We have seen throughout this pandemic a worrying move away from the progress that has been made in valuing, honouring, and learning from the lives and lived experience of disabled people.
Now in Britain, less than half of disabled adults are in employment, and the continuing pandemic is only making the situation worse, with the pay gap between enabled and disabled increasingly getting wider and wider. On top of that the benefits and the financial support for adaptions have decreased considerably through the austerity policies, especially with the introduction of PIP tests and the withdrawing of grants.
The pandemic has also disproportionately affected disabled people, who are twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as the able-bodied, with younger people with learning impairments, aged between 18 to 34, being 30 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than others of a similar age, according to Public Health England, with many having DNR notices placed upon them without their or their guardian’s consent.
It is too soon to tell whether recent austerity policies, different standards of treatment or DNR notices have played a part in that shocking statistic. The use and understanding of the language of ‘underlying health issues’ slipped all too easily into the language of eugenics, playing into a narrative of some lives mattering more than others. The disabled, including those in residential care homes, feel that they have been left high and dry in the pandemic.
Professor Francis Davis, Professor of Religion, Communities and Public Policy at the University of Birmingham told a recent Zoom conference on Catholic Social Teaching, that the Church always assumed that it treated disabled people better than the secular world. But the reality is that its track record is really poor. “Fifteen per cent of the world’s population lives with a serious life affecting disability,” he said. “That’s a huge and growing part of the community that does not find representation within or is served by the Church, which instead sees them as impaired and views them as objects.”
Davis pointed out that the Church continues to see disabled people as different. He cited the lack of people with any disability in senior roles, with no bishop with a visible named disability in any episcopal denomination within English-speaking countries.
This is not therefore just a Church of England problem. This is a problem across the whole Church. Wouldn’t it be wonderful for the Church of England to be seen to take a lead on this, in our parishes, deaneries and dioceses?
Back in March 2020 COVID-19 forced churches online. Suddenly the unimaginable happened – closed churches, remote and digital ministry, people having to stay at home, physical presence seen as threat. The rules of social engagement shifted dramatically. Actions that were once understood as profoundly positive – ministering personally to the sick, visiting the lonely, checking in on neighbours, assisting as a carer – became a danger to life. COVID-19 robbed us of so much that affirms our shared humanity as relational beings. We had to be agile and rethink church cultures; the ways in which we “do Church” and “be Church”.
It has taken a crisis to inspire these changes. But we forget disabled people’s groups have already been rethinking and re-imagining Church in this way for a very long time, exploring and reaching out to make Church more accessible to people in all kinds of situations. But disabled people’s calls for change have not been responded to so quickly, nor so imaginatively.
As disability advisor of the Diocese, and as part of the National Disability Task Group, I have been privileged to hear people’s lived experiences as disabled Christians. One message that I would wish to share, above all others, is that disabled people have extraordinary stories to tell, and a vital ministry to share within and for the church.
Within the disability movement, the slogan “Nothing about us without us” is a key principle and rallying cry. But I would say that the Christian faith’s rallying cry should add to that slogan, ‘if it is not about everyone it is not about anyone’. Disabled people are fully part of the Body of Christ.
For our faith affirms that we are all ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’, made in the image and likeness of God. As is stated in the Common Worship Introduction to Baptism, ‘In God we have a new dignity and God calls us to fullness of life’. If we all have a new dignity and if we are all being called into fullness of life, then, as the Church, we are promising to invest in the fulfilling of the God given potential of the other, in the flourishing of all God’s people.
We are not and we have never fully been the Body of Christ for the ministries of disabled people have not and continues not to be affirmed by many parts of the Church.
Sadly, all too often in our churches ableist ministries – specifically for disabled people by well-meaning non-disabled people rather than ministries led by and with disabled people – are the norm. Many churches still offer healing ministries whose focus is primarily on supernatural healing, viewing disabled people as objects, needing to be fixed, regardless of the damage that does to the wholeness and well-being of the individual.
Too often churches position disabled people as passive recipients of others’ service rather than as active co-creators of the Kingdom of God.
Fiona MacMillan, who chairs the disability advisory group at St Martin-in-the-Fields, writes: “In a Church which professes the gospel paradox of strength in weakness, we’re more often objects for pastoral attention than agents of change. We are more likely to be known by our needs than celebrated for our gifts.”
The theologian John Hull spoke of the prophetic ministry of disabled Christians. “Disabled people are not so much a pastoral problem as a prophetic potential.”
Many physical and learning-disabled people have wisdom that comes through their lived experience of social oppression, not in-spite of it — wisdom that they have gained from being marginalised to the edges of churches, and from which the Church could have benefited so much from during this time of pandemic.
In the light of the pandemic the Church had, and still has, an opportunity to listen to and learn from the ministry of disabled Christians, a ministry many disabled Christians have long wished to exercise.
The question is whether we, the Church, will listen and learn. If not, institutional churches may continue to be increasingly irrelevant to those disabled Christians who have had to establish their own ministries to each other in new spaces on the edge of Church.
What have we learnt through this pandemic?
- Many disabled people have been living for years in their own lockdown pre-pandemic, being unable to access their local parish church.
- Disabled people wish to worship and participate within their local parish context, on-site and when not possible, online.
- Online church has enabled disabled people of all ages to establish or re-establish a relationship with their local parish church.
- Online worship offers accessibility to many different sectors of our Church community including young mothers, neurodiverse people, people who are deaf (through automatic captions and/or BSL signing on Zoom), people who are blind (through telephone access via zoom), senior citizens, people on holiday, people in hospital as well as disabled people.
- We are moving to a mixed economy of onsite and online worship, just as we will continue to meet on zoom and each deanery and parish are going to have to adjust to the new normal.
- Onsite worship is particularly important for people with dementia, people with learning disabilities and senior citizens. This is not a binary issue.
- There is a need for specific online worship as part of our parish worship and mission profile, not just video feeds of physically present worship. People wish to be engaged with personally via the online feed.
- Online platforms enable opportunities for online coffee get-together, participation in prayer meetings, parish wide social activities, such a quizzes, bingo or other social events, which many would otherwise be excluded from.
- Online platforms open up possibilities of the sharing of resources/online courses within team, deanery and Diocesan contexts.
- Online platforms widens the reach of the occasional offices.
- How to create and lead online worship should now become part of curriculum for ministerial training, both at theological college and on IME, not as an add on, but as an integral part of the role of a priest.
- Online worship provision should therefore become part of parish profiles and job adverts
- Mix-mode meeting open the possibilities for more people to participate, solving pressing issues of childcare or physical access, for example.