The evening sky was rapidly darkening as my family frantically huddled outside our broken-down van on the rocky shoulder of a busy mountain highway. As smoke streamed from our engine, large semi-trucks continually blasted down the road beside us, going 120 km per hour (about 75 mph).
We’d been happily driving home from a family vacation when our wheelchair-adapted van suddenly began to give off major signs of trouble. The only option was to pull over on a difficult stretch of highway in a province not our own.
For two frightening hours, I devoted everything in my power to keeping our kids safe. Meanwhile, my husband, Eric, battled the spotty phone coverage of the Canadian wilderness to call for assistance. Finally a tow truck arrived to take our van to the nearest small city.
When the next morning a mechanic reported catastrophic damage and said a repair might take weeks, we decided to go home. Eric could return for the van once it was fixed. But how would we get home? If you use a power wheelchair, as I do, many common travel options are closed.
To fly, for example, one must be able to sit on a plane seat and check your wheelchair in with the luggage at the bottom of the plane. I can sit for only a short period without my wheelchair’s custom support, so flying wasn’t an option.
Similarly, calling a loved one to pick us up or renting a regular vehicle was also out. I need to travel in my power chair, which can be transported only in a specially adapted vehicle with a ramp. My power chair cannot go in a regular vehicle because it weighs hundreds of pounds, doesn’t fold to fit in a trunk, and needs locks to secure it to the vehicle floor.
Stranded almost 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) from home in a highway hotel, we surveyed our limited options. Panic began to set in.
Then inspiration hit. If anyone knows what it’s like to swim upstream against significant disability-related challenges and find innovative, workable solutions, it’s fellow people with disabilities.
These were the folks most likely to know someone willing to rent or sell us a used adapted van or come up with another novel idea for how we could get home.
So I reached out to friends in and out of the disability community and posted on social media to community and disability groups. Ideas, messages of support, and prayers quickly began to roll in from strangers and friends alike.
In mere hours, a solution was found. Friends of my parents in the disability community back home offered to lend us their wheelchair van. My father drove it out, and soon we were on our way. The crisis was over.
Valuable Skills
As this situation showcases, many people with disabilities develop creativity, resiliency, and problem-solving skills to survive and thrive in an obstacle-filled world where we are often treated as lesser members. Because we know what it is like to be devalued, many people with disabilities develop a keen sense of empathy for others who face challenges of all kinds.That's why I knew instinctively that people in the disability community were our best bet for finding a viable solution to travel home.
These invaluable skills are transferable to all aspects of life, including church life. Creative problem-solving, resiliency, and empathy are incredibly valuable gifts when serving and loving a church community.
Additionally, many people with disabilities know well the beauty of interdependence and have acquired the gift of accepting help from others in a way people without disabilities might have had less opportunity to experience.
“People with disabilities often understand what a gift of interdependence is. They are less likely to believe the myth that they can—and should—go it alone,” said Lindsay Wieland Capel, disability consultant with Thrive, an agency of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, in an email. “There’s so much the church has to learn from people with disabilities.”
“The church has easily fallen into the temptation to commodify our bodies and minds, placing value based on what someone can do or accomplish,” Wieland Capel added. “But that’s not how God sees us at all. We are valuable because of who we are and whose we are.”
But, perhaps because of this interdependence, people with disabilities may be seen as having fewer gifts, capabilities, or value to contribute. In churches—as in society as a whole—it can be easy to shut doors to leadership or to provide equal opportunities for service and belonging.
For example, every spring since we began attending our church in 2006, my husband has received a phone call from the church saying he had been nominated to the church council. He’s asked to please prayerfully consider saying yes because it is difficult to find enough people in the congregation willing to serve in this manner.
For 17 springs, I watched Eric receive these calls while I found other ways to serve the congregation and the denomination. Though our church continued its struggle to find elders and deacons, no call ever came for me. It wasn’t a matter of gender—a very solid percentage of our church council is women.
This year, after 18 years at our church, I told the church council what I’d noticed. In the spring, I received a phone call of my own.
What We Lose
Wieland Capel explained that sometimes people with disabilities simply opt out of participating in something rather than advocate for what they need or have to offer to the church.
“People don’t want to stand out or have to ask for special treatment,” she said. “That’s why universal design is so essential. I know of an older gentleman who stopped leading the congregational prayer at his church because he could no longer climb the stairs to the podium. That congregation was missing out on his gift of prayer because of a step!”
The losses to a congregation can be immense when a person stops fully participating or even outright vanishes from the pews. These losses are incurred whether the person has a lifelong disability, a chronic condition, or is facing more recent impairments due to advanced age, a new illness, or a short-term disabling condition.
Elderly members often bring a wealth of knowledge and wisdom to the table. When senior members stop being able to attend church or fully participate in church life, every member of the church, down to the tiniest infants, loses out on this wisdom and life experience. A church without its elders present and sharing their gifts is like a partly grown forest that has lost its most beautiful, aged trees.
People facing new illnesses, injuries, or short-term disabilities might still be processing and grieving the sudden changes in their lives and bodies. When these people vanish, our congregations not only lose out on the gift of their presence but also on the opportunity to lovingly walk beside them in their time of challenge and need.
Bolstering Fellow Members
Even though I had already lived with a disability for a number of years after a car accident in my early adulthood, I will never forget the shock, struggle, and sorrow I experienced in 2016 when I suddenly lost the ability to walk due to another injury.
A team of people in my church brought my family a meal every week for a year, and the extraordinary difference that made in our lives was unquantifiable. The food was helpful on a practical level, but even more, the love shown in those homemade meals was a morale-boosting encouragement like none other. For months, I wasn’t well enough to attend church, and these weekly meals were a loving lifeline of connection to our church family.
Psalm 34:18 reminds us that “the LORD is close to the brokenhearted.” To love each other deeply as a community, we need to model this and be close to each other in times of both joy and sorrow.
It can be a temptation to show each other only the good aspects of our lives. Social media is rife with pictures of people’s amazing lives while their secret struggles and hurts remain hidden away. But when we hide our struggles, pain, and sorrows, we rob each other of authentic relationships of genuine love.
This is not something we should model in our churches. When people facing illness vanish from church life, we lose the opportunity to authentically love each other in both hard and good times.
Over the ages and into the present day, the church has lost out on an extraordinary number of wonderful relationships and gifts when people with disabilities have vanished from the community or not been fully included. When that loss occurs due to something preventable, such as inaccessibility, devaluing, a lack of universal design, judgment, or a dearth of needed accommodations, it is a travesty.
Unique Stories
Of course, it’s prudent to be cautious. It’s easy to get carried away romanticizing the gifts of people with disabilities, but like everyone else, people with disabilities are individuals.
It is stereotyping to say that every person with a long-term disability is a resilient solution finder, that every person with a new illness is grieving, that every older adult is wise, or that people with disabilities as a whole bring specific and similar gifts to church life. When a person with a disability is no longer present or fully participating, the loss is tragic—but also unique to that person.
Many people picture people with disabilities as joyous folks who bring a sense of warmth and inclusion to the life of the church. Sometimes that is true. But I’m a prime example of this not always being the case. My husband and kids will happily fill you on how joyous I am not when I’m tired, headachy, or coffee-less.
The truth is that each person, disabled or not, brings unique and varied gifts, talents, strengths, weaknesses, hurts, and joys to the church. The loss of even one person is an extraordinary loss unlike any other.
Similarly, the varied opportunities for people with disabilities to share their gifts with the church are endless but also unique to each person.
“Sometimes people ask, ‘What roles have you seen people with disabilities in at a church?’” Wieland Capel said. “All of them! The ways people with disabilities serve are as varied as the ways anyone else in the church might serve.”
In other words, there is no one role that fits all people with disabilities, just as there is no one role that fits all people without disabilities. And there is no one-size-fits-all loss when people with disabilities and their gifts vanish.
“Some people will serve quietly with a ministry of prayer that no one even knows about. Others will serve by using their gifts of teaching. Others will clean up the pews after worship or volunteer in the nursery. Someone else might offer a ministry of presence by being beside people through difficult times,” Wieland Capel said.
The Lost Sheep
Luke 15 recounts Jesus’ parable of a person with a hundred sheep who lost one sheep. Instead of being happy that he still had 99 sheep left and calling it a day, he dropped everything and went searching for his missing sheep. On finding that sheep, he joyfully put it on his shoulders, went home, and invited others to join him in rejoicing.
While the parable is explicitly about the repentance of sinners, it also showcases the unique value to God of each person God individually and uniquely created. When a person—with or without a disability—vanishes or is not fully included in the life of the congregation, the loss is not only significant, but one of a kind.
Just as in Jesus’ parable of the one lost sheep, we too must drop everything when a person with a disability vanishes from our pews due to inaccessibility in the church, a lack of universal design, non-inclusive practices and attitudes, or other reasons.
We can “drop everything” by repenting of our lack of inclusivity or accessibility and for any barriers that we as a church or as individuals have put up. The next step is to embrace that person with a full welcome, genuinely listening to them about how the barriers can be removed or vanquished and how we can champion their full return.
To keep that person and their unique gifting is to retain a treasure of greatest value, just as it is for any other member with or without a disability. We avoid the loss and vanishing of not only that individual’s unique gifts but also their presence, friendship, love, and continued relationship as our dear brother or sister in Christ. This, ultimately, means everything and is worth all cost.
Discussion Questions:
- When was the last time you were either served in some way or taught something by a person with disabilities? Can you recount the moment?
- What are some specific ways we can love each other deeply in community, modeling Psalm 34:18, “the LORD is close to the brokenhearted”?
- In what ways have people with disabilities served in your local church?
- What barriers—physical or attitudinal—need to be removed in your church in order to better include people with disabilities?