Disability Justice & Disability Theology

...continuation from  "Disability Ministry with InterVarsity"

Access had a book club this spring, and read  "My Body is Not a Prayer Request" by Dr. Amy Kenny.  She was interviewed by Brandi Miller on the podcast, "Reclaiming my Theology" I've also been reading "Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness" after hearing the author Benjamin T. Conner speak at Urbana. I want to share some extensive quotes from both books.

I highly recommend both- Dr. Amy shares deep personal experiences and convictions from her own life and Bible perspectives as disabled person.  Dr. Conner shares from deep research, many scholarly writings, and the positives and negatives of Christian missionary work.

Image description: book cover, a wheelchair is covered in flowers of all colors with a yellow background. Bold white text on top reads: "My Body is Not a Prayer Request."

Quotes from the first chapter

"I wish I was whole in their minds- enough to exist without needing a prayerful remedy to cast out my 'demons,' a full human who has something to offer other than a miraculous narrative. I wish I could be more than my diagnosis, more than a problem in need of fixing, as if my disability is only valuable if converted into a cure. I wish prayerful perpetrators were free from the lie that I am worth less simply because my body works differently. In each of these encounters, I come away feeling like my stomach has just dropped out on a roller coaster. I am confused by the way people interpret my disability as in need of "fixing" without knowing anything else about me. I am troubled that my body becomes public property they feel they have the right to control. I am indignant that this takes place under the veil of Jesus-following, as though they are the bouncers to God's table. I am hurt that I must justify my own existence at church.

"Belonging shouldn't have the admission price of assimilation."

Four friends stand by a lake, Ginger, Tillman, Joan and Ira. They are recording disability interviews at Fall Conference. 

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"To assume that my disability needs to be erased in order for me to live an abundant life is disturbing not only because of what it says about me but also because of what it reveals about people's notions of God. I bear the image of the Alpha and the Omega. My disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. I have the mind of Christ. There's no caveat to those promises. I don't have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified and redeemed is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life.

"Maybe we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God's radiance to the church. What we need to be freed from is ableism."

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"Jesus returns to this messaging later, claiming that he's come to the world "so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind" (John 9:39). While this is directed at Jesus's audience, it offers a lesson for modern Jesus followers.

"If our primary perception of ourselves is as people who can see, hear, or walk--over those who can't do those things-the sin of stereotyping and excluding remains prevalent. According to Jesus, those who think of themselves as "able-bodied" may be in more need of healing than those who are disabled. "But that's figurative," you're tempted to clap back. Paul, blinded on the road to Damascus, begs to differ. Figurative or not, the fact that a disabled person makes two-thirds of us uncomfortable exposes the need for deeper healing. Instead of dismissing these statements as merely figurative, we should consider how to embrace disability as a mark of greater understanding about God. Disability acts as a method for revealing the living God to the community, not something that always needs to be prayed away to showcase God's power. Imagine if the prayerful perpetrator approached my wheelchair with reverence and awe instead of condemnation and accusation. Maybe then they would be able to witness the glory of God revealed through my disabled body."

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Ira and Hayley at Urbana, after a disability interview. Hayley uses a wheelchair. 

"Jesus's ministry is not all about a physical cure but about holistic healing.

"Today, we typically think of illness (and sometimes disability) as biological, with Western medicine set up to find and cure disease directly. When Westerners go to the doctor, it's usually to find a cure for whatever symptoms we're experiencing. I'm in pain: fix it, medicine. Folks in Jesus's day thought about healing in much broader terms. They talked about healing as restoring relationships and integrating someone back into social and religious systems. The Greek word often used in Scripture for healing is sozo, which means "to make whole" or "to save.” It's the same word used to talk about salvation. Jesus's healing is not purely about a physical alteration but about reestablishing right relationship between humanity and God and, hopefully, between individuals and community? Healing allows people to flourish. Modern medicine still recognizes the difference between curing and healing. Curing is a physical process: it's individual, usually (fairly) rapid, and concentrates on eliminating disease. Healing is a sociocultural process. It focuses on restoring interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions. It's lengthy and ongoing because it's a process of becoming whole."

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"Not all suffer from our bodies, but all of us suffer from the way society mocks or limits those bodies. Yes, even you. In my case, it is not my inability to walk or stand that disables me. Rather, I am disabled by the fact that buildings are structured with stairs, narrow hallways, and curbs, making them difficult for me to access on wheels. The public space disables my body, but it could be restructured or reimagined in a way that includes wheelchair and cane users like me. If we had bothered to build ramps, moving around the world in a wheelchair would not be cumbersome; it would be freeing."

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"Throughout Scripture, we encounter disabled people at the forefront of the work that God chooses to do with humanity.

"Isaac became blind. Jacob walks with a limp. Leah has "weak eyes" (Gen. 29:17 NIV). Moses has a speech disorder. Elijah feels depressed and suicidal. Timothy has stomach issues and "frequent ailments" (1 Tim. 5:23). Paul has the thorn in the flesh (2 Cor. 12:7). And who can forget Mephibosheth's two lame feet? The Good Shepherd brings abundant life, with and without our bodies being "able" or cured. God's healing is not contingent on our physical state. And according to John 9, it is Zach's blindness that displays God to the community, not his miraculous sight. Perhaps if we started to consider disability as a way to reveal the living God, prayerful perpetrators wouldn't accost me at church with their magician theology.

Friends gathered around a table, decorating Christmas cookies. 

"We need to disentangle ourselves from any system that claims there is a hierarchy of bodies and minds. We already have a context for this in the rest of creation. We expect there to be variety when it comes to trees, flowers, and animals, just not humans. There are sixty thousand types of trees, three thousand varieties of tulips, and four hundred kinds of sharks. No one claims fringed tulips are better or worse than cup-shaped tulips. They are both beautiful in their distinctiveness.

"We need to start thinking about bodies in the same way we think about tulips. No body is better or worse than another body because it is fringed or cupped. Variety isn't just the spice of life; it sustains life. Variation allows organisms to survive. Instead of eradicating difference, we should celebrate it.

"Imagine if you never compared your body to others. Wouldn't that be liberating? To embrace your body for what it can do and how unique it is rather than admonish it for not being tall enough, thin enough, strong enough, fast enough, smart enough (or whatever your "enough" is). Imagine how healing it would be if you celebrated yourself as a fringed tulip and stopped trying to become a cup-shaped tulip, without belittling either one."

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Book cover, blue and yellow art of angels and doves.

"Disabling Mission, Enabling Witness" Exploring Missiology through the lens of disability studies by Benjamin T. Conner. Quotes from the first two chapters:

"Disability" is a designation with a broad spectrum of referents that is constantly under negotiation. It is at times a label applied to people against their will, marking them as somehow defective, incomplete, or medically or psychologically pathological. At other times, the label is welcomed as an explanation and provides an avenue to resources and educational support that leads to access to goods and experiences people would otherwise be without. In particular, persons with invisible or hidden disabilities or impairments that often can't be discerned by observation (many mental health issues, chronic fatigue syndrome, debilitating pain, epilepsy, some traumatic brain injuries, cystic fibrosis, deafness, etc.) can find a diagnostic label explanatory, legitimating, and comforting. As disability scholar Tom Shakespeare explains, "Diagnosis can lead to better understanding of the problem and to access to appropriate support mechanisms: resource allocation is labelled."

"Disability" is also, alternatively, a badge or self-selected marker of identity.

"For example, self-identified "crips" who embrace their embodiment and reliance on wheelchairs or persons on the autism spectrum who embrace their neuro-diversity are not seeking a "cure."

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"Historian Kim Nielsen, examining the concept of disability among native North American people groups, clarifies that impaired people in indigenous cultures would only be considered disabled if they had weak community ties and lacked reciprocal relationships. Disability was viewed in relational rather than individual, body-centered terms."

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"The church is in a unique position to address the unemployment, abuse, violence, poverty, homelessness, and various incarcerations faced by people with disabilities. Unfortunately, the church has not consistently understood it to be included in its mission and witness in the world to address such concrete and tangible issues as a part of its proclamation of the kingdom of God (Mt 25:31-46). Instead, the church has often uncritically accepted the world's estimation of people with disabilities. Why so many crimes, so much abuse, so much discrimination against people with disabilities? Because people with disabilities are commonly more vulnerable and, to put it bluntly, viewed as somehow less than fully human both outside and within the church. Churches must speak into this issue of righteousness and justice."

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Ginger and Ira with special speaker Ivanova Smith, who shares about justice and intellectual disabilities. 

"Nancy Eiesland has observed: “For many disabled persons the church has been a 'city on a hill--physically inaccessible and socially inhospitable?" Her attempts at contextualizing the gospel from a disability perspective are generative for people with and without disabilities because they work to dislodge settled theological conceptions and practices and offer guidance for reimagining the Christian life and faith with a fuller vision of humanity (and God) in view. Contextualization is the missiological tool that uproots theology from one context so it can take root and grow in another. Contextualization reminds us, as Andrew Walls has clarified, "Nobody owns the Christian faith. Cultural diversity was built into it from the beginning? The continuing process of contextualizing theology helps us to remember that "no one cultural expression of the religion is exclusive for expressing the fullness of the gospel."

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"And contextualization can be upsetting, even terrifying, because while the process brings gains in insight and enrichment to our understanding of the gospel, it also brings discomfort and a sense of loss. In a series of talks given by Lesslie Newbigin to clergy of the Church of South India, later published as the Good Shepherd: Mediations on Christian Ministry in Today's World, Newbigin presents us with this challenge:

"We have not been willing to take the risks involved in re-thinking our faith, re-casting it in new terms, so that it takes up and re-interprets whatever in these movements is according to the will of God. We have been too timid, too anxious to make sure that we preserve intact what has been committed to us.

We are unfaithful servants, because the treasure committed to us has been given not that we should hoard it, but that we should risk it in the commerce of the world, so that it may make a profit for the Master."

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"Nancy Eiesland, whose Disabled God is a touch point for many discussions of theology and disability, has made much of the marks of Jesus' post resurrection impairment Jesus is the disabled God. Positively, she has driven home the point that personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability. What those marks represent is much more than the fact that Jesus was maimed and therefore shares somehow in the experience of being physically disabled. The marks of Jesus represent the fact that in the person of Jesus, God shared in the human experiences of exclusion, intolerance, injustice, religious and societal persecution and oppression, marginality, and weakness that people with disabilities face. Deborah Creamer, expounding Eiesland's theology, explains that due to his "shared experiences of discrimination and oppression" and "prejudice and exclusion" that are common to disability, one can justify the claim Jesus was, in fact, disabled."

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"Eiesland's most helpful statement in terms of contextualization is the following: "Our bodies participate in the imago Dei, not in spite of our impairments and contingencies, but through them. All of who we are participates in the image of God as we bear gifts that edify the body of Christ and bear the witness of the Spirit. In disability terms, one could say the body of Christ is not healthy without the infirm; its witness is disabled without people with impairments; it forgets who it is without people with dementia."

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"Human participation in bearing the Spirits witness is not related in any way to social status, cultural location, or ethnicity; prior credentials, qualifications, or merit, or intellectual capacities, physical attributes, or sensory function. All can participate in the ongoing redemptive ministry of the church by the Holy Spirit. Minister, educator, and disability advocate Brett Webb-Mitchell has explained,

"And in this body, the Spirit of God does not choose to neglect or not be in the life of people whom the world calls disabled, let alone in the distribution of gifts, services, and talents in the body of Christ. None of the gifts of the Spirit are withheld or designated to people based upon one's academic pedigree, or an intelligence quotient score, social adaptation scale, or any other modern day assessment tool."

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Friends at lunch at outdoor eatery, Joan, Ira, Tamara, toddler Vincent, and Ginger

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I have also loved reading the blog "Star in her Eye" a number of years before getting involved with Access. A favorite post:  The Partial Glossary of Words Not to Use with a New Mom of a Special Needs Baby.

She also wrote a wonderful article about Jesus and Disability 

"But I do not want anyone to “fix” my kid. That is not the miracle I seek.  

Instead, I want someone to lay hands on the people who presume she is less than. I want someone to eradicate the idea that bodies are either productive or burdensome, that they either contribute to the gross domestic product or drain it. I want someone to lay hands on the president for doing what an apologist later called “the classic retard.” I want some mystical savior to eradicate the assumption that disability is a curse, a calamity.

"Wouldn’t that be the bigger miracle?"

Part 3: Disability Imagination