All means all

May I speak in the name of the One God, Speaker, Word and Breath. Amen.

Today is Disability Awareness Sunday, coming at the end of Disability Awareness Week, which began last Sunday. It’s a day when hundreds of churches focus on disability inclusion within churches, what it means and what it might look like.

The Christian Disability Awareness organisation Through The Roof tell us “churches are often not aware of the many barriers disabled people can face on their journey to join, or be fully included, in church communities. Accessibility of church buildings isn’t the only barrier – there are lots of social and attitude barriers too, which are easy to overlook.

In a UK survey by Scope, 2 out of every 3 people said they felt ‘uncomfortable’ speaking with disabled people, and 3 out of every 4 disabled people reported experiencing negative attitudes or behaviour from others.” Just yesterday Mike and myself popped into Nandos for lunch, the young man we met at the door looked flustered by Mike being in a wheelchair and never once spoke to him directly.

I wasn’t sure if I was the right member of our team to preach today, even though I live in a household with multiple disabilities – some more obvious, others more hidden, their stories aren’t my story to tell. 

As many of you know our team has a variety of lived experience with disability, so if anything I say doesn’t feel correct then I welcome you and anyone here with lived experience to challenge and question, that’s how we grow together as a community.

And there’s another caveat I want to add – disability is a word with such enormous scope. It covers physical differences – congenital or acquired, surgical or degenerative - some of these are more obvious than others. It covers sensory deficits – hearing and sight being the most common but conditions which cause loss of sensation in the hands or feet can be hugely challenging in day-to-day life – how we turn the pages of a hymn book or climb the step to the communion rail can limit church inclusion.

There’s intellectual disabilities (a term I don’t like but I don’t know a better one), mental health conditions and neurodivergences – a category so broad and individual that each person’s needs will be vastly different, this makes it hugely difficult to know how to be the inclusive space and community which meets such a vast range of difference.

In our gospel reading today Jesus tells us that if we welcome a child we welcome him. Many preachers take this example and speak of the innocence and simplicity of children, that with the disciples argument about greatness the greatest is actually the person often considered the least, but others have read this symbolic act differently.

Professor Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark, writes, “In the first-century Mediterranean world, the characteristic feature of children was not thought to be their innocence, but their lack of status and legal rights. Jesus is not teaching a lesson about being child-like but speaking to the issue of status. 

Embracing children, contrary to their cultural evaluation as nonpersons with no ‘rights,’ was characteristic of the historical Jesus and early Christianity, who accepted the least and the lowly without asking what benefit they could receive from such people. Placing a child in their midst, Jesus speaks directly to the disciples. The child is not a prop or visual aid for a lesson Jesus wants to teach but belongs with the congregation; those who receive [even a child] receive Jesus, and those who receive Jesus receive the one who sent him.”

Now I don’t want to patronise, other or misrepresent, and I don’t consider people with disabilities to be “the least”. Many, maybe most, people with disabilities in the UK feel empowered and fulfilled, able to live full lives with some appropriate adjustments. Coming off the back of the Paralympics we know what can be achieved when funding and support are given where it’s needed (and hopefully Team GBs results give us hope we’re doing something right), but we also know that when cuts are made to government spending or local services, people with disabilities are disproportionally affected, and poverty disproportionately affects people with disabilities.

We know our world, our buildings and public spaces, outside of compulsory legislation, are designed for able-bodied neurotypical people – something we wouldn’t even notice until it becomes an issue.

There’s also a darker side to the way public life and policy affects people with disabilities - NHS and benefit cuts, the pandemic, the way PIP and Disability Living Allowance are assessed and awarded have all led to disproportionate numbers of excess deaths, partially due to not receiving timely or appropriate care but also people have taken their own lives due to the additional physical and psychological strain put upon them. They have been made to feel, like the child in our gospel reading, like nonpersons with no rights.

In the gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that greatness in God’s eyes comes from being a servant to all, and for today our focus is on how we serve people with disabilities both inside and outside of our community.

We’ve made a step towards this service by joining the Inclusive Church Network. Their statement, which we aim to follow, is “We believe in inclusive church – a church which celebrates and affirms every person and does not discriminate.

We will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.

We believe in a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”

To concentrate on serving and welcoming all, we’ve begun to look at our building, materials and services. We’ve undertaken extensive risk assessments which try and account for multiple areas of disability, and they’ve been undertaken by people with disabilities. 

Being a part of the Inclusive church network doesn’t mean we’ve got it sussed – especially with a very old and listed building to account for – but it’s a journey, a statement of intention and we know there’s going to be bumps along the way. We also know with the huge scope of disabilities we’ll miss something, so we rely upon our relationships as a community and the disclosure of our community, to tell us where we can do better or even where we’re getting it wrong. 

This takes all of us and it takes a commitment to noticing and to communicating.

There’s another aspect to being an Inclusive church and that’s challenging the systems, whether that’s church systems or the wider systems of government and legislation. 

To relate this to how we tackle for example racism, we know it’s not enough to not be racist, we need to be actively anti-racist, challenging behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress, and lifting the voices of those affected.

Within our community we have representation within the Diocese disability group, but it takes more than that one person. 

To actively serve people with disabilities we need to be actively anti-ableist, to challenge behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress them and find ways of raising up their voices to be heard, using the privilege of able-bodied people to lift up those who ableism affects. 

And this takes each one of us, it takes awareness and a knowledge that being servants of all means ALL. 

Amen.