Calling for a real #fullaccesschurch

Yesterday, the fantastic user-led organisation Disability and Jesus held a twitter action to encourage churches to think more about access for disabled people. The twitter tag was #fullaccesschurch – you can still go there are see the exciting, imaginative and involved discussions we had there about disability access to churches.

I ended up having a bit of a discussion with someone who said their church couldn’t afford access adaptations. Meanwhile, the wonderful Anne Memmot has written about focusing on access for those with other impairments, rather than letting the expensive ones distract us from doing anything. I understand both these perspectives. But I want to present a different perspective, from my vantage point as someone who no longer attends church, largely because I got sick of the terrible access everywhere I went, and having to fight for my right to get in through almost every church door I encountered.

I’ve been into some very well-off churches. One London church comes to mind where they installed a full cafe in the basement, with no mobility access to it, and began to hold all their Bible study and social groups there. Hint: there would have been no cost attached to holding a few groups in the wheelchair-accessible sanctuary and having some basic tea and coffee facilities upstairs. But they hadn’t thought of this – because it wasn’t important to them.

The official number of wheelchair users in the UK is 1.2 million (according to statistics collected in 2000 – the number is likely to have risen by now, with our ageing population). But that doesn’t include all the hundreds of thousands of part-time wheelchair users, electric scooter users, crutch and stick users, and many others with restricted mobility who benefit from mobility adaptations. I suspect the number of mobility-impaired people is actually much, much higher  – especially as other statistics show that 27% of young disabled people have a disability relating to mobility. That’s a lot of us disabled folks who are moblity-impaired in some way. Add older people, of whom a huge number use sticks, scooters etc, and you have a lot of people who can benefit from relatively cheap portable ramps and some thought put into where groups are held.

And now think about all the other people who benefit from mobility-friendly environments. Parents with children, including developmentally delayed older children. Older people who aren’t ready to define as having mobility impairments, but still appreciate flat access. People with other impairments, such as visual impairments, who can fall on badly-designed steps.

Many adaptations cost almost nothing – as Anne Memmot says. This is important for churches to know and think about. There are things they can do that will help a lot of people, for not a great deal of money – and sometimes for free.

But we have to face the fact that some adaptations do have a cost attached. Ramps may cost a few hundred pounds, more if they’re architecturally tricky. Hearing-aid loops may be about £1000 or a little more. The right kind of lighting for visually impaired and autistic people will have some cost attached. Basic toilet adaptations like grip-handles are not unaffordable but also not free. Large-print or easy-read Bibles are worthwhile for many congregations but will cost some money.

I don’t accept the argument that churches can’t afford adaptations. While not all churches are rich, it’s interesting that they can usually afford what’s important to them. At a group discussion I was at yesterday, a father of a wheelchair-using child spoke about the cost issue. “Cost?” he said. “You want to talk about cost? Jesus died for us!” The fact that churches don’t balk at putting in expensive cafe facilities, but do at disability access adaptations, shows what they value. And that’s often the comfort of the non-disabled people of God over the access of another part of the Body.

I, for one, am tired of the resistant tone and serious faces attached whenever I bring up access – especially mobility access. Stop talking to me about it as though I’m asking too much. If you woke up tomorrow and could no longer get into your local church, along with millions of other people who suddenly couldn’t get into their local churches, the world would hear about it very quickly. But disabled people, including mobility-impaired people, are always accused of asking too much of the churches. I don’t believe that we are. I believe we’re asking for our civil rights under British law, our human rights under European law, and justice from the people of God.

When people say “Access isn’t all about wheelchairs,” they’re absolutely right. We need to talk about all the other ways that people can be included. And as Anne Memmot says, that can be achieved for very little money. Some of it is even free. But not all of it will be free. So I’ll keep fighting for a truly #fullaccesschurch, with full access for ALL.

Whose ministry is your church missing out on, all because they can’t get in through the door or up to the pulpit?

What does real welcome look like?

Image: two people cupping their hands over their ears as though struggling to hear. Image from Manchester Diocese website.

Last week I attended a meeting at the Diocese of Manchester on ‘welcome and belonging’ for disabled people in the Church of England. Titled ‘We’ve Been Expecting You: Disability and the Church’, it was a half-day event to launch a report on disability and the diocese that was produced from a 2012 event on disability.

John Gillibrand was an excellent keynote speaker. He began by acknowledging that views on disability can be controversial and multifaceted — from the issue of who gets to speak for whom, to the social model vs other ways of approaching disability. John’s son is autistic and is currently in residential care. John’s story was fascinating. He talked about the stress and joys of being a vicar with a disabled child, and some of the other things that he and his family experienced while his son was growing up. He also talked about the way the church could and should be responding to disabled members. While I didn’t agree with everything he said, and his focus on care (rather than equality) worried me a bit, I did enjoy his talk very much, and it was good to hear about the experience of a church leader encountering disability in his family and congregation.

I raised a question at the end of John’s talk: If we focus on care, rather than equality, will this discourage the church from recognising the ministry of disabled people, and from ordaining them as ministers? John didn’t quite answer the question — he spoke about the discrimination experienced by disabled people applying for ordination, but not about whether ideologies towards disabled church members could affect this. But then, there wasn’t much time to discuss this or the many other issues that arose from his talk.

We then moved on to discussing the report that was being launched on the day, in small groups. Reflections from the floor included the need for things to move on much faster — for example, full level access to churches was proposed in the report, but the Diocese has not reported that this has been achieved. Disabled delegates talked about the difficulties they face in their churches, from a lack of BSL* translation and equipment for Deaf people, to the need for clergy to be trained around issues of disability, or at least to have thought about disability at some point in their training.

It was a very positive day, but the message from those attending was clear. The Church of England has a responsibility, not just to talk about access and inclusion, but to make it happen. There were access issues on the day that illustrated this point: while the building used was very accessible for those with mobility difficulties, there was no hearing aid loop, no BSL signing provided, and the structure of the meeting did not make it easy for neurodivergent attendees. The Church of England is clearly working hard to find out how to make their work and services more accessible to disabled people, but the general feeling at the meeting, from disabled and non-disabled delegates alike, is that it’s time they stopped talking and put ideas into practice.

*British Sign Language

Plain English: My Research

Image of a stack of books. Photo by Dayna Bateman (cc).

Image: a stack of books. Photo by Dayna Bateman (cc).

Post inspired by the #phdchat discussion on putting research into plain English.

Emancipatory research should be totally accessible to all, even though that can be difficult to achieve when universities demand styles of writing that are inaccessible to most. I find it particularly hard to write in clear, plain English (mostly because my brain doesn’t like making sense), but that’s no excuse for not trying. So I’m going to try to write updates in accessible language more often. Let me know if I start drifting into academic-speak and making no sense.

In my research, I’m looking at the experiences of disabled Christians. Incredibly, this has not been done before, and the issue is extremely under-considered in churches and religious contexts. It is also rarely discussed in religious studies in academia.

I’m looking at the way Christians and churches respond to disabled people, and to the issue of disability. This involves finding out where Christians get their ideas on disability. I have been listening to disabled church-goers about what church is like for them: their experiences of being included in churches, as well as their experiences of exclusion. Exclusion could means lots of things. It could be about physical access difficulties, attitudes that people find unhelpful, or discrimination because of disability. I have also been listening to church leaders and observing church services.

For context, I looked at theories of disability in Christianity, before I went out to talk to people. I’ve been looking at the history of churches in relation to disability, which is extremely interesting, and again rarely talked about in disability circles. I’m particularly interested in ideas of healing and the body, and how this relates to disabled people’s self-image and identity. For example, in relation to stories in the gospels where Jesus heals people: I want to go know how people in churches use these stories and how they feel about them. These theories will help me understand the categories that Christians use to organise ideas and experiences about disability.

For me, the most important thing about my research is that I want it to be a study that is as emancipatory as possible. Emancipatory disability research is a way of doing research, designed by disability studies academics and disability justice activists, which tries to make sure that disabled people have control of research. In the past (and often still today), academic research on disability was done by people who know nothing about what it’s like to be disabled. Disability studies has tried to change that by making sure that, in research studies, disabled people are treated as the experts on disability, whereas the researcher is only an expert on research. (This gets more complicated when you’re a disabled researcher yourself, as I am, but that’s another story!) This approach to research has proved extremely difficult to do, in practice, but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. I’m working with a group of disabled Christians who are holding me to account over my work, telling me if I’m asking the right questions and researching the right areas. I’m continually applying for funding to pay everyone involved in the research, as disabled people are far too often asked to give something for nothing. Of course, there’s little funding available, so I have sometimes ended up covering these costs myself. I’m determined to find a way to make this research accountable to disabled people, though, even if that turns out to be an expensive commitment.

This kind of research also involves a principle of ‘giving back’ to the community you’ve researched – in this case, to disabled Christians, and churches. So towards the end of the research, and afterwards, I hope that I’ll be able to offer training to churches in how to make their practice more accessible for disabled people, for example. As a trainer, campaigner and researcher, I hope there will be various things I can do to ‘give back’ to disabled Christians and their churches, and to share my findings widely.

I’m very grateful to all the people who have generously shared their time with me and taken part in the research. Their stories are valuable and I hope not to waste them, but to feed back their experiences to churches and beyond.

I’m @naomi_jacobs on twitter if you would like to ask more about the research, and my academia.edu profile is here.

Theology in Practice: A Tale of Three Masses – 1*

Image of a church with steps leading up to it. Photo by Reinante el Pintor de Fuego. Creative Commons Licence

Image: a church with steps leading up. Photo (cc) Reinante el Pintor de Fuego.

Hoping to make a bit of a semi-regular series of theology/theory in practice, to complement more theoretical thoughts. Although to me, ‘regular’ tends to mean ‘more than once a year’. So we’ll see how it goes!

I’ve been to three churches recently, where I had very different access experiences.