CHURCH VIEWS

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• Harm:
   

  • Don’t have to comply with ADA! Fought for this!

  • An anecdote from McCloughry paints this apathy clearly:
    I remember a friend telling me that he had toured the country speaking to churches about their responsibilities under what was then the new Disability Discrimination Act. These included, in many cases, improving access to church buildings. He said to me, ‘You would not believe how many church leaders sidled up to me afterwards and said, “What’s the minimum we have to do to get away with this?”’ They were not interested in disabled people. They preferred the status quo.

 

• “Rituals of degradation”
   

• Disabled people get told (implicitly or explicitly) that there’s something fundamentally Wrong with us
   

  • Told that our Creator won’t accept us until we “want” to be fixed, pray to be fixed

  • So there’s both the social death and a spiritual death

  • cureism

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Christianity at its best
 

• We claim that the status quo is not how things are meant to be
   

  • Instead of letting social norms shape our theology, we need to look at those norms through the lens of the Kin-dom
     

• You are enough as you are – your worth is inherent, not earned

• We aren’t made to work till we drop – imposed rest

  • Meshes well with “crip time”

  • ​Aside: Clocks were first used regularly in monasteries! starting in the 1200s.
    
    Sara Hendren:
    "Monasteries, full of men whose life’s work would never be economically efficient, helped to give human enterprise the regular collective beat and rhythm of the machine; for the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing of the actions of men."

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Fiona MacMillan makes this appeal in Disability the Inclusive Church Resource:
“Do not be as the world, labelling and judging. Welcome us as you welcome each other, honour us as though we were the greatest guest, not the least to be squeezed in and suffered. Listen to us – we are not the same, we have lived different lives, have stories which are worth hearing. Look on the edge for the signs of life, for what belongs at the heart.”