My Entry into the World of Theology and Disability

An Introduction

When I decided to go to seminary, I spoke to a friend about my reasoning and my thoughts about the importance of making the Church more open toward people with disabilities. He asked when I first became interested in disability ministry.

I didn’t know how to answer. I first began discussing it openly when I was in undergraduate school in 1990. That was when I began to have a place to speak about ministry.

Earlier in my life I had been a musician singing and giving testimony to the Church about God’s work in my life. It happened that I appeared before them as a person with a disability. All of my testimony did not have to do with God’s work in my disabled life. Most of it had to do with God’s work in my life as a teenager coping with various things, some of which intersected with the impact of disability.

As I thought about what it meant for me to enter the ministry in 2006 and advocate on behalf of people with disabilities, a number of things came to mind.

1. I didn’t want to be a token person who spoke on behalf of all people who were blind. I could only share my own experience as one person who is blind. Many people live with their blindness differently, and their methods need to be respected.

2. I did not want to speak solely on behalf of people who are blind. I live with several invisible chronic health conditions that have been very impactful in my life, and it is important for me to speak out regarding these things and to be present for other people who experience difficulties with chronic illness and faith or relationships in faith communities.

3. I struggled deeply with the question of whether a graduate degree was needed in order to write about disability, ministry, and theology. What I did not understand at the time is the fact that many people pursued graduate degrees in theology *because* the impact that disability on their lives drove them to seek ways to hold in tension the theological deconstruction and reconstruction that was happening in their lives.

Some people simply deconstruct the theology with which they have grown up. The wounds they experience are so deep that they want nothing more to do with God or the institutional Church. I gently respect that experience.

I have gone through several deconstructions—and reconstructions—in my life.

I have chosen to hold to my Christian faith for a number of reasons. It isn’t always easy. I find it worthwhile.

When I made my plan to go to seminary, I wanted explicitly to study church work with people with disability. I had in mind to study pastoral counseling and focus on trauma and spiritual care with people who had chronic illness.

I found no options available to me to do this. There were a handful of courses in counseling available locally when I started my study, but the counseling curriculum disappeared before I started those courses. At the end of my third semester, my professors began to suggest that I shift my focus to biblical studies. I eventually learned that this was a place where people with disabilities badly needed empowerment. However, I still had a strong passion for people who experienced woundedness in the Church because of disability.

While my employment path has primarily taken a different direction, my service path remained where I started. My phone is often in use with texts, calls or Facebook messages with people who cannot get to church or are in crisis due to medical situations. Most recently, I served in a very part-time role as associate pastor of care and inclusion, providing pastoral care and coordinating volunteers to visit and provide transportation for those in care facilities.

I was deeply disappointed in 2006 to learn that not only was there no track related to disability at my chosen seminary, but there was not even one course. I decided to resolve my disappointment by reading independently.

Numerous journal articles were available. I spent many hours building a bibliography for my own use, and I probably overloaded the reference librarian with interlibrary loan requests. By the summer of 2007, I had scanned 13 books on disability and ministry, Bible and theology. That was all I could find with the exception of a handful of biographies. The seminary library, by comparison, held scores of commentaries on the book of Genesis alone.

Today there are several hundred books in my library . Not only is this a growing field, but it is a field in which people have differing vviews and ways of practicing. It is a field that is informed by people’s experiences with different disabilities, diverse belief systems, diverse cultural backgrounds, generational differences, and other things that impact their life experience and theology. All of this diversity enriches our ways of relating to each other.

I invite you into this truly wonderful world of which I am a part. My painful deconstructions have become a wonderful world of discovery. At one time I thought that I was moving into another world in which I was supposed to hold “the right beliefs/interpretations” – just another incarnation of spirituality that I didn’t get quite right. I now understand that the world is wide and there is plenty of room for me in it.

There is room for you, too, whatever your manner of relationship with God.

עִם שִׁרִי ... יָמְלָךְ יהוה

With my song ... May the Lord be magnified.