Introduction to Accessible Churches and Disability Advocacy

Wherever you and your faith community find yourselves along the journey toward full inclusion, look for the resources and experts God has already provided. Alongside prayer and God’s Word, there are people in your community who are already advocating and working for belonging. This includes people with disabilities and their families, leaders, volunteers, special education teachers, community support staff, and the list goes on. Ask God to guide you and your congregation in the steps needed to enfold and to engage people with disabilities and their families into the life of your church. Get to know people in your faith community to learn best how they might experience belonging and contribute their gifts in service to others.

Effective ministry is relational ministry, and advocacy work will take time for people to understand, appreciate, and engage. Don’t lose hope. You are planting seeds that others will water, while witnessing to the truth that God uses everyone—even us—to create a world where everybody belongs, and we all serve together.

Accessible churches seek to bring about the full participation of people with disabilities in the life of the church and the full participation of the church in the lives of people with disabilities.

We envision gospel-centered, inclusive, mission-driven churches engaging and engaged by people with disabilities, realizing that our goals benefit the whole church.

We strive for hospitable and healthy churches that intentionally:

The medical, educational, and social service communities give labels to people such as “autism,” “cerebral palsy,” “dementia,” and “macular degeneration.” These labels can be useful for understanding and helping people, but a person is not his or her label. Instead, the goal is working together to build relationships with everyone in your church, regardless of ability.

Barb Newman writes in Autism and Your Church:

My mother-in-law was diagnosed with diabetes. It’s helpful for me to know this when she comes to my home. It helps me understand why we have needles in the garbage. It helps me stock up on the right kind of foods before she arrives for a visit. It also helped me understand the day she felt so strange in the grocery store and asked me to give her some orange juice before I had even paid for it. But it would be a mistake to overly focus on my mother-in-law’s condition and fail to appreciate her unique personality and interests. We don’t think about diabetes all the time; we laugh, talk, cry, shop, and watch movies together. Although I am grateful to be aware of the diabetic piece of my mother- in-law, it is only a portion of the complex and delightful person she is.

Similarly, knowing the particular disability a person lives with will help churches to better understand and help that person, but people are individuals with wonderfully complex needs, gifts, joys, challenges, and interests. As advocates, we must encourage people in our churches to focus on people and relationships. While labels can be important and valuable to people with disabilities, it’s important to focus first on the relationships that make us who we are.  

Take Kyle, for example. When the education team thinks about how best to include Kyle in Sunday school, they take his Down syndrome into account, but they also note Kyle’s likes and dislikes, things that calm him and make him agitated, ways that he learns best, and classroom activities that are challenging for him. Most importantly, they consider Kyle’s gifts and encourage him to use them in the classroom and the church.

Newman says that naming someone’s disability is like telling what state her family visited on their last vacation. It gives you a general idea what the vacation was about, but until you talk with the Newmans about what they did on vacation, you don’t know much about it. In the same way, we will not get to know the people with disabilities in our churches until each one of them is noticed when they arrive, known while they are there, and missed when they are gone.