Abstract
This past semester I taught a course called “The Church in Transition,” ministry in the context of the decline of mainline churches, closures, mergers, financial instability, and alternative ministries. There is, understandably, much hand-wringing in theological institutions today about the decline in Christian congregational affiliation, which has issued a passionate and sometimes desperate call not only for new models of ministry, but for new models of Christian leadership. Many pastors and Christian leaders are searching for flexible and adaptable paradigms of leadership that can accept, embrace, and, most especially, anticipate change in congregational ministry contexts. This reveals not only a willingness to adapt on the part of church leaders, but a conviction that prior paradigms of leadership and training were molded and wedded to a concept of congregational ministry that is now outdated and obsolete. “What do pastoral leaders look like in a post-Christendom world?” many of us are asking, and especially theological educators are asking, “How can we train them up?”
These conversations about religious decline tend to ask existing leaders to reinvent the molds for leadership and ministry. In so doing, they fail to recognize that the most needed conversation partners for such transformation may not even be at the table. My way of answering this question about leadership and training has been to look ethnographically at the people in churches for whom leadership has often been out of the question and try to understand how the Church can nurture and receive the very ministry it is lacking yet seeking. Over the last two years I have been doing ethnographic research with families and congregations with people with disabilities. In our first study, “Lonely Joy: How Families with Nonverbal Children with Disabilities Communicate, Collaborate and Resist in a World that Values Words,” 1 we discovered that far from being a mere project for the Church, families with children with disabilities who are nonverbal have distinct cultures of communication that can teach us valuable things about what it means to be human and expand our notions of joy. The problem, however, is that the Church, steeped in ableist culture, rarely has eyes and ears to receive such joy. Thus, families remain lonely in their joy and congregations miss out.
Our second study, which is ongoing and whose data I draw for upon for my article in this special issue, involves 11 different people with disabilities, as well as their ministry contexts and congregations. 2 This study has helped us see that loneliness is not just endemic to people with disabilities and their families, but to congregations as well. In considering Charles Taylor’s contributions to understanding ministry in light of secularization, practical theologian Andrew Root argues that the church today is depressed, because the charge that the church needs to change stresses out and overwhelms people who are already struggling to keep up with the demands to add more and more in modern life. 3 In our study we noted that churches in ministry with people with disabilities behaved much the same way. Despite the fact that families with people with disabilities were at their door, churches practically turned them away, arguing that they didn’t have the special education resources, the experience, skills, or facilities to minister to them. In other cases, looking for “church Prozac” as Root would say, they made herculean efforts to provide education services comparable with local special education programs, so that they could support families with persons with disabilities.
In the 2000s, practical theologians Andrew Root and Kenda Dean ushered in what they called “the theological turn” in youth ministry, making the argument that for too long churches had focused on young people as recipients of programs, siloed objects of mission. 4 In turn, they queried, what ministry might be possible if people in churches stopped viewing young people as problems, projects, or programs and perceived them as theologians in their own right, people of faith in whom God was instilling gifts for ministry and leadership? It is telling that a similar shift, from programs to people, has not happened in many churches with respect to ministry with people with disabilities.
Based on our research, we argue that churches “act small,” depressed, or lonely in ministry with people with disabilities, because they have been persuaded to think that worldly models of inclusion are the only paradigms for thriving disability ministry. It is difficult to provide a comprehensive definition of inclusion, given the breadth of institutions and actors that espouse it as a goal and its pervasive cultural currency. However, inclusion, as articulated in the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004), emphasizes people with disabilities’ rights to full participation in all aspects of society, as well as the provision of appropriate supports so that people with disabilities can be fully integrated into existing environments. Given the cultural and institutional emphasis on inclusion across legislation, schools, transportation, and employment, it is not surprising that American churches as institutions that are active in the world tend to also embrace and reflect this priority for inclusion in their ministry with persons with disabilities.
But while many of the goals of inclusion are in line with what the Church believes about the diverse nature of the body of Christ and Christ’s ministry in the Gospels and in the world, we find that a commitment to inclusion often fails to undo ableist norms and biases that undergird structures and systems of power. In his critique of inclusive ministry, theologian Thomas E. Reynolds points out that inclusion, paradoxically, tends to deny difference, assimilating a “them” into “us,” “assuming the rightness of its own position as an inside, all the while masking the fact that the inside itself is a construction based upon othering an outside.” 5 In my preaching and teaching I have compared the ministry of the Church to the banquet host in Luke 14: the church champions its charge to welcome and host people with disabilities, all the while ignoring its privilege and furthering the subordinate status of people with disabilities as mere participants, guests at the table, or worse, as afterthoughts, people who are included in the kingdom, but in such a way that primarily assures the salvation of the able-bodied and those in power. Instead, I suggest that this passage must be read as a cautionary tale, Jesus’ critique of power and politics, and that the Lukan messianic meal imagines the Kingdom as far more transformative than the worldly practices of diversity and inclusion.
Most concerningly for this special issue, inclusion fails to undo or expose the reliance of Christian leadership on a theology of ability. As pioneer disability theologian Nancy Eiesland prophetically noted now nearly three decades ago, in many theologies of access and inclusion, “the able-bodied church is at the speaking center,” whereas “persons with disabilities [remain] the topic.” 6 We need look no further than the recent uncovering surrounding Christian founder of the L’Arche movement, Jean Vanier’s sexual abuse of women, to remind us of this. 7 Despite the tremendous gift and sign L’Arche ministry has been to the world, the movement has struggled to make people with disabilities the “speaking center.” For years now, disabled scholars have taken issue with the language of brokenness in L’Arche and the way in which discourse surrounding L’Arche often uplifts and privileges the testimony and experience of able-bodied persons, the assistants, thus whether intentionally or not, silencing the ministry and perhaps humanity of people with disabilities themselves, the core members. 8
There are reasons for this, given that core members who reside in L’Arche often do not have much written and spoken language, and Vanier has been clear that the message of L’Arche is not disabled liberation, but Christian community, communion, even shared brokenness in the body of Christ. But one of the conceits of Vanier’s legacy is that as much as he emphasized brokenness, he ultimately instrumentalized the “brokenness” of people with disabilities, especially by leaving his own brokenness shielded behind closed doors until the bitter end. Even in the absence of language, there are real risks, formidable risks, to movements that do not lift up and amplify disabled leaders, and to movements that will not and do not name the conceits of inclusion, community, and mutuality in a world besieged by ableism and inequality. How might this pain and the fall of Vanier be an invitation for L’Arche to uplift the “communicating center” of people with disabilities rather than letting assistants become their speaking signs to the world?
The articles in this issue identify the ways in which God works through disabled leadership, as Jesus calls people with disabilities into ministry and the Spirit equips them, especially illuminating a context in which the Church has often participated in their discrimination. Benjamin T. Conner’s article boldly lays bare the misfit between a seminarian with cerebral palsy’s distinct call and creative adaptations in leadership alongside seminary and church officials who foreground their inability to perceive him as a leader. Conner and John Swinton, both focusing on persons with profound intellectual and developmental disabilities in their articles, move the theological conversation around vocation from individual agency, capacity, or self-actualization to the corporate gift of receiving vocation from God and discerning together in community. Shane Clifton argues that disability helps unmask leadership by rejecting authority, inviting new forms of meaning, goodness, and beauty that are not subsumed in a paternalistic redemptive, assimilative narrative. Raedorah Stewart puts the agency for writing a new narrative theology of disability between the listening and the telling of the stories of people with disabilities. Hannah Lewis helps us behold the collaborative paradigms for leadership indigenous to the Deaf Church. And Devan Stahl offers a vision for ministry that rejects the false inclusion and ableism of healing services, imploring us to reimagine them as spaces for disabled leadership, vulnerability, and lament.
The COVID-19 pandemic, during which I’m writing this editorial, seems yet another daunting revelation with respect to our collective ableism, 9 but I wonder if, in the spirit of this collection of articles and the gifts of disabled leadership to the Church, we might become further attuned to the creative and adaptive gifts for leadership that have come and do come uniquely out of disabled lives and experiences. For instance, teaching this semester alongside a Deaf teaching assistant, Noah Buchholz, 10 in my “Ministry with People with Disabilities” class reminds me that people with disabilities, some of the first to utilize online modes, have long been innovators in enhancing and making accessible diverse modes of communication. 11
On the first day of virtual class, Noah led the students in learning simple American Sign Language (ASL) that can be used to register comprehension, concern, or interference precisely in a mode where it makes sense for students to have their microphones turned off to avoid the static so distracting to hearing people. In the early days of the pandemic when churches were struggling to pivot to non-infectious ways of passing the peace, our seminary community, which had been passing the peace in ASL since Noah came to campus (see my article in this collection), found that we already had modes of worship that transcend some of these challenges. As Hannah Lewis discusses, the Deaf community has long known that their culture and language should not be framed in terms of loss but rather gain, but perhaps the pandemic poses one opportunity for churches and seminaries to have the will and vision to receive it.
In her lecture, “God on Wheels: Disability Liberation and Spiritual Leadership,” Rabbi Julia Watts Belser argues that most of the world doesn’t want to talk about disability and, therefore, disabled people are taught that they should take up as little space as possible and “pass” in all situations where that might be possible.
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Although passing can be advantageous, and there are costs to disclosing one’s disability, Belser asserts that there are also many costs to being closeted about one’s disability. Toward the very end of the lecture, in the question and answer, Belser talks about how becoming a wheelchair user helped her to “claim the integrity of [her] own self” in necessitating that she take up space to be in and go through the world.
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Contrasting two postures in her wheelchair use in the world, Belser paints a vision for disabled leadership: When I move through a crowd I have this posture, I call it elbows out. This is elbows tucked [she demonstrates keeping her arms close to her chest]. This is elbows out [demonstrates pushing her elbows away from her body]. Elbows tucked and elbows out, the motion that I’m making here with my elbows, is actually only about two inches different max in terms of the actual physical space that I take up, right? So we’re not talking a major change. Here’s the thing though—elbows out reminds me that I don’t give way, other people move. So when I move through crowds with a person who’s not a wheelchair user, with a walker … a person who’s a strider I like to say, they don’t go first. They don’t move with enough, they don’t move, they’re always worried to make sure that I’m going to keep up. I’m like, no, no. Get out of my way. I’m going first and you follow after. They’re always trying to like clear a little path. I’m like no, no, we’re going, we are moving, and space will get made.
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As the Church is depressed and stymied by the limits of inclusion, disabled leaders offer new ways of being, moving, and leading in the world, through which the Spirit may be calling the Church back to Christ. It will come as no surprise that the churches in our ethnographic study who could name the gifts of disabled leaders were also experiencing renewal, revitalization, and transformation, as they were being drawn into diverse practices of worship and ministry. As Eiesland herself once chided, As long as disability is unaddressed theologically or addressed only as a “special interest perspective,” the Christian church will continue to propagate a double-minded stance that holds up the disabled as objects of ministry and adulation for overcoming the very barriers the church has helped to construct. Moreover, the church will squander the considerable theological and practical energies of people with disabilities who, like many other minority groups, call the church to repentance and transformation.
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Footnotes
1
Erin Raffety et al., “Lonely Joy: How Families with Nonverbal Children with Disabilities Communicate, Collaborate and Resist in a World That Values Words,” Journal of Pastoral Theology 29.2 (2019): 101–15.
2
This research was funded by a Louisville Institute Project Grant for Researchers, and will conclude in Winter 2020. The research received approval from Hummingbird Institutional Review Board in April 2019.
3
4
See for instance, Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, The Godbearing Life (Nashville, TN: Upper Room, 2005) and Andrew Root and Kenda Dean, The Theological Turn in Youth Ministry (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2011).
5
Thomas E. Reynolds, “Invoking Deep Access: Disability beyond Inclusion in the Church,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology, 51.3 (2012): 219.
6
Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1994), 82.
8
Madeline Burghardt, “Brokenness/Transformation: Reflections on Academic Critiques of L’Arche,” Disability Studies Quarterly 36.1 (2016).
9
10
For more on Deaf culture and religion, see Noah Buchholz and Darby Jared Leigh, “Religion and Deaf Identity,” in Deaf Identities, ed. Irene W. Leigh and Catherine A. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University, 2020), 72–95. I am grateful to Noah for providing insight and feedback on this editorial.
11
For much broader discussions of ableism in seminaries and universities, see, respectively, Benjamin T. Conner, Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018) and Jay Dolmage, Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2017).
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13
Ibid., 1:07.
14
Ibid., 1:07–1:10.
15
Ibid., 25:00.
16
Eiesland, The Disabled God, 75.