disabled Christianity with Jeff McNair "Natural like home" for Wednesday, 23 July 2014

disabled Christianity with Jeff McNair "Natural like home" for Wednesday, 23 July 2014
In our Light and Power Company group, we often talk about how we feel more like a family than like a class or a group that meets at church. People are accepted as they are.  Sure we make demands on each other. But the overriding theme is acceptance, overlooking differences like social skill deficits, thinking the best of others, trying to be affirming, praying for each other, caring for one another and so forth. These are the kinds of attributes we find in families that are functioning well.  We rejoice with the successes of our family members, we hurt with them when they hurt. It is like we recognize that we are in this life together, as a family. In families, you don't necessarily choose each other, but you love one another nontheless. When you enter a group like our Light and Power group, you become a member of a family of people who chose the group initially, but then just accept others as the family grows. It is kind of like the idea of America being a melting pot (although we seem to be struggling with that at the moment as many groups don't want to relinquish their rights to be a part of the American family, they want to change the American family to be like them), where you come in as whomever you are and then become a part of the family, whatever personal characteristics you bring.
On our recent trip to Australia, we discussed this idea with Lindsey Gale, a groundbreaker in helping churches to be open to persons with disabilities. She made the comment in one presentation that the experience of being in a church should be, "natural like home." Church should be an extension of the love and acceptance I feel in my home among my family. As she went on to say, if disability is different at home than it is at church, that indicates a problem. If I do not feel at home, I am not experiencing the hospitality that I should be feeling.
I have been thinking that churches should be regularly reviewing their level of hospitality towards people...all people. Not the high performers who would be celebrated in any environment.  But hospitality toward those who experience devaluation for any number of reasons, not the least being disability and the poverty that too often accommpanies it. It is the presence of those people who can be like the "canary in the mineshaft" to tell us how we are doing at hospitality.  If those people are not in your church, if they do not see your church as "home", then some serious self examination needs to occur about who you are as a church. Are you a church of Jesus Christ who would welcome devalued people, or have you morphed into something else that self-examination would cause you to make excuses for?
Do you have the courage to ask those with disabilities or those who are familes with members with disabilities about whether your church feels like home to them? It is a scary question. (see this past post on scary questions) But it is a question if answered honestly will provide guidance for the church such that it will become hosptiable to all.  So it would be "natural, like home."
Jeff McNair
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Scary questions and frightening answers
I have to admit that I like Quentin Tarantino movies.  They are quirky and they make me think.  In the film Pulp Fiction the dialogue between Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) is interesting.  There is one point in the film where the following exchange occurs.  Vincent says something to the effect "You are scaring me Jules."  Jules responds,
"If my answers frighten you Vincent, then you should cease asking scary questions."
That is the problem often, isn't it.  We don't ask the hard, the scary questions because the answers will frighten us.  You know I also think we have actually gotten to the point as a church where we have stopped asking some of the scary questions, perhaps because we have a good idea of what the answers would be.
Should my church make room for people with mental illness?
Should the Sunday school include children with autism?
Are worship services too knowledge oriented?
Do we love our neighbor as Jesus would have us love our neighbor?
The rich young ruler asked Jesus a question, for example, and he got a frightening answer.  He didn't realize that his question was scary but it sure was.  "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"  I think he expected Jesus to say, "You know you are doing great.  Just keep on doing what you are doing."  But Jesus didn't say that.  He said, "You lack one thing: go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor."  Jesus' answer made the young man's question become a very scary question.  It demanded him to change, to eschew his comforts, to step out in faith, to do something he had never done before, to take his commitment to God seriously.  You see if we ask the right questions, we may get frightening answers, but it they are from God, they are the best answers, the answers that will guide us to growth in our faith and in our likeness of Jesus.
But we first need to ask the questions and the questions are very basic, very very basic to what the Christian life is all about. Imagine asking questions like,
"Good teacher, should there be a place for everyone in the church, be they mentally ill, or physically disabled, or emotionally disturbed or mentally handicapped, or profoundly disabled, or are there some people who by their nature can be excluded from the church?"
"Jesus, am I loving my neighbor as a church if I pick and choose those in the community whom I will care about, particularly if I don't choose those who have been devalued, or are disabled, or are disenfranchised?"
"Lord, if the way we do church from Sunday School to worship service, to social gatherings, to small group Bible studies are exclusive of particular people, are those programs worth retaining in their current form or should the be scrapped in their entirety and reimagined with say, disabled people being present in mind?"
"Good teacher, if people with disabilities do not fit within the current structures of the church, should we exclude the people or change the structures?"
I suspect Jesus would look on us with love as he did to the man in the story because, hopefully we are asking out of a desire to be obedient.  But I suspect his answers would rock our world.
But we must continue to ask these scary questions even though the answers truly do frighten me as well.  As God reveals the answers to these questions to me, I pray that I will not "be shocked and go away grieving" because I was unprepared and unwilling to act in obedience to what I was told.  I am asking the questions and I am beginning to understand some of the answers as they are revealed to me.  May God give me, give us all the faith to do what we should do in spite of how the requisite changes will shock us and show us our disobedience.
Jeff McNair
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