“How Do You Think You Are Going to be a Pastor?”

Abstract

This article defamiliarizes the concept of vocation by attending to one individual’s process of discernment and the issues that that experience and reflection upon it raise for theologies of vocation and the institutions that sustain them. Drawing upon insights from persons with disabilities and disability studies, this article (dis)ables vocation.

Keywords

disability ministry practical theology theology vocation

Chris’s Calling

As I was entering my senior year at college, I was asked to share my story at a local church. I said I would be willing to do it. It was shortly after that the pastor came over to my dorm room to tell me how he greatly appreciated my message, and to tell me I had a gift of communicating. Have I ever considered going to seminary?

I had never thought about seminary mostly because I have a disability that affects my communication. “You need to communicate well to be a pastor.” However, as the first semester moved along, God continued pointing me into the ministry direction. I decided to apply to seminary.

I should have seen the barriers early on when a dean of the seminary requested a face-to-face interview with me before they would accept me. I knew the president of the seminary very well because I took two classes from him at college, and he reassured me he was going to sit in this interview. I found the first question [the dean asked me] interesting, and it should have struck me funny right away. It was, “How do you think you are going to be a pastor?” To be honest, I didn’t know. My answer was, “God knows how that is going to work and with his grace he is going to use me.” There were a couple of more questions [related to accommodations for my disability], and so on that I just said prepare me like any other. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was actually asking because to me this was no different than the rest of my life. I was going to figure this out on the go, like I have since being mainstreamed in third grade.

I was accepted into seminary. During orientation, [as part of the formative curriculum] we took psychological tests and then met with the psychologist. At that meeting, he asked me the same question, “How are you going to be a pastor and what if somebody tells you that you can’t become one?” Again, I said by the grace of God I would be able to do this, and I would prove myself to whoever thought I don’t love do this. He called that a defensive answer. I wasn’t exactly sure how it was, but I forgot about it and moved on.

The first year and a half went as smoothly as expected. We had some bumps at first, but [several people supported me and we] worked well together and managed those bumps together. I was really excelling in classes and also my [church] internship.

I wonder, in what ways, in our understanding and expressions of Christian leadership we are limited by an abstract, mythic, or normative understanding of ability? In what ways are our conceptions of Christian leadership undergirded by an unimaginative and ableist¹ doctrine of Christian vocation, which is nurtured and flourishes in disabling institutions? How might “disability,” as a lived experience and as a critical category of inquiry, challenge seminaries, divinity schools, Christian congregations, and theologians to think more broadly and deeply about Christian vocation, and, relatedly, who is deemed fit to lead the church in mission?

In what follows, I will share and engage Chris’s story, much of it in his own voice, as a way of examining the questions posed above. Chris was encouraged to attend seminary and was given access to theological education, but he was never encouraged to interpret his life in terms of vocation and consistently faced the question, “How do you think you will perform the tasks of a minister?” Neither his seminary nor his denomination ever imagined him as a minister. Chris will help me to challenge contemporary understandings of vocation through the lens of his experience of disability and his challenges seeking ordination. I will then defamiliarize or complexify vocation further by considering the vocation of people with intellectual and profound intellectual disabilities. While many congregations and seminaries can imagine people with mobility challenges or sensory disabilities as ministers, few can imagine a vocation in Christian leadership by someone with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Finally, I will give Chris the last word and allow him to tell you about his vocation.

I come at this task as a missiologist and as one committed to the insights issuing from disability studies. Missiologists are, according to Andrew Walls, magpies—forever stealing from other disciplines and fields of study, calling them their own.² He explains that missiologists have a vocation to “invade the scholarly territory of the neighbors and steal their topics” and to be “academic subversives, upsetting harmony by raising new issues; introducing new perspectives and data; identifying new questions and problems within established fields; exploring the missiological dimensions of topics already discussed by our theological colleagues.”³ Missiologists examine the boundary-crossing nature of the gospel and appreciate the cultural pluriformity or diversity of our common vocation as witnesses to the kingdom of God. Furthermore, I view myself as a disability missiologist. Disability missiology acknowledges “disability” as a possible boundary (Chris experienced it as a barrier and termed it as such) and interrogates how human experiences of disability or being disabled might offer a critical analytical perspective for expanding our knowledge of both God’s mission in the world and the church’s self-understanding and practices as a participant in and agent of that mission.

In particular, I will be considering how an ableist understanding of vocation flourishes in an institution designed to filter out people with disabilities, the seminary, thus making it unlikely or surprising when people with disabilities emerge from seminary as leaders in the church. Nondisabled (or more accurately, as disability studies scholars and advocates remind us, temporarily abled or not-yet-disabled) leadership is normative for the church. This fact has consequences for how differences from standard, typical, or normal are viewed, as disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland Thompson explains: “As the norm becomes neutral in an environment created to accommodate it, disability becomes intense, extravagant, and problematic.”⁴

I am working with a conception of disability that does not consider disabilities primarily in terms of losses or deficits. Disability is, among other things, a socially constructed category for labeling differences and impairments. It is also a category of critical inquiry employed by people with and without disabilities that draws upon the perspectives and embodied presence of persons with disabilities. Along with disability studies scholar Jay Dolmage, I understand disability as “an identity and an epistemology, as a way of being in the world and making meaning in the world.”⁵ Understanding disability in terms of identity and epistemology rather than in terms of pathology or deficit is the beating heart of disability studies. The experience of disability, then, provides an epistemological advantage, as disability rights scholar Simi Linton explains: “A disability studies perspective adds a critical dimension to thinking about issues such as autonomy, competence, wholeness, independence/dependence, health, physical appearance, aesthetics, community, and notions of progress and perfection.”⁶ Many of these capacities or values make up the unexamined, neutral expectations or requirements many people believe are necessary to respond to Christian vocation and to hold a position of leadership in the church.

Drawing upon the experiences of people with disabilities and the insights from disability studies I will “(dis)able” the concept of vocation. (Dis)abling “seeks to redress the exclusion of disability and disabled people from our critical discourses, our scholarly imaginations, and our classrooms.”⁷ By using Chris’s account of his calling and seminary experience and by drawing up the insights of scholars who have reimagined vocation as a result of spending time with people with intellectual and profound disabilities, I hope to (dis)able the theological concept of vocation with the goal of recovering a richer and more inclusive understanding and practices of discerning Christian calling and leading.

Chris’s sense of vocation or calling began with a story, like most. We narrate our lives. Our stories of calling connect us to what God has done and is doing in the world. We reframe our identities and sense of purpose in conversation with Scripture, a context, with others, and toward God’s purposes in a way that exceeds self-insight or a sense of personal destiny. In US, middle-class culture the concept of vocation, whether secular or religious, is often informed and shaped by presuppositions about individualism and the notion that the individual must chose the correct vocation from among seemingly unlimited choices.

Practical theologian Kathleen Cahalan has spent a good deal of her academic career considering vocation and challenging misconceptions. In her short, accessible book on the subject, The Stories We Live: Finding God’s Calling All around Us, she encourages individuals and congregations to focus on the prepositions that frame how we speak about calling.⁸ When we speak of vocation as a noun (“I’m trying to discern my vocation”) then we run the danger of viewing vocation as a singular, static entity. Prepositions, on the other hand, express relationships and offer multiple and dynamic conceptions of vocation. Prepositions also provide the structure for the chapters of her book: called by God in multiple ways; called to be followers of Christ; called as we are; called from people, places, and situations; called for service and work; called through each other; called in suffering; called by God from within; and, attending to the callings all around us.

Vocation, according to Cahalan, is not primarily a concept describing individual calling and self-fulfillment—it is a term that describes how we are written into a larger story of God’s redemptive work as an actor or actress. Therefore, our vocation is related to other vocations and oriented by God’s redemptive work in the world. According to Douglass Schuurman, vocation is another way to talk about how we live out our Christian discipleship. In his words, “Put in general terms, the purpose of God’s call is for the people of God to worship God and to participate in God’s creative and redemptive purposes for the world, to enjoy, hope for, pray for, and work toward God’s shalom. This is what it means for Christians to follow Christ.”⁹ Understanding one’s particular vocation as part of a shared general vocation requires a process of discernment.

Chris was in such a process (with others: pastors, institutional leaders, mentors, friends, and peers) to discern his vocation. Many affirmed that he was called to be a pastor—he had recognized gifts, an internal sense of calling, and a set of circumstances that allowed him to pursue his calling. However, in his tradition, as in many traditions, the path to being a pastor traveled through seminary and required affirmation by a governing denominational body. The fact that Chris has cerebral palsy, experiences constant involuntary movements, is a power wheelchair user, and uses augmentative alternative communication (AAC) would prove to be, as Chris described it, a barrier. Nonetheless, Chris remained optimistic. As Garland-Thomson explained in the introduction to About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times, speaking as a person with and for people with disabilities (and in an aptly titled chapter with the heading, “Living Well in a World Not Made for Us”), “We are expert users, lifehackers, of situations into which we fit uneasily, transforming the work world with our presence and distinctive expertise.”¹⁰ Chris was a master life-hacker and was convinced the barriers he anticipated in seminary wouldn’t keep him from his calling to be a pastor.

Seminary

The seminary, as an institution of higher education, bears an ableist legacy. According to Jay Dolmage, as he argues in Academic Ableism: Disability in Higher Education, there is a racist, eugenic, and ableist character to academic culture. In his words, “The ethic of higher education still encourages students and teachers alike to accentuate ability, valorize perfection, and stigmatize anything that hints at intellectual (or physical) weakness.”¹¹ Dolmage offers a heuristic tool developed through three spatial metaphors to help his readers consider access: steep steps, which represent the inaccessibility of academic institutions both in their architecture and their programming; retrofits, the premier visible example being an added ramp that conveys the fact that modifications to an environment emphasize that the building, pedagogy, and culture were designed without people with disabilities in mind and that disabled bodies don’t really belong; and, universal design, a hopeful concept that represents more of an inclusive worldview in action than a compliance list being ticked off.¹²

Chris was an expert life-hacker and was not intimidated when he faced “design apartheid”—the methodical exclusion of disabled people from planning, architecture, and design decision-making.¹³ Seminaries, like universities, are designed with an ideal learner in mind and this ideal student is constructed as normative by the institutions teaching practices, spaces, and technologies. Consequently, seminaries often filter out disabled bodies. It was not these barriers, as formidable as they were, that pushed Chris away from the pastorate.

Many professors worked closely with Chris to support him and the institution acknowledged their responsibility to make theological education accessible to him. One language instructor taught Chris the Hebrew alphabet by using a small sand box. Since Chris communicated by means of an augmentative communication device using only the big toe on his left foot, she would draw characters in the sand with her big toe and he would copy her. She made extra large flash cards and worked as his flashcard flipper so that he could see them clearly. She remarked that Chris was bright, competitive, and seemed to learn language more quickly because, out of necessity, he was used to holding information in his head. Another professor explained that Chris received support in the form of note-takers, was allowed more time on exams, and was given the opportunity to enter large amounts of text in his AAC when he was required to give a presentation in class. He was included and involved the community life of the seminary. At his parish internship, Chris read Scripture during services, was involved in sermon preparation, pastoral care, and preached a couple of times. When he preached, the sermon was delivered together with the lead pastor, Chris having entered his text into his speech device in advance. That pastor described Chris’s practice of leading in the following way: “He demonstrated his leadership qualities through what he accomplished: speaking in different venues, other leadership initiatives, he demonstrated resilience, strength of character, and other characteristics of a leader. But, for him, none of those things were enough.”

Indeed, despite flourishing in the first two years of seminary, personally and academically, he found himself facing the possibility of academic probation. If one were to map his story to his transcript, it would become clear why his grades began to fall:

It was at the beginning of my fourth semester that I was called into the academic office and [the associate dean told me about] a letter I was going to get. I was being assigned a committee because he said they had some concerns about my theology. I was aware that very few people get through seminary without this happening to them, and I was aware that some thought my theology was too simplistic. When you ask questions about why you have a disability for twenty-four years of his life, you come to realize that it is impossible to understand everything about God. Really, trying to put God in a nice pretty theological box doesn’t exactly work. Christianity is about having faith in those tense moments and not losing faith because there are no concrete answers. I was ready to explain this when I entered into the conference room.

However, the first question again was how do you think you are going to do this pastor thing? Do you really think we are going to find you a job? This time I was really taken aback and hurt by these questions. One, I’ve been honest all along saying God knows what he has me here for, so I’m going to trust Him and His purpose for me being here! Secondly, we’re about two and a half more years from graduating, and I’m not expecting you to find me a job. I believe I need to do that myself. I was frustrated! I was mad. I felt like I had not many people supporting me beside [a couple]. My advisor even had these questions [about my capacity to be a minister], so I didn’t know where to turn or where to find support.

I finished up that semester with the same gusto as I always had. I was going to show them this was going to work! I have done it before, and I knew I could do it again. However, Classis exams happened. You know the exams where you study your tail off expecting questions on everything you have learned. Well, my questions were about how are you going to do this? And after saying by the grace of God, just like everybody here does it. They said that answer was defensive, and my spirit was finally broken.

I didn’t know what to do, but I sure didn’t want to go back to seminary … However, I tried to push myself through classes, but my heart was no longer into it. That frustrated me too. I wasn’t a quitter. I didn’t want to quit. But my spirit was no longer there.

I had an awful third year academically, but I decided in February it was time to go into ministry on my own. I was bitter for a while because it hurt. I have come to understand that they just were unable to envision somebody like me with a disability as involved as mine leading a church.

Many people worked together with Chris to help him find success in an ableist institution. When people with disabilities enter higher education they must disclose their disabilities, secure supports, and constantly self-advocate.¹⁴ In general, higher education is tougher on people with disabilities, and, consequently, 66 percent of students with disabilities in American colleges and universities do not persist to graduation, “a rate 17% higher than their peers without disabilities.”¹⁵ It is revealing to note that while 31 percent of US citizens 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, this applies to only 13 percent of the same demographic with a disability. Additionally, disabled students are likely to have 60 percent more debt at graduation, it often takes them more time (as much as 25 percent longer) to graduate due to accessibility challenges and the rigors of navigating life, two-thirds don’t receive accommodations while in school, and, in general, accommodation services are underfunded.¹⁶

Part of the problem is that students are moving from high school, where IDEA and IDEIA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act) and IEPs (Individual Education Planning)¹⁷ are educational statutes, to Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the ADA, which are civil rights statutes without a corresponding educational service requirement.¹⁸ Stated differently, these laws are civil rights laws and not educational decrees, so receiving academic support requires more initiative on the part of the student, as Hadley and Archer explain: “Unlike high school in college students with learning disabilities are expected to provide documentation of their learning disability and request services. Developing the self-regulated skills needed for college can be overwhelming for many students with disabilities.”¹⁹ Institutions of higher education in their design, pedagogy, and community life communicate to disabled students that they don’t really belong—we aren’t designed with you in mind. When one enters a divinity school or seminary, that person faces additional challenges—unarticulated but viscerally felt expectations about what competencies, capacities, or abilities are required to be a pastor. All this causes barriers for disabled students.

However, the most challenging barrier that Chris faced was theological, the ableist and unimaginative notion of vocation held by others. The church missed out on Chris’s pastoral leadership: his perspective, his sensitivities, his embodied wisdom, and his wit. Chris quit seminary and gave expression to his vocation outside of the institutional structures of ecclesial leadership.

Chris’s experience calls into question our understanding of Christian vocation and church leadership. We need to (dis)able vocation because, as Kathleen Cahalan and Bonnie Miller-McLemore suggest, “Many people’s lives and vocations are constrained by sexism, heterosexism, and able-ism that impede them from actualizing gifts for work, love, and other pursuits.”²⁰ Chris clearly had the abilities necessary to lead the church in mission—the fact that he used augmented speech, operated a power wheelchair, and moved constantly shouldn’t have been factors in determining whether or not Chris could live into his calling; those factors merely inform how he executes his calling. Of course, Chris has what seems to many most important in theological higher education—a sound mind, the capacity for cogitation and abstraction, and the ability to make meaning. Surely, he could “overcome” his mobility and communication challenges. Therefore, to further (dis)able our understanding of vocation, I will explore several motifs for imagining the vocation of people with intellectual or profound intellectual disabilities who lack these capacities below. We respond to God’s calling in more ways than with our intellect.

Motifs for Imagining Intellectual Disability and Vocation

In what ways do people with profound intellectual disabilities shape the people who care for them into particular kinds of leaders? Do they do this in both agential and non-agential ways? Can we speak about a vocation for people with intellectual and profound intellectual disabilities, and, if so, can we speak about a kind of leadership exercised by people with intellectual and profound intellectual disabilities?

Called to Call Forth

Theologian and Methodist minister Frances Young was challenged by the birth of her son, Arthur, to imagine her son’s vocation in a world that seemed not to value his different way of being. Arthur was born with severe learning disabilities, and his presence in Young’s life caused her to consider her culture’s uncritical acceptance of the values of individualism, dominance, and competitiveness that seemed to undergird a concept of competence that was deemed essential to a fulfilling and successful life. Arthur would never have competence by the world’s standards, but he did have something to offer his community. While he lacked the characteristics that society uplifts as being fully human—“language, intelligence, the ability to read others’ minds, a moral sense”—what he had was the capacity to (in her words),

call forth those characteristically human qualities of response to one another—indeed the true human values that Paul calls the gifts of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5.22). Indeed, that some persons lack moral autonomy surely highlights that point that true human goodness is never individualistic—it’s corporate, something found in community.²¹

I call this capacity to “call forth” an evocative witness,²² and we find this vocation exercised especially among people with intellectual disabilities.

Arthur’s disabilities didn’t hinder him from having a vocation—they shaped the way he participated in a community that has a vocation to live out or to live into the very things he evokes. In that community, Arthur was a “man with a message,”²³ someone with a unique calling that supplemented, enriched, and shaped a shared vocation to be a certain kind of community in the world. Young reflects on their shared vocation: “True, I had over the years pondered his vocation, not least how it was part of my own ministry as I articulated insights given through him and others like him.”²⁴

What was Arthur’s contribution to the community? What was his message? Young explains:

Fundamentally what he directs us to is not about competence—those hands with their intriguing patterns of movements have never even picked up a spoon and used it efficiently. Nor is it about acquiring things … Basically it’s about appreciation, fascination, vaguely seeing yet not seeing, cheerfully being, just existing with a never-ending capacity for wonder at the same simple things.²⁵

Young describes Arthur as a “catalyst,” one who can “provoke,” and one with the “capacity to evoke fondness, to disperse depression, to tell us we’re appreciated, we’re beautiful.”²⁶

Frances Young identifies a vocation that she shared with Arthur and a kind of evocative witness, a calling to call forth in others. Arthur’s participation in their shared vocation emphasized the importance of being witnesses rather than doing something as an active and independent agent. Arthur, by his presence, evoked things that other people do not or could not evoke—he was, therefore, an indispensable contributor to his community’s witness. Frances Young testified about a vocation that could never be lived without her son Arthur in a universally impactful book that never could have been written without his presence in her life.

The Silent Spokesperson

After moving from Harvard to L’Arche Daybreak, Toronto, Henri Nouwen became a part-time caregiver for Adam, a profoundly disabled young man who experienced grand mal seizures and required full-time care. While Nouwen certainly romanticized Adam in his account of their interaction, it seems clear that the Harvard professor had become a student under Adam and learned embodied lessons about mutuality, vulnerability, connectedness, friendship, personhood, theological anthropology, presence, nonverbal communication, interdependence, compassion, and the importance of being over doing. Significantly for our line of inquiry, Nouwen also learned about vocation and leadership, explaining, Adam was a “the silent spokesman of the peace that is not of this world.”²⁷ Like Arthur, Adam had a calling to call forth community. As Nouwen understood Adam’s vocation, “The third and most tangible quality of Adam’s peace is that while rooted more in being than in doing and more in the heart than in the mind, it is a peace that always calls forth community.”²⁸

Adam’s vocation was not connected to “heroic virtues” nor was it restricted by his limitations. Adam, like all people, expressed his vocation through his limitations and brokenness. In Nouwen’s interpretation of Adam’s life and impact, “Adam was chosen to witness to God’s love through his brokenness.”²⁹ Adam had a “divine origin and sacred mission,”³⁰ becoming for Nouwen an image bearer of Christ with whom he shared a witness, explaining, “He seemed to be without concepts, plans, intentions, or aspirations. He was simply present, offering himself in peace and completely self-emptied so that the fruits of his ministry were pure and abundant. I can witness that the words said of Jesus could be said of Adam: ‘Everyone who touched him was healed.’”³¹ Adam became a nonverbal teacher who taught by his presence and helped to refine Nouwen’s understanding of vocation: “Adam clearly challenged us to trust that compassion, not competition, is the way to fulfill our human vocation.”³²

The Stranger in Our Midst

Ian Cohen, who contributed to Frances Young’s edited volume, Encounter with Mystery, speaks of a “strange vocation” and suggests that people with intellectual disabilities exercise a priestly vocation within their communities. Cohen notes that the ger, or stranger, played an important role in the Old Testament narrative by reminding the Israelites who they were. That narrative is continued in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus is cast as the ger—not of this world but living in it. While all Christians are aliens and strangers in the world, Cohen suggests that those with intellectual disabilities are more effective demonstrations of the otherness and the “true soul of God’s people.”³³

Something about God and humanity is manifested in the stranger. Cohen calls this the “strange vocation”; the calling of the stranger to let people know that their humanity is a shared humanity. How do people with intellectual disabilities exercise this vocation? By simply living within the community. Cohen explains, “The presence of the mentally disabled … created a different response.”³⁴ People with profound disabilities evoke things from the community that are essential to that community’s faithful witness, simply by being present. Since this is the case, Cohen argues, “we should endeavor to permit those who are mentally disabled to exercise their vocation. Not to do so is to mar the image of God in us all.”³⁵ Moving away from individualistic understandings of calling or vocation, he adds, “To live such a vocation, or simply to be, can only happen in community.”³⁶ Without the presence of the stranger, the nonverbal witness to what we are called to be together, reflecting something of the image of God to the world, the community can’t live out her vocation. As I have written elsewhere, when we don’t include the presence of people with intellectual disabilities in our congregations, we diminish the fitness of our witness.³⁷ Cohen explains one way people with intellectual disabilities live out their calling:

It is the mentally disabled who “call to us on our way,” showing us the direction in which we must travel. It is here, as in other moments, that the priestly aspect of the human vocation is in the imago dei which makes a person—priestly in the sense of reflecting God to the world. This reflection is not a capable activity practised by one who has the capacity to do so; rather it is the function of a person who is perceived and affirmed as a person by the assembly of those who acknowledge their sojourning state.³⁸

In the redemptive and reconciling mission of God, we are drawn towards one another and towards God not due to a capacity. The identity of the church is a sojourner and those with intellectual disabilities serve as priests who remind the community of its identity.

Brian Volck in a recent article, “Silent Communion: The Prophetic Witness of the Profoundly Disabled,” casts the contribution of the profoundly disabled in the church in terms of hospitality and suggests they have a prophetic role among the congregation. People with profound disabilities are the stranger (similar to the ger concept developed by Ian Cohen in “A ‘Strange’ Vocation”). Volck identifies the church as a countercultural community with a powerful witness to the world’s values to the extent that it welcomes the strangers and offers a “dramatically expanded imagination of what it means to be human.”³⁹

The absence of agency and power that make the profoundly disabled the stranger, also makes them “incapable of guile, deceit, or dissembling.”⁴⁰ (Here he is clearly speaking of the profoundly disabled and not those persons with intellectual disabilities.) Speaking of one individual in particular, Volck comments, “if Anna’s witness teaches me that personhood and dignity are gifts from God, independent of my abilities, her wordless vulnerability calls me to speak, write, and act on her behalf.”⁴¹

The church is faithful in its vocation to the degree that she “embodies practices of welcome and communion with the cognitively disabled.”⁴² The vocation of people with intellectual disabilities in this approach is evocative—through their calling as part of the church’s witness they call forth faithful witness by the church. The focus is not on what they do as independent agents, but rather how they shape the community to be more faithful in her witness through the agency of the Spirit as indispensable members of the community of faith. Volck’s speaking, writing, and acting on behalf of Anna is not a matter of her being merely inspirational—as a member of the body of Christ himself who has his own unique (though not independent) contribution to make, Volck couldn’t do what he is doing without Anna. By her presence and in her person, Anna offers something to her community that doesn’t exist without her.

A Vocation of Teaching Friendship

Hans Reinders touches on vocation in his important work, Receiving the Gift of Friendship. In that text he explains that the gift of friendship with God includes the gift of freedom to be involved in a purposeful life—“the gift of being entails a mission,” he explains. “Being human is never without meaning, because it always means something to God: because there is a God, there is purpose.”⁴³ How do people with profound intellectual disabilities share in vocation? Reinders is clear that people with profound disabilities, while lacking agency or the powers of reason or will, have a mission: “the mission of the profoundly disabled is aptly characterized as a mission to teach us something.”⁴⁴ While Reinder’s is too prescriptive in his estimation of how the profoundly disabled execute their vocation, his thoughts on the matter are extremely important. Casting people with profound disabilities as teachers he explains that one of the most important things they teach their communities is about the gift nature of friendship with God. They “witness,” he proposes, not through explanation but through presence and interdependence and as vehicles of God’s friendship, to the fact that human existence is dependent on God’s initiative and friendship and that Christian discipleship and community are dependent upon receiving a gift.⁴⁵ Therefore, people with profound disabilities call us and anyone who will attend to them to the core of the gospel message.

A Vocation of Being

In Becoming Friends of Time, John Swinton insists that people with intellectual disabilities are called to be disciples. In being called to be disciples, they aren’t simply called to be included in church life: they are called and given a calling, or a vocation through which they participate as indispensable members of their congregations in the ongoing redemptive work of God. Swinton explains:

Our vocation occurs in God’s time and is intended to fulfill God’s purposes. With such a context, vocation is never perceived as a personal achievement or goal; it is not an individual search for the fulfillment of our own destiny. Rather, it is an opening up our hearts to the callings of the Spirit in order that we can be enabled to participate faithfully within God’s timefull redemption of the world.⁴⁶

Vocation is countercultural, is enabled, and is communal. Addressing Frances Young’s important reflections, already considered above, Swinton states, “Previously, I suggested that the people of God are called to help those with experiences similar to Arthur’s to discover what God’s love feels like. Young’s narrative reminds us of the mutuality of such a task.”⁴⁷ He concludes, “What is striking about Arthur’s story is that his vocation was not to do something but rather to be something.”⁴⁸

The are many ways to talk about the vocation or calling of people with intellectual disability and profound intellectual disabilities. The concepts of witness, through the practice of Christian hospitality, provoking or evoking things from others in their community, being and providing a certain kind of presence, and the God-given capacity to bear the gifts of the Holy Spirit in a priestly or prophetic role that shapes a community to become the kind of people who are more faithful witnesses to the kingdom of God, are just some of the ways people without the cognitive capacities that Chris possesses can participate in Christian vocation. Because traditional understandings of agency are removed from the conversation about how we participate in Christian vocation, the discussion about how one with intellectual or profound disabilities participates in Christian vocation moves from speaking about capacities to focusing on community, connectedness, and enablement by the Spirit. This shift moves our thinking about Christian vocation toward a more faithful biblical theology and practice that is applicable to all people.

Conclusion: “How Do You Think You Are Going to be a Pastor?”

An advocate for augmentative alternative communication (AAC), Chris was elected as the president of the USSAAC (United States Society of Augmentative Alternative Communication) and served in that capacity from 2013 to 2016. In 2012, he formed a mentoring organization, BeCOME AAC (Building Connections with Others through Mentoring and Education about AAC). The organization provided tools and services to people who use AAC (and those who don’t) in order to enable and enhance communication so that people with disabilities can be socially integrated and experience community. BeCOME AAC was dissolved in October 2018, but the vision is still alive, and Chris teaches and consults with several institutions. His TEDx Macatawa talk on the subject, Seeing Unique Abilities, has over 30,000 views.⁴⁹

I believe my vocation is helping people see their brokenness through a different lens. People see their limitations through their worldview lens. My job is to help them see their limitations through their true identity of that they are a child of God. They may have circumstances that limit them in some way, but God can use them and their circumstances to accomplish His purpose. I want to challenge people not only to see their constraints differently, but to view them as how God views weakness.

Footnotes

1

See, Fiona Kumari Campbell, “Ability,” in Keywords for Disability Studies, ed. Rachael Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (New York: New York University, 2015), 12–14. Disableism involves discrimination against people with disabilities. Ableism, on the other hand, “denotes the ideology of a healthy body, a normal mind, appropriate speed of thought, and acceptable expressions of emotion. Key to a system of ableism are two elements: the concept of the normative (and the normal individual); and the enforcement of a divide between a “perfected” or developed humanity and the aberrant, unthinkable, underdeveloped, and therefore not really human” (13).

2

Andrew F. Walls, Crossing Cultural Frontiers: Studies in the History of World Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017), 259–66.

3

Ibid., 259.

4

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia, 1997), 24.

5

Jay Timothy Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2017).

6

Simi Linton, Susan Mello, and John O’Neill, “Disability Studies: Expanding the Parameters of Diversity,” The Radical Teacher 47 (Fall 1995): 5; also, Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York: New York University, 1998), 1–7.

7

Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2002), 3.

8

Kathleen A. Cahalan, The Stories We Live: Finding God’s Calling All around Us (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

9

Douglas J. Schuurman, Vocation: Discerning Our Callings in Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 18.

10

Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, About Us: Essays from the Disability Series of the New York Times (New York: Liveright, 2019), xxxi. For more on firsthand accounts of people with disabilities discerning their vocations and exercising leadership in the church, particularly the Methodist Church, see Robert L. Walker, Speaking Out: Gifts of Ministering Undeterred by Disabilities (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012).

11

Dolmage, Academic Ableism, 3.

12

“I want to center the idea that we must design a future for higher education that acknowledges but rejects its eugenic, steep steps history, refuses to accept an ongoing series of retrofits and slapped-on accommodations, and values instead the unpredictable times and places of disability to come” (ibid., 122).

13

Ibid., 43.

14

See the series of blogs about the experience of disability in graduate school in Inside Higher Ed by Alyssa Hillary, an autistic graduate school student studying neuroscience.

15

Allison R. Lombardi and Adam R. Lalor, “Faculty and Administrator Knowledge and Attitudes Regarding Disability,” in Disability as Diversity in Higher Education: Policies and Practices to Enhance Student Success, ed. Eunyoung Kim and Katherine C. Aquino (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 107.

16

Dolmage, Academic Ableism, 21. See also Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University, 2018). “The national average of students with disabilities seeking services from their higher educational institution is about 10 percent of the undergraduate population … [T]he graduating high school population of students with identified disabilities is much higher. Some students with disabilities are not going to college. Of the rest who do go on to higher education, many choose not to seek disability services and choose not to disclose a disability status formally” (p. 32).

17

The IEP meeting involves a group of teachers, parents, special education professionals working together with the student to ensure an appropriate and effective education program, including both academic and functional goals.

18

Wanda Hadley and D. Eric Archer, “College Students with Learning Disabilities: An At-Risk Population Absent from the Conversation of Diversity,” in Disability as Diversity in Higher Education: Policies and Practices to Enhance Student Success, ed. Eunyoung Kim and Katherine C. Aquino (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 78–79.

19

Ibid., 79.

20

Kathleen Cahalan and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, eds., Calling All Years Good: Christian Vocation throughout Life’s Seasons (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 21.

21

Frances Young, Arthur’s Call: A Journey of Faith in the Face of Severe Learning Disability (London: SPCK, 2014), 76.

22

Benjamin T. Conner, Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness: Exploring Missiology through the Lens of Disability Studies (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2017), 115.

23

Young, Arthur’s Call, 141.

24

Ibid., 142.

25

Ibid.

26

Ibid., 146.

27

Henri J. M. Nouwen, “Adam’s Story: The Peace That is Not of This World,” in Seeds of Hope: A Henri Nouwen Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Durbank (New York: Image, 1997), 255.

28

Nouwen, “Adam’s Story,” 261.

29

Henri J. M. Nouwen, Adam: God’s Beloved (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 30.

30

Ibid., 36.

31

Ibid., 64.

32

Ibid., 90. Also see Christopher de Vinck, The Power of the Powerless: A Brother’s Legacy of Love (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 111. Christopher describes his brother’s impact with the following words: “He evoked the best love that was in us. He helped us grow in the virtues of devotion, wisdom, perseverance, kindness, patience, and fidelity” (111). Oliver’s contribution can be viewed sacramentally as part of the evocative witness of a community. In this case his vocation is evaluated and or valuated in terms of what he does for his community as part of a community that images God.

33

Ian Cohen, “A ‘Strange’ Vocation,” in France M. Young, ed., Encounter with Mystery: Reflections on L’Arche and Living with Disability (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1997), 157.

34

Ibid., 162.

35

Ibid.

36

Ibid.

37

Benjamin T. Conner, “For the Fitness of Their Witness: Missional Christian Practices,” in Converting Witness: The Future of Christian Mission in the New Millennium, ed. John G. Flett and David W. Congdon (New York and London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019), 123–38.

38

Cohen, “A ‘Strange’ Vocation,” 164.

39

Brian Volck, “Silent Communion: The Prophetic Witness of the Profoundly Disabled,” Journal of Disability and Religion 22.2 (2018): 217.

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid.

42

Ibid., 218.

43

Hans S. Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 314.

44

Ibid.

45

Ibid., 320.

46

John Swinton, Becoming Friends of Time (Waco, TX: Baylor, 2016), 117.

47

Ibid., 123.

48

Ibid.

49

, accessed 11/5/19.

Author Biography

Benjamin T. Conner is Professor of Practical Theology and Creator and Director of the Center for Disability and Ministry (CDM) at Western Theological Seminary. The CDM exists to support ministry leaders of all abilities in receiving and nurturing the gifts and contributions of persons with disabilities through formational opportunities including theological education, consultation, forums, and publications. With John Swinton (Aberdeen) Benjamin will be co-editing a book series co-branded with the CDM and Intervarsity Press Academic on disability and practical theology.