Reflecting on my experiences from our first community gathering, I was struck by the questions posed by our group speakers and the experiences shared by members of the special needs and disabled community. Overall, I left with two observations and two questions. The observations are that (1) this population is woefully underserved across not only our community, but our entire nation; access to care, especially for adults with special needs and disabilities becomes significantly more challenging to access, and (2) we as a community at DaySpring are doing simple, meaningful things to create a sense of belonging and participation for people in this population, and at the same time there is much more we could be doing. In light of this, I began to ponder two burning questions: What does it mean to be welcoming to this population? How important is it to our DaySpring community to be welcoming to this population?
In regards to the first question, my thinking was stimulated by a premise raised by one of our speakers: individuals are disabled primarily because their environment is not designed for them. This oversimplification is not meant to ignore the stark reality of medical and mental health considerations that a person experiences, but rather to draw attention purposefully to the social barriers faced by this population. In total darkness, there is no difference between a person who is blind and a person who can see. An individual in a wheelchair at the bottom of the stairs is disabled because of the stairs, not because of the wheelchair. An individual with profound autism attending a church service is impaired because their church does not provide supportive resources for stimulating, meaningful participation, not because their sensory and social needs are different. They are socially impaired because their vocalizations are met with uncomfortable stares and glances, not because their social awareness is limited. That individual and their family is un-welcome not because of their child, but because of their church. To welcome those with special needs and disabilities means creating and designing space so they have the ability to meaningfully participate in the life and worship of our congregation.
The second question is one posed for discernment and community discussion. It is not a question of whether this is important, but to what degree it is. It is important enough to our DaySpring family that our communion servers go out into the congregation to those with mobility impairments. It is important enough that we provide designated parking spaces for those with disabilities. It is important enough that we greet, smile at, and play with those with special needs and disabilities and welcome them into our classrooms. At the same time, none of those things require or ask much of us as a community or as individuals. A question that I will be sitting with over the next two years with the other individuals from our church who are engaged with this project is whether it is important enough to our DaySpring family that we invest more of our own time, energy, and resources into creating more space and accessibility for this population to truly belong within and among us. Our job as part of this project is to assume that we are doing some things well now, and to be open to the possibility that we have room to do more.
Our role as stewards requires us to be discerning of how to best use what limited resources we do have—today is not a call for immediate change. The task we were left with from this first meeting was to simply observe what our church is doing now and to seek to understand why we do things the way that we do. In the future, we will begin to cast a vision for what we would like to do differently, and what we as a congregation might do to make that vision come to pass.
