I leaned against the wall in the church foyer, excited yet exhausted after a week of Vacation Bible School.
“What a busy week!” I said.
My friend, Sara, stood just a few feet away from me, a smile on her face, watching some kids run around while their parents chatted.
“You know what I dream about?” she said.
“What?”
“A VBS for kids with disabilities.”
“Oh…wow!”
“Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Yeah.”
“Or at least we need to figure out a way to get them here. We would need more volunteers, but we could do it!”
“Yeah.”
“I just think they’re missing out when they don’t get to come, and we do, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Wouldn’t that be great?”
“Yeah. It would.”
My friend Sara is a speech therapist, she works with kids with disabilities often. I knew she had a heart for kids with disabilities and their families, and I admired her for that. But I thought it wasn’t “my thing.”
I didn’t think her idea was great. Instead, I thought it would be a lot of work and not something I wanted to be involved with. Would there actually be enough volunteers to make something like that happen?
While she talked about her dream, I ran an inner monologue about how God had not “called me” for that job. I felt God had not “given me a passion” for kids with disabilities, so why would I be involved with that?
That conversation in the church foyer with my friend Sara replays in my mind over and over. Why? Because I had such a strong conviction I wasn’t “called,” yet several years later I gave birth to a baby girl with Down syndrome. The irony of the situation has never abandoned me.
I didn’t feel “called” yet I’d become a mom to a child with a disability. We were now what I used to think of as those families.
In Christian circles we talk about “being called” because we’re so “spiritual.” Now I know “being called” is an excuse not to care.
I had a wrong way of thinking.
Why did I ever believe I was exempt from caring about a certain group of people? Perhaps it was because I once thought that caring was a result of a “calling.” But caring is a result of loving, and we need to learn what it means to love.
Let’ make one thing clear: Jesus called us to love our neighbors as ourselves. I haven’t found any place in the Bible where there are stipulations or restrictions as to who we get to care about and love.
When God said to love others as I love myself, He meant loving people and kids with disabilities, too.
Now, many years later, I am a parent of two children with disabilities who recognizes and knows personally the desperate need for the Church to reach out. I know the need to educate and help the Church, because there are too many misconceptions and inaccurate perceptions regarding disability in our own faith community.
My view of disability has changed. Yes, it’s changed because I now parent children with disabilities, but mainly because in this journey I’ve had to face my own negative disability attitudes, which were based on ignorance and pity. I am not the same young lady standing in the church foyer, thinking that reaching out to families impacted by disability did not apply to me. I am a member of the Body of Christ along with my brothers and sisters with disabilities, and we all need each other to function and be whole.
Do you ever wonder how the Church receives us, families living with disability?
Here is a sad reality, many families who have a member with a disability do not attend church. Looking at it from a statistical perspective, the US Census estimates that 20% of the population is made up of people with disabilities. How many churches do you know that are made up of 20% of members who have a disability?
It’s time we begin to ask why people with disabilities are missing in our churches. Perhaps it’s time we reach out and ask them directly what keeps them from attending church. It is time we listen. It’s time that we, the Church, do something about it.
We have a people group who has been marginalized, ignored and pushed away by society for too long, and the church has acted no different. It is time that as a Church we treat our brothers and sisters with disabilities as equal and invaluable members of our faith communities. To recognize their full humanity and embrace them, accept them, celebrate them and do life together.
If we claim we want to be like Jesus, let’s remember his ministry involved reaching out to people with disabilities. If Jesus had a church today, his church would include people with disabilities and it would be fully accessible. Why is it our churches look so different?
And when people with disabilities join our faith communities, instead of praying for physical healing, let’s pray for God to open our hearts and our eyes to our own disability attitudes. Let’s figure out how to do life together. And if we are the Church, let’s embrace, celebrate, accept, and love unconditionally.
And let’s never forget that people/children with disabilities are fully human and fully valuable, fearfully and wonderfully made.
What are we going to do about it?
Does your church need help to begin these conversations? I can help through Disability Matters.
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May I use this in our next church newsletter?
Thank you for sharing.
Steve, send me an email.
And praying for emotional healing too..eg “Healing of Memories” . We need to include all disabilities…physical and emotional and not make folk feel like second class citizens who have not been “healed ” by prayer or have lesser faith.
Thank you for this. I’m both a pastor and a dad of two children with autism. This is so needed.
What keeps me away? That “Pity Look.” Be an unknown person and try to go into a church with a child who uses a wheelchair or crutches to get around. They will see my daughter, see her laughing and playing and dashing around, turn to me, and say “I’ll be praying for her and you all” WITH PITY IN THEIR EYES. I have friends who pray for us, and have told me. But they say it in times when we’re struggling with a health challenge, and it’s said with love and encouragement. There are people in the general public who do the pity look, but they seem to focus themselves in churches.
Pity helps no one. Least of all my daughter, who is thriving and exuberant BECAUSE I keep her away from the “pity people” as best I can. It is not my job to bring my daughter to people who don’t “get it,” like some traveling museum exhibit. It’s my job to raise her to be strong, capable, and prepared to overcome the challenges all over her world that other people put there. Learning that “turn the other direction” is the best answer to the pity look is part of that. I do the best I can to surround her with people who see HER, not some “message from God in their lives” or someone to challenge them to prayer or calling or whatever they choose to call it. We have more than plenty!
Thank you for addressing this isssue! As a sister of a person with disabilities, I have seen the need for this type of “attitude-change” in the church for a long time. People need to be “educated” about how to relate to someone with a disability. And by this, I don’t mean they need to read a book or take lessons. The best way to learn how to relate to someone with a disability is to get to know him/her. For older people with disabilities (my sister is over 50) it might be enlightening to ask them what would help them to feel welcome in the church. Or what would make it easier for them to attend church. My sister needed a ride and someone to sit with her. That would have made a world of difference. Thanks again for writing about this!
Sharon yes! It’s about relationship.
I have said, for many years, that there are hundreds of thousands of churches in the U.S. filled each Sunday morning with people wondering what their purpose is, whether they will have, can have, a “calling.”
I have heard a calling. A literal, audible, explicit calling–twenty-five years ago, in the cry of a newborn princess with Down syndrome.
We have seen “the pity look” a father mentions above–when Annie was a newborn older women would approach us in public, and then visibly recoil when they saw that Annie has Downs.
But we have also seen a mature church respond with…maturity. Our pastor preached on the meaning of the covenant relationship between God and His people–and the covenant relationship between the church and its weakest members–on the Sunday she was baptized.
After corporate prayer at our present church, we exchange the Peace of Christ. And every Sunday Annie goes forward to be hugged (and frequently kissed) by the pastor and the elders. We play a tune we call “Annie, It’s Time to Sit Down” to signal the end of the time–and the worship service continues. Annie, and other children in our small church with disabilities, is part of the fabric of our tapestry.
But we’re an Old School church: we have old people, and newborns. Grandparents, parents, and grandchildren sit together. We have a modest church building in the middle of a gritty, industrial, Rust Belt city. We don’t have a marketing plan, we don’t have “growth targets,” we don’t tailor our “church experience” the Young and Beautiful.
We believe that we are called to worship–corporately, within the sanctuary, and personally, in how we deal with our families and one another. And that’s reflected in how Annie is valued by our church community (even if she’s standing on her head in the sanctuary after worship is over).
I love this.