Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness (eBook)

Introduction

Megan is a thirty-four-year-old woman with cerebral palsy and a significant cognitive impairment who lives in a group home. She is barely verbal, difficult to understand, and, oddly, when she does speak, says everything at least twice in direct succession. She works a few hours a day at McDonald’s during the week cleaning up the dining area. On weekends, she goes to church with us. She can’t read, so she makes unusual noises during the songs and the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. Her friend Seth, who has Down syndrome, now comes with her, and they always sit near each other. Once when we were out of town, Megan went to church by herself. Her phone made noise during the service, and she was unable to turn it off. She left.

Do you think you know Megan?

Let me try again.

Megan is a resident at Friendship House, a residence on the campus of Western Theological Seminary where seminary students share housing with young adults with intellectual disabilities. She delights in her housemates, and they are her best friends. She sometimes exercises, prepares meals, or creates artwork with the seminary students. On World Down Syndrome Day this past year (always March 21 to symbolize the value of the extra, or third copy of, the twenty-first chromosome in people with Down syndrome), four of the Friendship House Friend residents were looking forward to being acknowledged and celebrated.1 Megan does not have Downs, but her friends wanted to make sure she was included. When my wife pointed out that Megan didn’t have Down syndrome, they insisted, “Megan has Downs.” Megan nodded her head vigorously and repeated in affirmation, “Yes, I do . . . yes, I do.” Why should she be excluded yet again, this time because she has the “wrong” disability?

She has difficulty communicating verbally and knows it, so in an effort to make sure you can understand what she is saying, she tends to say things at least twice. Every day during the work week, Megan takes public transportation to her job. Once a week she rides horses at a therapeutic riding center.2 On her way to work, she often texts her friends the emoji of a hamburger, and when it is time to ride, she texts an emoji of a horse. On the weekends, she joins my family at church (and texts us an emoji of a church to let us know she is there and waiting for us), and she is an important part of our community of witness. Though she can’t read, she participates in all aspects of the worship service and offers habituated responses to the music and the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed.3 Megan has a contagious enthusiasm about church and emits a profoundly joyful and largely nonverbal witness to being included in the body of Christ. When she invited her friend Seth to attend church with her, of course he came. Everyone wants to be loved and included; everyone is looking for a place to belong. Soon after joining us at church, Seth was baptized.

One Sunday when we were out of town, Megan attended church by herself. She sat in the balcony where we often sit together. No one sat close to her. During the songs, no one found the correct pages in the hymnal for her. At some point during the service, her phone began to buzz, and she was unable to turn it off. People around her “shushed” her and looked at her in a way that she interpreted as harsh and angry. No one helped her. She began to cry. No one comforted her. She quickly left church, ran home, and cried. In the three years we have known her, Megan and her friends from Friendship House have the chance to gather and share highs and lows from the week with my wife and each other. In that time she has had only two lows. One was when my son stopped by McDonald’s when she was working; he didn’t see her, so he did not greet her. The other low was when her congregation failed her: they didn’t make room for her, didn’t value her contribution to the church, and didn’t seem to want her witness.

It should be obvious that Megan is not suffering because of her cerebral palsy or limited intellectual development. In fact, she is generally one of the most joyful people I know. She does, however, suffer when she feels unwelcomed, excluded, or like she doesn’t belong. Don’t we all? We must complexify the common-sense belief that all people with disabilities suffer as a consequence of their impairments. Unfortunately, disability and suffering are frequently paired in the relatively few seminary courses that engage the lived experience of disability and in books and curricula that address disability from a faith perspective.

I don’t want to over-interpret Megan’s life and appropriate her experiences in an instrumental way to make my points. Much of my retelling of her story is my attempt to allow her to “speak for herself” when words are difficult for her and to allow her to offer a word of challenge to the church. I want to acknowledge that Megan’s involvement at church, my familiarity with her, and my awakening to her indispensability as a part of a witnessing community are among the many experiences that led me into the type of theological inquiry found in this book.

Through various communicative modalities, Megan conveyed her delight in attending church with our family, and her Spirit-enabled witness prompted Seth to want to join the church. Megan participated in the congregational practice of Christian witness.

Her friend Seth was recently baptized. Seth shares Megan’s enthusiasm for church, and while he functions on higher social and intellectual levels than Megan, Seth also lacks the capacity for abstraction that is required to cogitate on deep theological truths. What did he understand about the sacrament? Was the event, in his mind, as much a cause for a party as it was about union with Christ? Does he really understand the Apostles’ Creed, which he recited in confirmation of his baptism? Seth certainly knew that he felt loved, and he responded in the way that the community set forth. One of the most important aspects of Seth’s liturgy of baptism might not have been his understanding of the event but rather the vow of the congregation members to commit themselves before God to Seth’s spiritual nurture.

Seth was asked, “Will you be a faithful member of this congregation, and, through worship and service, seek to advance God’s purposes here and throughout the world?” Seth responded “yes” to what he understood to be an invitation to join a community where he felt welcomed. Seth took his place as an ordained (baptized) member of the congregation. By virtue of his baptism he is called to participate in God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world and to bear witness to that work, just like Megan. But how will he be able to live out his baptismal identity? Certainly Seth, like all Christians, has received gifts of the Spirit. And I know Seth to have many other characteristics and capacities that he could employ in service of this mission. Still, he is limited intellectually and has a small sphere of social interaction. The clue to Seth’s being shaped and supported in his role as a member of the body of Christ is found in the congregation’s response. The congregation stands and receives the charge (in the form of a question):

Do you promise to love, encourage, and support

these brothers and sisters

by teaching the gospel of God’s love,

by being an example of Christian faith and character, and

by giving the strong support of God’s family

in fellowship, prayer, and service?4

Seth’s desire to be baptized provided the congregation with an opportunity to revisit their doctrine of baptism, and it might add a fresh perspective from which the practice of baptism can be more fully appreciated. Seth enters a community of faith just like everyone else—he doesn’t have all of the spiritual gifts for the edification of the church, but he has some of them. Like the rest of us in the community of faith, he is not independent but rather interdependent on the Spirit and others in the community for his growth in the life of faith. While he has not yet and might never pass through some of the anticipated stages of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development, Seth comes into the Christian community with all he needs to be a disciple. His baptism, like every baptism set within the acknowledgment of the Spirit at work and within the confession of a community, bears witness to this fact. Seth’s baptism reminds the congregation of what is true of all baptisms—they are more about God knowing us and equipping us than they are about knowing exactly what we are doing, choosing, or proclaiming.

My Location

I am a professor of practical theology at a denominational seminary who, along with the others in this community, is invested in preparing the next generation of men and women to lead the church in mission. I do not at this point have a recognized disability and acknowledge the challenge of writing on the subject when I am not disabled. I am an outsider to the experiences of exclusion and discrimination that so many people with disabilities...