Inclusive Christianity: A Framework from Biblical Hospitality Customs (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of Religion & Disability, 2021
Faithfully participating in the Eucharist has been a struggle for the body of Christ since the formation of the Church (I Cor 11:17-34). According to Paul, the Eucharist, as a cruciform meal was intended to perform socializing dynamics that pushed against rather than reinforced social fragmentation and marginalization within the Corinthian body (Gerd Theissen and Mark T. Finney). The meal offered the church in Corinth a way to enable boundaries by giving the church a cruciform location for its identity recognition, moral formation, and missional vocation (Yung Suk Kim, Matthew Meyer Boulton, and Joseph H. Hellerman). Like the church in Corinth, the late modern church continues to struggle with faithfully “keeping the feast.” One example of this struggle that this paper explores is the tension that exists between many church’s practices of the Eucharist and the inclusion of individuals with disabilities. The late modern church’s struggle with ableism has ancient roots. Some argue (Saul M. Olyan) that it is present even within the biblical data itself, while others (Amos Yong) argue that ableism is caused by misinterpretations of the biblical data from “normate perspectives” which exclude disability as normal and therefore give way to the stigmatization and marginalization of individuals with disabilities in the church. I argue that when Scripture is read as a whole it offers a more hopeful picture for the inclusion of individuals with disabilities, particularly when it is read in light of the cruciform arc of the redemptive story which is symbolized in the Eucharist meal (Nancy Eiesland, Grant Macaskill, and Edward Foley). 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, with its cruciform picture of the Eucharist feast, offers the late modern church a heuristic model for how to read the biblical data to enable boundaries for individuals with disabilities.
Invoking Deep Access: Disability Beyond Inclusion in the Church
This article seeks to challenge the ways access and inclusion are thought about and practiced in church communities with the hope of encouraging a robust hospitality and deep accessibility among all in the body of Christ. A first step stresses the difference of disability over the sameness of human personhood underneath it. A second step considers possibilities for practices of receiving gifts from one another in ongoing gestures of vulnerable mutuality that negotiate access for all, and thereby create community. The article concludes by proposing this be cultivated by a spirituality of attentiveness that embodies hospitality.
2015
The Christian gospel compels humanity to embrace deeper ways of being human together that will overcome false divisions and exclusions in search of flourishing and graced communities. Presenting both short narratives emerging out of theological reflection on experience and analytical essays arising from engagement in scholarly conversations Theology and the Experience of Disability is a conscious attempt to develop theology by and with people with disabilities instead of theology about people with disabilities. A mixture of academic, professional, practical, and/or lived experience is brought to the topic in search of constructive multi-disciplinary proposals for church and society. The result is an interdisciplinary engagement with the constructive possibilities that emerge from a distinctly Christian understanding of disability as lived experience.
Enabling Communities: Bible Studies on Including People with Disabilities in Church (2021)
This bible study (available as a Facilitator’s Guide and Students’ Guide) helps church small groups under the basics of disability inclusion from a biblical perspective. It comprises four studies drawn from the New Testament, and includes practical and group application. The Facilitator’s Guide contains answers and detailed facilitation guidance to help small study leaders. These books can be purchased here: https://bit.ly/enablingcommunities\_s & https://bit.ly/enablingcommunities\_f.
Paradox in the Development of the Non-Disabled Church
“He was born blind so that the work of God can be revealed in him,” John 9:3. The appropriation of disabled body images and metaphors in the symbolic language of Christian theological discourse played and continues to play an instrumental role in the formation, building, and sustaining of Christian faith communities. Yet, Christianity's symbolic language is also used effectively to disenfranchise and alienate the actual disabled body from Christian communities. An inheritance from its Graeco-Roman and Jewish ancestry, Christianity takes as normative a direct link between disability and sin. This paper focuses on John 9:1-41 in exploring early Christianity's use of disability to articulate its ideals and examines the implication of the disability/sin correlation for contemporary Christian Communities.
Many Christians with disabilities find ecclesial, or churchly, spaces inhospitable to our unconventional bodies. Sometimes there are stairs when a wheelchair-user would need a ramp. For example, theologian and wheelchair-user Nancy Eiesland tells part of Dianne DeVries’ story. DeVries, a woman born without arms or legs, worshipped in a Pentecostal church. She had had a dream—a dream that she felt was from God—that necessitated her placement in the choir. Nonetheless, the pastor to whom she spoke would not hear of renovating the choir dais with a wheelchair-accessible ramp (Eiesland 1994, 35). Similarly, at other times, the congregation has no large-print or Braille hymnals for people who have visual impairments or are blind. Personally, as a man with cerebral palsy, I find that church pews severely restrict my motion, because they are blocky and angular, when my body would prefer rounded or open-concept furniture. As Tanya Titchkosky observes in another context, many ecclesial spaces reveal the “marginality” and “alterity” of people with disabilities (Titchkosky 2003, 226-37). You could say that many Christians with disabilities inhabit a place without much grace in the institutional Church, because we are not what Titchkosky would call “intended” participants (2003, 113-14). The place of people with disabilities in the ecclesia often lacks God’s abundant love because it has been created with only one set body type—the ideal—in mind. Christian churches can be different. I contend that the sacraments make space for Christians with and without disabilities to engage in dialogue concerning physical access in ecclesial spaces. Many church sanctuaries display an inhospitable spirit that betrays the freedom and dignity granted to human beings by Jesus’ liberating love. By contrast, however, baptism witnesses to human equality: it allows for the creation of conditions where everyone can give and receive dignity in the community. Baptism allows for the re-visioning of church buildings into spacious and gracious places where people can know each other intimately. Holy Communion also facilitates dialogue about physical access to ecclesial spaces. The meal’s clarion-call for material redistribution and solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the world attests the human need for the affirmation of the body. When we share the bread and the wine, we offer each other what Tom Reynolds calls “availability” (2008, e.g., 19, 123). We become disposed towards the Other in acts of corporate, and corporeal, affirmation. Communion allows us to “re-member” every body in the room, and to admit our need for each other.
Sacredness, Accessibility, and Inclusion: Disability Advocacy in the Christian Church
2020
This paper looks at how concepts of disability and Christian theology have intersected over time. Using the framework of sacred space, I situate the historically exclusive nature of sacred spaces, both as a general theological concept as well as in ancient Israel, and what their implications were for people with disabilities in the Hebrew Bible. This paper also examines sacred spaces theoretically, such as through a religious studies framework, while gleaning from Michel Foucault’s theory of utopia and heterotopia. Synthesizing these various disciplinary approaches to sacred spaces, I examine Judaic and Christian theologies of disability as they relate to both future and present eschatological viewpoints. Finally, through the use of primary and social media, I conduct case study analysis of two Christian-based disability advocacy organizations – L’Arche and the All Belong Centre for Inclusive Education – through the framework of heterotopias and demonstrate how these organizations offer the possibility of a sacred space that is inclusive rather than exclusive and other. I argue that the inclusive spaces imagined and created by these groups signal towards a partially-realized understanding of the Kingdom of God as well as the accessible utopia of disability advocacy work, which for these groups is one and the same. The interaction of Christian theology and the discourse of disability as enacted by the Christian advocacy groups under study in this paper challenges latent ableism within religious studies and the discourses of sacred space that can otherwise go unnoticed and unquestioned. By doing so, this paper offers a platform for more intersectionality in the study of religion.
Jesus and the Portrayal of People with Disabilities in the Scriptures (2013)
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This article explores the role of Christian scripture as a basis for understanding the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities in Ireland. Historically, Irish services for people with intellectual disabilities were provided by Roman Catholic religious orders and congregations and it is posited that scriptural perspectives provided a context for, not just the service response but also, the societal response in a largely Christian State. By examining the Old and New Testaments and, in particular, the suffering, death and wounding of Jesus, it is proposed that there was, from the origins of Christianity, a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian community and that this facilitated the development of a faith-based approach, akin to eugenics, which was unwittingly grounded in injustice and dehumanisation. This is discussed within the context of the Spiritan mission related to the work of justice.