Not whole without us: Including people with disabilities in our understanding of the church,the gospel,and the world

Abstract

The Lausanne Movement famously organizes Evangelicals around the need for “the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.” Years of reflection on what this means has led the movement to make more and more explicit statements about who is included in mission, what that mission looks like, and whom that mission is directed toward. In its most recent statement, the Cape Town Commitment expressly calls for us to “think not only of mission among those with a disability but to recognize, affirm and facilitate the missional calling of believers with disabilities themselves as part of the Body of Christ.” This is the first time that people with disabilities are explicitly included in this evangelical conversation and yet, though it has been over 10 years since Cape Town, scholarship on what this means in terms of theology, ecclesiology, and missiology remains underdeveloped. This article explains why disability must be part of our understanding of whole church, whole gospel, and whole world, and will suggest that when it is, we will change the ways in which we talk about and do mission.

Keywords

disability people with disabilities Lausanne Movement Cape Town Commitment ecclesiology theology missiology gospel Orthodox theology of mission icon

Introduction

In his book Nothing about Us without Us, James Charlton (2000) chronicles disability oppression and liberation and notes that the Disabilities Rights Movement has coalesced around the idea that people with disabilities know what is best for themselves and their community. This shift in the locus of control responds to the paternalism that he says “saturates” the ways people with disabilities experience dependency (Charlton, 2000: 3). “Nothing about us without us” becomes a liberative proclamation that calls out the “the sources of many types of (disability) oppression” while simultaneously stating “opposition to such oppression in the context of control and voice” (Charlton, 2000: 3). This article, in a sense, riffs off of Charlton’s thesis by examining the place of people with disabilities within the Lausanne Movement’s (1974: point 6) call for “the whole Church to take the whole gospel to the whole world.” “Not whole without us” similarly highlights the prejudice that many with disabilities experience in the church—often through “subtle [forms] of pervasive paternalism and social aversion” (Eiesland, 1994: 64)—and calls the church toward “wholistic” inclusion and mission that is centered on the whole gospel. How we talk matters and it matters immensely for how we understand our theology (“whole gospel”), our ecclesiology (“whole church”), and our missiology (“whole world”). Without the full and intentional inclusion of people with disabilities, the church, the gospel, and the world cannot be “whole.” Only when we include the full spectrum of human ability do we have a more complete Body, a more complete message, and a more complete presence to and in the world.

Defining our terms

When speaking of disability, I follow Thomas Reynolds (2008: 27) in defining it as “a physiologically rooted social performance . . . a term naming that interstice where (1) restrictions due to an involuntary bodily impairment, (2) social role expectations, and (3) external physical/social obstructions come together in a way that (4) preempts an intended participation in communal life.” It is important to see people fully without necessarily reducing them to their impairments. It is also important to acknowledge the ways that many impairments are made into disabilities by various barriers to access (social, physical, attitudinal, etc.). Reynolds’s definition, I believe, helps us to maintain this balance.

Disability includes a broad spectrum of physical, social, emotional, and mental impairments that can be temporary or permanent. For this article, I will mostly be thinking of people with more permanent impairments. I will also tend toward the use of people with disabilities since this is a broadly accepted way to refer to the varied abilities of people without reducing them to their dis/ability or deemphasizing their personhood. The term is not perfect and I do not use it as a means to ignore impairments and disabilities that are central to people’s lived experiences and key parts of their identity. Additionally I should note, that while I hope to be inclusive in my use of disabilities, having a son with Down syndrome, I am most interested in how people with intellectual and developmental disabilities contribute meaningfully to a whole church, gospel, and world.

Whole church

The people of God are those from all ages and all nations whom God in Christ has loved, chosen, called, saved and sanctified as a people for his own possession, to share in the glory of Christ as citizens of a new creation.

—Cape Town Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 23)

The church has largely responded to disabilities in three ways: pity and paternalism, disregard, and spiritualization. Pity and paternalism often manifest in medical models of disability in which disability is seen “as an abnormal part of life in a normal world” (Hubach, 2020: 26). Medical models of disability emphasize people’s limitations and often reduce people to the function of their disabilities (Reynolds, 2008: 25). Since it is “assumed that disability indicates a deficient or flawed human condition . . . which holds a person back from participating in society,” disability necessarily needs to be treated, “fixed, made better, or overcome” (Reynolds, 2008: 25). When limitation is the focus, “reciprocity is annulled” as people with disabilities move (or are relegated) to “the role of an otherwise helpless and useless burden” (25). In this way, people with disabilities are welcomed in the church as objects of ministry but no more.

Disregard happens in the many ways in which the church, like society, “inadvertently perpetuates processes of disempowerment, exclusion, and isolation” (Reynolds, 2008: 26). People with various impairments become disabled when the social and physical structures themselves create barriers to participation.¹ Disregard also happens when church practices and attitudes locate the “problem” of disability within the person rather than within the social structures. Nancy Eiesland (1994), for example, recounts how ushers asked her to remain in her seat and wait for them to bring her the Eucharist after others went forward to receive the elements. In a painful testimony she says,

My presence in the service using either a wheelchair or crutches made problematical the “normal” bodily practice of the Eucharist in the congregation. Yet rather than focusing on the congregation’s practices that excluded my body and asking, “How do we alter the bodily practice of the Eucharist in order that this individual and others with disabilities would have full access to the ordinary practices of the church?” the decision makers would center the (unstated) problem on my disabled body, asking, “How should we accommodate this person with a disability in our practice of Eucharist?” Hence receiving the Eucharist was transformed for me from a corporate to a solitary experience, from a sacralization of Christ’s broken body to a stigmatization of my disabled body. (Eiesland, 1994: 112)

Churches spiritualize disabilities by suggesting that disablement is either sinfulness or saintliness. When disability carries the sin trope, people’s impairments are viewed as punishment for or consequence of sin. The fallenness of people and the world are to blame for “abnormal” things and only through full repentance and genuine faith will healing come. When impairments remain, the person is blamed and condemned for hidden sin or faulty faith. When disability carries the saint trope, people with disabilities are thought to have a special relationship with God—after all, God only gives the biggest challenges to the toughest soldiers. In this way disability is seen as “a test of faith, an opportunity to build character or to inspire others, an occasion for the power of God to be made manifest . . . or simply a mysterious result of God’s will” (Creamer, 2009: 50). Unfortunately, whether as sinner or saint, “these interpretations too often mean that when people with disabilities have been considered at all by religious communities, they have been looked at as objects to be avoided, admired, pondered, or pitied—very rarely have people with disabilities been considered first as people” (50).

Eiesland (1994: 20) painfully summarizes the church’s ambiguous interaction with the disabled by saying,

Rather than being a structure for empowerment, the church has more often supported the societal structures and attitudes that have treated people with disabilities as objects of pity and paternalism. For many disabled persons the church has been a “city on a hill”—physically inaccessible and socially inhospitable.

And yet, this is not true to the calling of the (whole) church.

As Evangelicals who embrace the missio Dei, we understand the church to be a central and indispensable part of God’s redemptive plan for the world. The Apostle Peter (1 Pet 2:9–12) gives us a rich portrait of the church as a disparate people with all manner of diversity being called by God into a new eschatological community of interdependence where “unity in diversity” (Niringiye, 2015: 187) and embodied presence gives verbal and “iconic witness” (Conner, 2018) to the saving work of Christ and the Kingdom of God.

Peter’s central point is that once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God. What makes us a people? Quite simply, other people! In her article on disability inclusion, Jessie Fubara-Manuel (2019: 49) draws from the African idea of ubuntu, which was popularized and translated by Bishop Desmond Tutu as “a person is a person through other persons.” Ubuntu recognizes the humanity of people through their relationships and calls us, as a church, to acknowledge “our interrelatedness and interdependence with one another” (49). When we do so, our “interdependence on one another” becomes “the collective confession that we are not a people without other people” (50 emphasis mine). This interdependence gives people with disabilities just as much import in the creation of “a people” as those without disabilities; and it gives them just as much personhood as others through their being made into a people by their relationships with others in the church. Just because people with disabilities are, perhaps, unable to achieve “independence, productivity, intellectual prowess and social position” (Swinton, 2003: 67) in ways that match societal expectations, this does not negate the gifts and contributions they are called and enabled by the Holy Spirit to share nor does it exclude them from being made and making others into the people of God.

This interdependence is a significant part of the church’s catholicity and its ability to “share the many gifts of God . . . that nourish us to be a visible, material witness in the world” (Jones, 2014: 201). The church does not lack anything it needs as God’s people because, as Jones notes, God makes room in the church for all peoples, nations, races, cultures (and abilities), and he adds people to the church in such a way that the church is complete and whole, not missing anything. The inclusion of all the people God calls to himself and the reception of the gifts their participation in the body brings is “essential to the wholeness and health of the church” (201).

Seeing the wholeness of the church as reliant on the inclusion of people with all manner of abilities moves us to reconsider the structures and power dynamics within the church. Donna Jennings (2017: 32) notes that the church often directs ministry “from the strong and able to the weak and disabled, based on the one-sided premise that people with disabilities need the church.” However, as Jesus’ encounter with the blind man in John 9 suggests, Jesus dismantles barriers and prejudices that would perpetuate paternalistic attitudes and calls the man into relationship and to witness. Toward this end, Jennings (32) says we should not just focus on “the geographical spread or the theological depth of the church, but also carefully consider the shape of the church” because, quoting Conner, “the very diversity of Christian humanity is necessary in order for the church to be complete.”

Newbigin (1989: 123–24) reminds us that “as the mission goes its way to the ends of the earth new treasures are brought into the life of the Church and Christianity itself grows and changes until it becomes more credible as a foretaste of the unity of all humankind.” The very expansion of the church calls for incorporation. If the Kingdom of God is to come “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10), then a foretaste of Revelation 7:9 should be present within the church. This must necessarily include people with disabilities² who are “an essential part of the diversity of the human experience and [thus] necessary contributors to the calling of Church to bear witness to the ongoing redemptive work of God in this world—proclaiming the Kingdom of God is at hand” (Conner, 2015: 14). The question Newbigin (1979: 19) asks is, “Do we recognize in them members in the Body of Christ without whose gift we are maimed?” Or as Conner (2018: 60) more positively restates, “Do we acknowledge that people with disabilities are members of the body of Christ who enable a more credible witness in a world of people with differing abilities?”

Whole gospel

God’s glorious good news in Christ, for every dimension of his creation.

Cape Town Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 7)

The Lausanne Movement has reflected deeply on the nature of the gospel as a story of good news and hope for every dimension of creation. This “gospel is not a concept that needs fresh ideas” because it is “the unchanged story of what God has done to save the world, supremely in the historical events of the life, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus Christ” (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 7). However, as the Cape Town Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 7) does suggest, this story needs “a fresh telling.” Part of this fresh telling requires more intentional engagement with the interplay between the gospel and people with disabilities. Though this should happen on multiple levels, let me just highlight two.

First, we need to hear the voices and perspectives of people with disabilities as they reflect on the gospel. Paul Hiebert famously championed the right for indigenous churches to engage in self-theologizing, suggesting that theological dialogue within the global hermeneutical community leads us toward a true meta-theology (Cathcart and Nichols, 2009: 209). People with disabilities share in the priesthood of all believers and, thus, share in the ability to provide theological reflection out of their experiences and perspective. From their reflection, they gift the church a fresh telling of the gospel.

The disabled God

For example, Eiesland (1994: 98) introduces a provocative and powerful reconceptualization of “the symbol of Jesus Christ, as disabled God.” This “contextualized Christology,” she says, “is an authentic process of perceiving how God is present with people with disabilities and of unmasking the ways in which theological inquiry has frequently instituted able-bodied experience as the theological norm” (98–99). Eiesland argues that the early church understood Jesus’ incarnation—his being “God with us”—largely through his life, death, and resurrection. But it is at the resurrection, she says, that the disciples truly understand “the person of Jesus for who he really was” (99). And it is in this revelation that God is revealed as the disabled God, “who embodied both impaired hands and feet and pierced side and the imago Dei” (99). Speaking of Jesus’ resurrection appearance to the disciples in Luke 24, Eiesland (100) suggests,

Here the resurrected Christ is making good on the incarnational proclamation that God would be with us, embodied as we are, incorporating the fullness of human contingency and ordinary life into God. In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation. In so doing, this disabled God is also the revealer of a new humanity. The disabled God is not only the One from heaven but the revelation of true personhood, underscoring the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability. (Emphasis mine)

This reconceptualization of Jesus through the impairments that mark his resurrected and glorified body does several things. First, it repudiates any notion that the bodies of people with disabilities are “artifacts of sin” (Eiesland, 1994: 101). Second, by inviting the disciples to experience Jesus’ body (“touch my hands, my side”), Jesus “alters the taboo of physical avoidance of disability” (101). But in this acknowledgement of his pierced side, Eiesland also suggests that, third, Christ is able to identify with “hidden” disabilities (consider the hidden internal damage caused by the sword). “For many people whose hidden disabilities keep them from participating fully in the church or from feeling full-bodied acceptance by Christ,” she says, “accepting the disabled God may enable reconciliation with their own bodies and Christ’s body the church. Hence, disability not only does not contradict the human–divine integrity, it becomes a new model of wholeness and a symbol of solidarity” (101).

What does this do for our gospel witness? It broadens our understanding of resurrection hope. By “sharing Christ’s risen life” we not only “are adopted as fellow heirs with Christ,” become “citizens of God’s covenant people, members of God’s family and the place of God’s dwelling,” and “have full assurance of salvation and eternal life” (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 22). We also find hope that “our nonconventional, and sometimes difficult, bodies participate fully in the imago Dei and that God whose nature is love and who is on the side of justice and solidarity is touched by our experience” (Eiesland, 1994: 107).

Iconic witness

Second, we also need to be awakened to fresh ways of telling the gospel story by considering how people with disabilities reflect the gospel. Benjamin Conner (2018: 103) observes that because “abstraction and rationality . . . are deemed essential to being a person, participating in imaging God, or being a witness,” people with intellectual disabilities who may lack these qualities “are sometimes theologized out of significance.” Yet, as Conner (104) argues, election initiates vocation with the express purpose of witnessing to God’s glory. This is true regardless of one’s mental and physical capabilities. Building on a relational approach to the imago Dei,³ Conner (111) argues that “we have no capacity to image God on our own apart from Christ.” If it is “our relationship to the One who makes us persons and the fact that God is acting toward us in a particular way,” then we cannot judge a person’s capacity to image Christ (i.e., bear witness) by discerning in them a certain capacity (112).

This understanding counters Enlightenment arguments that personhood is found in rationality, autonomy, and moral agency. People with more profound intellectual and developmental disabilities may not demonstrate purposive agency or self-determination; however, Conner (2018: 122) argues this does not diminish their ability to reflect imago Dei, to witness to God’s glory, because it is “Divine agency, not human agency . . . at the center of our capacity to participate in the image of God to bear witness.”

But does not gospel witness require rationality and words? Without discounting the need for words in gospel witness, Conner (2018: 129) employs Orthodox theology (of missions, evangelism, and iconography) as a reflective lens to “relativize words and abstract theological concepts and . . . destigmatize experience and encounter.” Words can do a lot, but as with any medium of communication, words face limits “in their capacity to describe and bring us before the reality of God” (129). A fresh telling of the gospel is a call not only to “hear and believe (Rom 10:4–17)” but also “to taste and see (Ps 34:8)” (130). This demands that all Christians, including those with significant intellectual disabilities, engage in “iconic witness” with the church. How does this witness tell the gospel without words?

First, the church’s iconic witness gives a countercultural picture of “the good life,” or human flourishing and calls others to “taste and see”—not through reason, doctrine, or information, but through “the language of experience and participation” (Conner, 2018: 132). Such iconic witness especially gives place for people with intellectual disabilities to participate. After all, “what intellectual capacities are needed for someone to bear or receive the hospitable presence of Christ, or participate in community of prayer, or receive the gift of friendship, or participate in the church’s practice of testimony by bearing the witness of the Spirit?” (Conner, 2018: 133). Indeed, without the presence of people with disabilities, the church’s iconic witness suffers because it is incomplete and much more in line with cultural currents that see “the good life” and sharing life with the disabled as incompatible (104).

Second, iconic witness mediates a presence and a sense of historical connection and invites others to be connected. “Icons,” Conner (2018: 133) says, serve “as a window into the kingdom of heaven,” inviting us “to be connected to a community of faith that includes those who have gone before us.”

Third, iconic witness is evocative and calls people to encounter Jesus. In recognizing that an icon “does not speak” but “is never mute” we see that iconic witness points people toward Jesus (Conner, 2018: 134). Imaging God and pointing to Jesus does not always require words or specific capacity.

Fourth, iconic witness is intricately tied to the whole of the church’s communal witness. “Evangelism and witness,” Conner (2018: 136) says, “are ecclesial and liturgical in that they flow from and find their final meaning in the community’s worship. The congregation, as the body of Christ and the community of people called to bear witness, offers a kind of ‘hermeneutic of the gospel’—a setting that offers a more complete account of God’s redemptive work in the world than a disembodied (i.e., apart from the body of Christ) message.” The church is sign and foretaste of the kingdom of God; this makes it more “than just an instrument conveying truths about life in Christ” (136). The church is also sign and foretaste of embodied participation in the life of Christ.

Finally, iconic witness also reorients our missional scope from the individual to the cosmic. It is not just our souls that God redeems, but through the very embodied iconic witness, in which God choses even broken bodies and minds “as a vehicle of the Spirit,” we are reminded that “all of creation is called to participate in redemption” (2018: 138–39). “In the icon,” Conner (139) says, “all of the elements are called together and strategically placed where they can bear witness. Evangelism is not a strategy to rescue an individual monad being saved from hell; it is a Spirit-enabled invitation to be part of God’s cosmos-wide redemption through Christ.”

Conner (2018: 140) concludes that “The Orthodox reminds us that the gospel is not a manageable commodity, and our words, actions, and other presentations of the gospel cannot contain or exhaust its mystery. Iconic evangelism and witness invites people to union with something that they do not completely understand, and in the process of witness, everyone is changed.” We image God in community, as a “gift expressed together in Christ and animated in us collectively by the Holy Spirit” (141). This is the fresh telling that people with disabilities bring us. We image God in and through our bodies and the collective being-in-relationship in Christ and with one another. But only when this collective imaging of God includes people with disabilities is our witness and our gospel complete. As Newbigin (1979: 24) argues,

Without that witness from within its own membership, the Church’s witness is distorted and deceptive, and the Church’s discipleship is irrelevant to the real world in which men and women live and suffer. For it is only when the witness of the handicapped is an integral part of the witness of the whole Church, that this witness is true to the Gospel of the Crucified who is risen, the risen Lord who is the Crucified. Only with this witness as part of its total message does the Church’s message measure up to the heights and depths of the human situation.

Whole world

Our love for all peoples reflects God’s promise to bless all nations on earth and God’s mission to create for himself a people drawn from every tribe, language, nation and people.

Cape Town Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 18)

According to the World Health Organization, over 1 billion people (15 percent of the world’s population) live with some form of disability. People living with disabilities are disproportionately poor and suffer from inadequate healthcare due to costs, ability to get to services, availability of services, and quality of services. People with disabilities are also among the most unreached in the globe as well, with 90–95 percent having no access to the gospel (Jennings, 2019: 30). Sadly, despite these statistics and despite the fact that almost every person on the planet will face one or more disabilities in their lifetime (especially as they age), people with disabilities have not been a priority in missions. However, if everything I have argued thus far is true—that a whole church requires the inclusion of people with disabilities and that a whole gospel requires the perspectives and witness of disabilities—then doing mission among and with people with disabilities will necessarily become an intentional priority in our mission. As people with disabilities come into view, our priorities and strategies in mission and our language about disability will go under review.

For example, Malcom Gill’s (2017) reflection on contemporary church-planting movements (CPM) reveals a significant absence of the aged, poor, and disenfranchised. Many CPMs embrace the homogeneous-unit principle as a way of targeting a specific unreached population, but Gill (2017: 89) says this strategy often produces churches that fail “to encapsulate in their gatherings the reality of God’s plan for diversity in his church.” By seeking to have a “face to the world,” contemporary churches fail to pastorally look after those already within the church, particularly the aged (who are disproportionally disabled). In bold words, Gill (2017: 90) says,

I would suggest that it seems that at the base of much ministry today is the shortsightedness of well-meaning pastors who are looking to reach, network, and connect with people only in their own demographic without due consideration of those not in their “people movement.” In this regard I think they not only miss the richness of “the one new humanity” (Eph 2:15), they also fail to demonstrate or witness the power of the gospel to work in and through a diverse community unified by Christ.

At the heart of this exclusion is pragmatism. Many church-planting organizations focus on entrepreneurial leadership capabilities, communication skills, and people management when assessing candidates, overshadowing assessments of theological convictions and ecclesiological understanding (Gill, 2017: 90). This “overemphasis of pragmatism and skill orientation has,” Gill suggests, “had an indirect influence on the nature of how many young pastors view church. A success syndrome that has predominantly been based on numeric outcomes, staff size, and the shape and style of the church service has increasingly led to the fading away of the aged, poor, and disenfranchised from the agenda of the church” (91). When any person is viewed as lacking useful contribution for numeric growth, they are discarded as nonessential (91; cf. Escobar, 2000; Scheuermann, 2021).

Gill’s evaluation of CPM highlights how, when people with disabilities are forefronted in our thinking, some of our long-held practices might need adjustment. Such review can and should be made across a host of missional spaces, including our assessment of missionary candidates and models we use for evaluating missional success (John, 2019: 3); how we appropriate things like the unreached people group idea (Scheuermann, 2021); how we develop our theology, ecclesiology, and missiology (Swinton, 2003: 74); and so much more. By “disabling missiology” (that is, dismantling ableist missiology), we enhance our ability to see, reach, and incorporate the almost 1 billion people in the world who have disabilities and are in need of the gospel.

But not only do we need to prioritize disability in our mission strategy, we also need to consider why explicit language about and intentional inclusion of (dis)ability language matters. As a case in point, let us consider briefly the Cape Town Commitment. Commendably, the Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 37–38) is the first time that the Lausanne Movement has explicitly called for mission among and with people with disabilities. While we can infer that people with disabilities are included in the document’s many commitments, outside of this specific mention in Section II.B.4, the Commitment misses opportunities to make the inclusion of disabilities explicit. As we read various sections of the document, it becomes clear why intentionality in language is imperative.

For example, when talking about “We love the people of God,” the Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 23) correctly argues that “A most powerfully convincing mark of the truth of the gospel is when Christian believers are united in love across the barriers of the world’s inveterate divisions—barriers of race, colour, gender, social class, economic privilege or political alignment.” The Commitment (23) notes that “few things so destroy our testimony as when Christians mirror and amplify the very same divisions among themselves.” The problem here is that the church is often complicit in perpetuating barriers for people with disabilities by othering them, by ignoring them, or through “pervasive paternalism and social aversion,” as already noted (Eiesland, 1994: 64). With disabilities being a reliable predictor of whether people and families are present within a church (Carter, Biggs, and Boehm, 2016: 128–29), it seems important that the Cape Town Commitment include abilities among the list of inveterate barriers to which the church is called to offer a counter witness.

Forefronting disability might also prevent the use of language that perpetuates narratives that disability is necessarily negative. In the same “We love the people of God” section, the Commitment (The Lausanne Movement, 2010: 24) calls for the honesty of prophetic voices who will identify the church’s failures to love and will call the church toward repentance. In lamenting the church’s relational brokenness, the Commitment (24) states, “Our love for the Church of God aches with grief over the ugliness among us that so disfigures the face of our dear Lord Jesus Christ and hides his beauty from the world—the world that so desperately needs to be drawn to him.” The message here is correct: the church has bought into worldviews and practices that have yielded disunity and, in so doing, has failed to reflect Christ fully to the world. However, the message uses language that perpetuates ableist structures. The imagery here equates ugliness with disfigurement (i.e., disability) and then contrasts disfigurement with beauty. This overlooks the fact that it is a disabled God that we follow; our resurrected Jesus identified by his disfigurement—impaired hands and feet, a pierced side (Eiesland, 1994). His disfigurement is not ugly nor does it portray unmarred perfected beauty. While we can misrepresent Jesus in the world, we must be careful not to use language that identifies impairment as sinful or ugly. And it is at this point that Eiesland (104) calls us forward:

. . . the church, which depends for its existence on the disabled God, must live out liberating action in the world. The church finds its identify as the body of Christ only by being a community of faith and witness, a coalition of struggle and justice, and a fellowship of hope. This mission necessitates that people with disabilities be incorporated into all levels of participation and decision making.

Conclusion

As we consider the whole church, taking the whole gospel, to the whole world, we might need to even reconsider whether the word “whole” is powerful enough to accurately capture what we need to capture. The word “whole” has its own connotations within the disability world, at times being levied as the goal line and measuring stick for anyone who, whether temporarily or permanently, is not whole in mind and/or body. While it is not absolute, the current reality is that we have been a whole church, taking a whole gospel, to a whole world. That is, an abled church, taking an abled gospel, to an abled world. Connor (2015: 26) powerfully challenges us:

Since it is the Holy Spirit who enables witness, the only way that people with disabilities who are part of the body of Christ can fail to offer their contribution to the ministry and witness of the church is if they are not afforded a place within our congregations. The absence of their concerns and presence from theological schools and congregations diminishes the church’s capacity for ministry and the fitness of her witness. No one is impaired such that they can’t bear the witness of the Spirit, and no single person should be disabled from participating in the church’s witness.

I would add to this that the absence of people with disabilities from the church inherently limits the scope of our mission as well. Perhaps if we substituted complete for whole, we might be able to shift our focus to consider ourselves and our mission in a new light. Who among us is missing such that the church is not complete? What is missing in our gospel story such that the gospel is not complete? Who is missing in our missional strategy such that we have not yet reached the complete world? Only in asking these questions do we truly come know that, indeed, the church, the gospel, and the world is “not whole without us.”

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rochelle Scheuermann

Notes

Author biography

Rochelle Scheuermann is Associate Professor of Evangelism & Leadership at Wheaton College Graduate School and serves as director for three master’s degrees in the Graduate School (Evangelism & Leadership, Missional Church Movements, and Ministry Leadership). She earned her MDiv from the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary and a PhD in intercultural studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Prior to coming to Wheaton, Rochelle served as Program Director & Associate Professor of Intercultural Studies and Vice President of Academics at Lincoln Christian University. She is an ordained minister and served as Associate Pastor at a church plant in downtown Salt Lake City, UT.

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