The Christian Education Committee held garage sales and hosted breakfasts and dinners to solicit donations. The committee also appointed a small autism task force, with Bill Gaventa serving as informal advisor, to monitor all aspects of support for Walter. The task force received a small budget, so it became part of normal church administration. One of its first accomplishments was to establish a regular schedule of family events and excursions that would link Sandy and her family and a few other families from the Eden School with church families.
Ultimately, the autism task force was renamed the Special Needs Accessibility Project, and its mandate was broadened to reflect its member’s awareness that other developmental disabilities existed besides autism. It also reflected its members’ conviction that their work was really about providing access to God for people with special needs.
Still, the changes taking place at the church to include Walter sometimes met resistance. As Bill Gaventa has written, the difference between welcome and rejection of people with developmental disabilities in houses of worship can be small.
As the inclusion effort gained momentum, church members occasionally called the pastors to complain about Walter’s behavior during worship. One person voiced concern about whether the ministers were “turning the church autistic.” The pastors responded by publishing more of Walter’s story and reports on the work of the special needs group in the monthly newsletter. Walter’s family joined the church’s Dutch Dancing Group, which further brought the boy into the life of the church. As a congregation, members read books such asThat All May Worship: An Interfaith Welcome to People with Disabilitiesand We Don’t Have Any Here: Planning for Ministries with People with Disabilities in Our Communities . Although one member did leave the church over this and other issues, what little anxiety and resentment existed in the church ultimately faded as Walter and his family became part of the fabric of the congregation.
In 2005, Walter reached confirmation age, but because of First Reformed’s small membership, he was alone in his age group, and there was no confirmation class in which he could be included. The larger question for Sandy and the pastors was, in any case, what could confirmation mean to Walter? Hartmut believed that confirmation was foremost a remembrance of baptism, an invocation of the Holy Spirit, and admittance into the confessing membership of the church. He and Sandy discussed what they wanted for Walter and “quickly found common ground,” he later wrote. “We did not want to pursue Walter’s confirmation only for the sake of the ritual. It would have to have meaning if we were to proceed.”
The church’s elders agreed, and they concurred that Walter’s training should be flexible, consistent with their understanding of God’s grace. They wanted to focus on Walter’s potential for learning and growth in their faith. “At the time, this sounded well intended,” wrote Hartmut, “but also very ambitious. How would we determine Walter’s potential for growth of faith?” Again the church’s neighbor, Bill Gaventa, offered some help in the form of examples of curricula from the Boggs Center library. Soon the group had a list of learning goals and objectives and a custom-made curriculum with illustrations, simple songs, and very simple texts.
When two church members who were also special education teachers reviewed the curriculum, they felt the lessons were in some respects too difficult for Walter, and in others they were too simple, underestimating his ability. Drawing on their expertise, they revised it down to six lessons. On May 11, 2008, Walter, now eighteen years old, was presented to the Board of Elders. Accompanied by his mother’s voice and Pastor Hartmut on the piano, Walter sang the Doxology and the Gloria Patri. The elders continued with a normal, if modified, confirmation class setting, asking Walter to distinguish a Bible from a hymn book and an angel figure from a cross.
Having satisfied the elders, Walter was confirmed a week later, on Trinity Sunday, May 18, 2008. While using the traditional order of worship, the pastors were determined not to have Walter experience worship as a passive recipient. They included a Sunday school skit before the sermon, written by Susan and called “Weedy Creation.” The plot followed the creation story of Genesis 1 and required Walter to hold up a sign for the congregation after each completed part of a very diverse creation. Seven times he performed this, exclaiming each time, “It is good!”
The confirmation ceremony also was tailored toward Walter’s strengths. Instead of the usually required verbal vows, team members prompted Walter to act out his vows. A member read the four professional questions, but instead of answering “I do,” Walter handed her, after each question, one of the objects he had used during his confirmation class sessions: a wooden cross, a Bible, a figurine of an angel, and a figurine of Jesus. In the end he received the blessing while kneeling in front of the holy table, something that had also been rehearsed. It was a joyous day, and representatives of many agencies and nonprofit groups joined the worshipping community for the event. The service was followed by a party in the church’s fellowship hall.
“Today, Walter is an integral part of the congregation at First Reformed Church,” Hartmut said, and working with him has connected many groups and individuals within the congregation. “It has also opened our eyes to people with other needs,” the pastor said. These include Latino schoolchildren in New Brunswick, some of whom First Reformed has integrated into its congregation, and homeless men, for whom it provides shelter in rotation with other area congregations. For many years now, as many as fifteen homeless men have slept in the church’s fellowship hall for two weeks each winter.
“Anybody working toward including a particular group,” said Hartmut, “soon discovers that inclusive ministry does not stop there. It leads to many other groups, whose access to the holy table deserves equal attention.”
This story is one of sixty-four in the forthcoming book Amazing Gifts: Faith, Disability, and Inclusion, by Mark I. Pinsky, with a foreword by Ginny Thornburgh, to be published soon by the Alban Institute. The book tells stories of people with disabilities, their family members, and their congregations who have taken actions to make their parish, church, synagogue, temple, or mosque more inclusive of children and adults with all types of disabilities.
Faith & Leadership: A learning resource for Christian leaders and their institutions from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity
Claire Wimbush: Broken people walking toward wholeness
The Rev. Claire Wimbush articulates a theology of the body from the perspective of someone who cannot walk, stand, wash her own hair or tie her own shoes. But she can celebrate the Eucharist and preach a homily and serve as an Episcopal priest.
Indeed, she finds “a kind of beauty in my broken body offering the broken body of Christ to my congregation,” she said.
This video was produced in 2011 as part of the Clergy Health Initiative. Wimbush currently serves as a chaplain at Westminster Canterbury Retirement Community in Richmond, Va.
The following is the full transcript of the video:
I was born with spastic cerebral palsy, which is a neuromuscular disorder. Which is basically a fancy clinical way of saying my muscles do not speak the same dialect as my brain. The list of things that I cannot do is long. I cannot walk, stand, wash my own hair or tie my own shoes.
But I can keep a 2-year-old interested for five minutes -- which is a feat -- preach a homily, celebrate the Eucharist, train my service dog and, apparently, function in full-time parish ministry.
I never thought much about my disability -- about my body -- as I was growing up. So it wasn’t until I got to college that I started thinking perhaps it was time to think about what being a Christian with a disability actually meant.
We went to chapel every Tuesday in the Wren Building, and in order to get into the chapel, I used a lift that would help me to ascend a flight of stairs.
One Holy Week, I got on the lift [after the service] to go down, and it creaked down about 6 inches and stopped dead. So there I was in my wheelchair at 10:45 at night on Maundy Thursday suspended 6 feet above the pavement, with absolutely no way to get down.
And I looked, I looked at my friends, and they looked at me, and we scratched our heads a little bit, and finally somebody said, “Well, we’ll leave the chair and lift you.” So we unstrapped me and somebody held my shoulders and somebody held my legs and somebody held my Book of Common Prayer (because good Episcopalians don’t go anywhere without the Book of Common Prayer).
And they lifted me down, and I remember it was while I was spread-eagled above the pavement, in the dark of the night, the night before Good Friday, and I thought, “We really need theology for this, for what we’re doing.”
And then I thought, “Well, actually, we already have theology for this: ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.’”
And then I looked at the Gospels and saw that God became this body too. Not any body, but one particular body, in Galilee, at a particular point in history.
Jesus’ particular body is the body that was broken on the cross and then raised again after three days, still bearing the wounds of the cross.
And God -- who can make oceans, and elephants with ears the size of tablecloths, and blue butterflies and all the wonderful things that we see around us -- could surely have found the power to close those wounds, and to resurrect the Son of God in a perfectly whole body.
So the fact that God did not choose to do that tells me something mysterious about how God wishes to be in the world. God never chooses to be with us except to be with us in our brokenness.
What the body of Jesus shows us is a kind of wholeness that does not depend on physical perfection.
If I am a body and you are a body and we are relating to each other as two fully … people who are fully present in our own flesh, then it is much easier for us to understand what it means that God is fully present in flesh.
It’s easier for us to behave as if we worship -- as we do -- a God who had the scandalous courage to come to us in flesh.
My ministry is not graceful in the customary sense. I drop everything I pick up. (Girl, that’s my baby.) When I was learning to celebrate at the table, I had to be very careful not to drop the body and blood of Christ. I had to figure out that … that there was a kind of beauty in my broken body offering the broken body of Christ to my congregation.
We give thanks to you, O God, for the goodness and love which you have made known to us in creation, in the calling of Israel to be your people, in your Word, spoken through the prophets.
At the Eucharist, we encounter -- intimately -- God’s brokenness, and God’s brokenness encounters our own.
So that when I take the broken body of Christ in my hands and I cradle it in my palms and hold it on my tongue, what’s happening is that God’s brokenness, God’s disability, God’s humility -- whatever word you want -- becomes a part of my own.
It’s not only my brokenness that gets transformed at the Eucharist, but yours, and the guy kneeling next to me and the old lady in the third pew who’s been at the church since she was 3. And all of us together then are shaped into the body of Christ.
And when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, “Take, eat, this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
This is Christ saying, “I have come to you. I have given you myself. Now give me your body to do those things that I would do, to touch and to heal, to bless and to walk with dirt on our skin together through the world.
“Do this in remembrance of me.”
I remember when I was 17 -- you know how 17-year-olds get. I opened up a beauty magazine in the grocery store. I forget which one. And I saw a picture of a girl who was wearing the same clothes that I was wearing that day.
It was really fortunate or unfortunate, you might say, depending on your perspective. And she looked so much more beautiful than I ever could. She was 15 pounds lighter. Her hair was beautifully done and she had great makeup. She’d probably been airbrushed to seventh heaven, but I looked at that picture and thought, “I will never get there.”
And I spent most of the next year in a fit of teenage pique trying to avoid my body entirely. Not looking in mirrors, skipping my physical therapy appointments. It was basically an extended temper tantrum, I think. But it was painful.
And when we set up for ourselves ideals that are the wrong ideals -- that we simply can’t reach -- if we can’t reach them, when we realize we can’t reach them, it becomes so much easier to shut off and say, “Well, fine. I can’t be that. I can’t be the perfect pastor. I can’t be the perfect supermodel. I just can’t do it, so I am just going to stop. I can’t deal with the guilt. I can’t deal with the pressure. And that’s just it.”
As a culture, we’ve fallen into the trap of allowing imperfections to be deeply stigmatizing. We believe that our imperfections can only diminish us. That if we are diabetic or if we have cancer or if we are overweight or if we have cerebral palsy, we are somehow less than we should be.
We keep shortchanging ourselves; we keep aiming for perfection which is one-sided, one-dimensional -- glossy and attractive, but false.
When I preside at the Eucharist and I look out at my congregation, what I’m seeing are broken people, who in their brokenness and in the arguments and in their own little nitpicky, “I don’t want to sit in the third pew; I want to sit in the fourth pew” or “We changed the altar cushions; I liked them when they were blue, and now they are red” -- in their humanness and their preoccupations and their worries and their pains -- are, just as I am, broken bodies, broken people walking toward wholeness.
It says something about God that God would call and consecrate and ordain a priest who is going to drop the broken body of Christ at some point in her ministry and that God does not mind.
My job is to remember where we are going when my congregation can’t. And to remind them week by week and day by day: Learn to become so aware of yourself and so aware of what God is doing in your life and in the life of the community around you that everything that you do shows forth the glory of God, even the imperfections.
Here endeth the lesson.
An Alban author reflects on his own journey as an able-bodied man writing about people with disabilities, their families, and the communities of faith that embrace them.
Read more from Mark I. Pinsky »
On July 26, Mark I. Pinsky will receive a Justice for All Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities. The award, which recognizes individuals who have proven to be extraordinary champions in advancing the goals of the ADA, will be presented to Pinsky for his sensitive and stirring authorship of Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability and Inclusion . He recently reflected on how writing the book changed his life. We think it can change your congregation too.
But the Alban Institute explained that in many ways I represented exactly the kind of reader they sought—people of faith without expertise or personal experience with disability. In the main, these were the congregation members and clergy who make the accessibility and inclusion decisions about their houses of worship. While plenty of valuable resource manuals exist, there was a need for stories that grip hearts and minds, showing struggles and solutions.
What I didn’t realize was how much writing this book—eventually titled Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability and Inclusion—would change my own life and the way I see and interact with people with disabilities. I learned many things, most of them simple, which in retrospect should have been obvious.
Like it’s okay to feel uncomfortable when first encountering people with disabilities; you’ll get over it, and they’ll understand. It’s also okay if you don’t know what to say at first; you’ll get over that, too. Many people with disabilities have great—if sometimes mordant—senses of humor, if you listen for it.
I learned that words and terminology matter. “The disabled” and “disabled people” can objectify people with disabilities, turning them into abstractions. A helpful memory aid is this slogan: “‘People’ First,” thus, “people with disabilities.” A disability is something they have, not something they are. People use wheelchairs; they aren’t confined to them.
In researching this book, I asked members of the disability community around the country to share their stories with me, and they did. I also tried to focus at least as much on people who “cope with” as on people who “conquer” their disabilities, as inspiring as the latter may be. And I included a wide array of disabilities (physical, emotional and intellectual) and faith traditions, though not all are represented.
The resulting tapestry of stories illustrates what can be done to integrate people with disabilities into faith communities, in the belief that the house of God should welcome everyone. The relationship, I learned, is often mutually enriching. The stories offer examples and ideas that can transform any congregation into one that includes, values, and enjoys people with disabilities. The emphasis is on “best practices” across the faith spectrum, particularly on actions that require no large financial commitment or expenditure. Embracing people with disabilities in our congregations is not primarily a matter of money and architecture—although commitments to those things can help. For communities of faith everywhere, people’s hearts matter more than their budgets.
Those with disabilities can be invited to write first-person articles for congregational bulletins. Members with Down syndrome who wish to participate can be service greeters. Qualified volunteers can offer monthly respite support for caregivers of those with more severe disabilities, and anyone with a driver’s license can provide occasional rides to services and activities. Most denominations produce, at little or no cost, resource materials to make congregations accessible and inclusive.
The good news, I learned in researching the book, is that some churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are already welcoming people with disabilities and preparing for the coming influx of wounded vets and creaky boomers. They’re tapping technology and simple thoughtfulness to reach out in creative ways to this faith-hungry community. Still, it takes more than just automatic door openers, large-print Bibles, and improved signage to make a congregation disability friendly.
The bad news is that some congregations still resist making themselves welcoming, accessible and inclusive. Others that try may fail, at least at first. People with disabilities say that’s why they “church shop” before finding a faith home. And sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, disability sorely challenges faith.
Like me, you may find it difficult, as you read these stories, not to ask yourself whether you could do what they have done. As others repeatedly cautioned me, this is not the question to dwell on. Our only job is to understand and to help in any way we can.
Originally published by Religion News Service .
Comments welcome on the Alban Roundtable Blog
Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion was published in 2011 by noted religion writer Mark I. Pinsky. Pinsky gathered stories from churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples across the country, "stories of people with disabilities and the congregations where they have found welcome." He has taken special care to include the widest range of disabilities, including non-apparent disabilities like lupus, chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, depression, and mental illness. There were 54 million American with disabilities as of 2000, and that number has increased significantly with the addition of wounded warriors from the Afghan and Iraq wars and an aging population.
The author emphasizes that his purpose is to not to write a resource manual on accessibility and inclusion. Rather, Pinsky seeks to share stories of how people with disabilities have experienced their faith in the context of their disability, and how congregations have gained when they value the gifts that people with disabilities bring along.
"This book," notes the author, "is for congregational leaders and others who may have no expertise or personal experience with disability, but who make the congregational decisions about accessibility and inclusion."
Learn more and order the book »
Read more from Mark I. Pinsky »
On July 26, Mark I. Pinsky will receive a Justice for All Award from the American Association of People with Disabilities. The award, which recognizes individuals who have proven to be extraordinary champions in advancing the goals of the ADA, will be presented to Pinsky for his sensitive and stirring authorship of Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability and Inclusion . He recently reflected on how writing the book changed his life. We think it can change your congregation too.
***
As someone outside the disability community, I thought myself an unlikely choice to write a book about the faith dimension of disability. Over two decades as a religion writer for daily newspapers, I had written just a handful of stories about the subject. But the Alban Institute explained that in many ways I represented exactly the kind of reader they sought—people of faith without expertise or personal experience with disability. In the main, these were the congregation members and clergy who make the accessibility and inclusion decisions about their houses of worship. While plenty of valuable resource manuals exist, there was a need for stories that grip hearts and minds, showing struggles and solutions.
What I didn’t realize was how much writing this book—eventually titled Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability and Inclusion—would change my own life and the way I see and interact with people with disabilities. I learned many things, most of them simple, which in retrospect should have been obvious.
Like it’s okay to feel uncomfortable when first encountering people with disabilities; you’ll get over it, and they’ll understand. It’s also okay if you don’t know what to say at first; you’ll get over that, too. Many people with disabilities have great—if sometimes mordant—senses of humor, if you listen for it.
I learned that words and terminology matter. “The disabled” and “disabled people” can objectify people with disabilities, turning them into abstractions. A helpful memory aid is this slogan: “‘People’ First,” thus, “people with disabilities.” A disability is something they have, not something they are. People use wheelchairs; they aren’t confined to them.
In researching this book, I asked members of the disability community around the country to share their stories with me, and they did. I also tried to focus at least as much on people who “cope with” as on people who “conquer” their disabilities, as inspiring as the latter may be. And I included a wide array of disabilities (physical, emotional and intellectual) and faith traditions, though not all are represented.
The resulting tapestry of stories illustrates what can be done to integrate people with disabilities into faith communities, in the belief that the house of God should welcome everyone. The relationship, I learned, is often mutually enriching. The stories offer examples and ideas that can transform any congregation into one that includes, values, and enjoys people with disabilities. The emphasis is on “best practices” across the faith spectrum, particularly on actions that require no large financial commitment or expenditure. Embracing people with disabilities in our congregations is not primarily a matter of money and architecture—although commitments to those things can help. For communities of faith everywhere, people’s hearts matter more than their budgets.
Those with disabilities can be invited to write first-person articles for congregational bulletins. Members with Down syndrome who wish to participate can be service greeters. Qualified volunteers can offer monthly respite support for caregivers of those with more severe disabilities, and anyone with a driver’s license can provide occasional rides to services and activities. Most denominations produce, at little or no cost, resource materials to make congregations accessible and inclusive.
The good news, I learned in researching the book, is that some churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples are already welcoming people with disabilities and preparing for the coming influx of wounded vets and creaky boomers. They’re tapping technology and simple thoughtfulness to reach out in creative ways to this faith-hungry community. Still, it takes more than just automatic door openers, large-print Bibles, and improved signage to make a congregation disability friendly.
The bad news is that some congregations still resist making themselves welcoming, accessible and inclusive. Others that try may fail, at least at first. People with disabilities say that’s why they “church shop” before finding a faith home. And sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, disability sorely challenges faith.
Like me, you may find it difficult, as you read these stories, not to ask yourself whether you could do what they have done. As others repeatedly cautioned me, this is not the question to dwell on. Our only job is to understand and to help in any way we can.
Originally published by Religion News Service .
Comments welcome on the Alban Roundtable Blog
______________________________________
Adapted from Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion by Mark I. Pinsky. Copyright © 2012 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved.
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
The author emphasizes that his purpose is to not to write a resource manual on accessibility and inclusion. Rather, Pinsky seeks to share stories of how people with disabilities have experienced their faith in the context of their disability, and how congregations have gained when they value the gifts that people with disabilities bring along.
"This book," notes the author, "is for congregational leaders and others who may have no expertise or personal experience with disability, but who make the congregational decisions about accessibility and inclusion."
Learn more and order the book »
Follow us on social media:
Copyright © 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Alban at Duke Divinity School
1121 West Chapel Hill Street, Suite 200
Durham, North Carolina 27701, United States
No comments:
Post a Comment