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This week, Krysia is joined by Dr Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson to discuss their book, At the Gates: Disability Justice and the Churches. We have a structured discussion on four main areas related to the book: research and theology, barriers to belonging, church on the margins, and then COVID-19 and online church.
The transcript to the episode is available here: https://share.transistor.fm/s/2a612512/transcript.txt
If you have any questions, or just want to say hi, email us at cat@abdn.ac.uk or find us on twitter @autismtheology.
This podcast is brought to you by The University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology.
The artwork for this podcast uses the Centre for Autism and Theology Logo, created by Holly Russel.
Creators & Guests
What is Autism and Theology Podcast?
The Autism and Theology Podcast is a space where we engage with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, share relevant resources, and promote ways in which both faith and non-faith communities can enable autistic people to flourish.
Our episodes are released on the first Wednesday of every month. We have a variety of guests who are related in some way to the field of autism and theology. Some are academics, others are people with life stories to share, and some are both!
We also release CATChat every third Wednesday of the month. These are shorter and more informal episodes where your hosts will share news and give you as listeners an opportunity to ask questions and share your stories.
Krysia:
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Autism and Theology podcast. My name is Krysia, and I'm really excited that you've joined us this week. This podcast is a space where we will be engaging with the latest conversations in the field of autism and theology, share relevant resources, and promote ways that help faith and non- faith communities enable autistic people to flourish. Our podcast episodes are released on the first Wednesday of every month, with Cat chat on every third Wednesday where your hosts share news and answer questions. The podcast is run from the University of Aberdeen's Centre for Autism and Theology, which we shortened to CAT. Today I am joined by two amazing guests: Dr Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson. So I wonder if maybe start with Naomi. Could you maybe tell us a bit about yourself for people who don't know you or haven't read your work?
Naomi:
Sure. And thank you so much for inviting us on the podcast and big fan of this podcast. So that's really good of you. So I'm Naomi Lawson Jacobs. I'm a social researcher, and I'm a disabled and multiply neurodivergent person. So I'm autistic, dyspraxic and ADHD. And I've also got a physical condition. Ehler’s Danlos syndrome, and I'm a part time wheelchair user. So as you can probably hear from that, my lived experience is quite relevant to my research. And my PhD research was with disabled and neurodivergent Christians, on their experiences of churches and faith, and I now work as a now work as a freelance researcher and research assistant, at the moment at the University of Leeds. And I'm a disability activist. So among other things, I'm a trustee of Disability Rights UK, and I've got 2 cats called Biscuit and Spooky and they like cats on this podcast.
Krysia:
I have to admit I'm a big biscuits and spooky fan as well. How about you, Emily? Could you give us a bit of background on you for people for the podcast?
Emily:
Hi, I'm Emily. I work in a church doing administration, but I'm also involved in a lot of church and disability groups, particularly the annual conference of Saint Martin in the Fields and Inclusive Church, which is a great space to talk about all things disability in church and I would really pleased that Naomi approached me about their PhD research and I would able to help bring it into a more public arena, with the publication of At the Gates.
Krysia:
So as you can probably tell, all three of us are massive out the Gates fans. Two of them are the authors, so that would make sense. And as part of our opening thing, I thought I'd read what's on the back of the book actually. So there's gives quite a bit of - kind of background as to where it came from. So At the Gates is based on a decade of research telling disabled Christians own stories of churches and Christianity sharing their prophetic calls for justice with a church that has two and close the gates to disabled people. The book centres on the lived experience of those who've rarely been enabled to speak in the Christian conversation on disability. These stories capture an authentic picture of the church in critical need of transformation from a care based approach to one that focuses on justice, equality and access for all. That gives a bit of background to where it came from in terms of Naomi's PhD research and the co-writing with Emily and the transformation to this fantastic book. So we're going to have a bit of a structured discussion as part of our podcast on 4 main areas kind of research and theology barriers to belonging church on the margins, and then COVID-19 and online church. So for our first part of our discussion, Naomi, I wonder if you could we could have a - So here's some of your thoughts around what gaps and issues in research and theology led you to write this book?
Naomi:
Yeah. So I did an MA some years ago now in disability studies at the University of Leeds. They have a great centre for disability studies and I really loved learning about how academic research has been a resource for activism for change and the disabled people's movement and among disabled people's groups. But at the same time, I became really aware that there's very little research and disability studies on religion and not an awful lot in religious studies that works with disability studies and an interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary way and kind of uses those emancipatory theories and ideas from disability studies, which there's many years of now. And there is a lot of work in in theology on disability, but a lot of it has historically been about disabled people rather than with us or by us or even for us. It's been partial theology, which does really important work, but is often about ministry to disabled people and doesn't amplify our voices in quite the same way as a lot of the work in disability studies does. And I really felt that what they needed to be more research that centred disabled and neurodivergent Christians lived experience of accessing churches, partly because I knew from personal experience and experience in communities like the Inclusive Church community that Emily mentioned, I was aware that many disabled and neurodivergent people were struggling to access churches and encountering difficult theologies and Christian practises that disempowered them and kind of a lack of critical reflection on those theologies. Although that's the kind of beginning to explode now, which is really exciting, was there's more and more critical theology happening in disability theology. But this was over 10 years ago, so there was much less of that. So I did PhD research with 30 disabled and neurodivergent Christians, and then there was a second stage of research for the book that Emily talked a bit about. And we've now talked to over 50 disabled people about their experiences of churches and faith and their experiences specifically as disabled in neurodivergent people. And one of the findings was that disabled people couldn't easily join in with the theological conversation. That should be about us and for us. So we couldn't read inaccessible texts and a lot of people found gatekeeping to conferences or to academic knowledge, and they found it really hard to break into that discussion about them. And I called this a pastoral model of disability where we're really constantly positioned as the objects of theology rather than people who want to contribute to theology, maybe not always in an academic way, but in in talking about our lived experience and our understanding of faith and God. And I was- also because I'd had this great experience of realising that research has been really powerful in the roots movement of disabled people. I really wanted this research to empower communities of disabled people and enable our activism for changing churches, which is slowly happening. So one of the things we wanted to do when we wrote At the Gates, the book based on the research, was to make it accessible and to make it useful for disabled people in our communities and to represent disabled and neurodivergent people as theologians who were thinking deeply about the relationship between disability and faith in their lives, and who often asking really different questions from academic theologians. And that's where kind of Emily joined me and she suggested that we stop talking about participants and start talking about storytellers. And we worked to centre people's stories in the book and to do more than say they're a participants in a study. But to say these are our people's stories. And we worked collaboratively with them. Emily, did you want to say a bit about your role in c-writing the book?
Emily:
Yes, I often talk about my role in the book as more of a curator, so I would present it with all these wonderfully diverse stories and different contacts of people living out their faith or trying to live out their faith and encountering barriers and gypsy shadows. So I really see my role in the book as a curator bringing the torrid into the light. It's a gift to the church for conserving so much treasure in them and that would benefit the whole body of Christ, not just disabled and neurodivergent Christians
Naomi:
As we talked about quite a lot was disabled people, not as a problem to the church, but as a blessing and shifting the conversation because we've been talked about as a problem for so long. But some of these theologies that our storytellers shared were wonderful gifts to the church.
Krysia:
That's fantastic. And I wonder, building on the kind of almost the inversion of gifts to the church. Naomi, if you could tell me about what barriers to belonging your participants experienced. And I also wondered if there's any specific barriers that your neurodivergent participants experienced.
Naomi:
Yeah. So this is interesting because I often think about disability theology as involving neurodivergent people, because we're all facing ableism, which comes from very similar places. But there are also unique barriers faced by neurodivergent people accessing churches that might be different from people with physical impairments. So in the book, we had some two ways of thinking about access, thinking about the social model of disability and about environments and cultures that disable people and thinking a bit about theories of inclusive design as well. So we talked in one chapter about physical access to the environment, which did include neurodivergent people, but maybe a bit less. So lights and sound, for example, can be very relevant to neurodivergent people, but a lot more wheelchair users and people with chronic illnesses were talking about the buildings they couldn't access. But in the next chapter we talked about cultural access and cultures of access and the way that church cultures can be accessible and can build access in from the beginning or they can prevent people from participating and create barriers to participation. So, like all institutions, churches aren't unique in this. But churches are designed for normative body minds. So for people who can move in certain ways, who can think in certain ways and behave in certain ways. And these are the dominant ways of being in our culture that are accepted and churches reflect other institutions in our cultures in that way, as much as we're also the body of Christ, it's good to think of us as communities that do the same things as any other community. And pastoral theologians have written quite a lot about belonging for disabled people, but they haven't always explored the barriers that might get in our way, so it's great to talk about how churches want to welcome disabled people. But what are the practicalities of that? What's what is it about church cultures that can prevent us from accessing churches? And that's not always conscious exclusion. We're not setting up to say that churches want to exclude disabled and neurodivergent people, but just in the way that churches do church, some people may not fit. So there's a disability theorist called Rosemary Garland Thompson who writes about misfitting. And it's basically when a building or an environment or a culture is designed for a certain type of person, and other people come along and they're like the square peg in the round hole, they're just not going to fit unless they try and fix themselves or fit themselves in a way that can be quite damaging to people. So for neurodivergent people trying to go along every week to a church that isn't designed for our needs in terms of sensory access, in terms of learning access and lots of other things could be really traumatic for us. But we continue to do it because that's how the Community is designed. So one example of this is the quite specific barriers that neurodivergent people faced when it came to church being a very social institution. So I know, and I'm sure many, many people listening will know that churches can be kind of unrelentingly social. There can be a real expectation that disabled people in all situations will be able to attend every week, turn up on time, and participate in lots of activities with a social element like Bible study courses or coffee after church and for lots of different reasons. Not all of us can do that if we're disabled. So we talked to Anthony, who's an autistic person who was a Church of England member who'd once had a desire to explore vocation as a priest. But he was really stuck because church was so overwhelmingly social for him, and he went to church to worship. That was his way of thinking. He didn't go to belong to a social club, and the social parts of church were traumatic for him and really difficult for him to fit into. And he spoke about the everyone must join in brigades. The people in church who kind of strongly encourage you to join in as a sign of your commitment to church. But Anthony said, my commitment is to God. And, you know, if I can participate socially, I will. But that's not my priority. And so this social church was an inaccessible culture to him, and he sadly ended up leaving church permanently. He still has a strong faith, but he just can't participate in social churches. And then we talked to Leah, who's dyspraxic as well as autistic. And as well as struggling with the social culture of church, so she had her own coping strategies around this, she played in the church music group, which was a structured way for her to be an active part of the church, but unstructured socialising was difficult for her and she really struggled in home groups because of the way they were run. They cause her anxiety and stress. She was expected to speak on the spot and she wasn't given the passage in advance, so she was trying to process it more quickly than was possible for her, and she also had a lot of barriers to teaching and learning because she had learning difficulties. So there were long sermons in her church that she couldn't follow and sometimes they were more an interactive sermon series, which she found really much more accessible. She could talk to people about what she was hearing in the sermon, but most of the time, that wasn't what her church wanted. The sermons were long and preached from the front, and then in Bible studies, Leah would find it really difficult to process information and speak, and she thought there might be other ways to do that. But she herself wasn't sure about how to advocate for her needs. And she said that she felt like she was always staying at the level of a new Christian because she couldn't access teaching and discipleship, which I thought was a real indictment for me of churches that might say they welcome all believers and might really want to, but don't create accessible approaches to discipleship for neurodivergent people or people with learning difficulties. And then on a kind of interactional level, a lot of our storytellers with lots of impairments dealt with psycho emotional disabilities. So this is a theory from disability studies. Disablism is sort of ableism on the individual level that's directly direct discrimination towards disabled people. But psycho emotional disabilities can be that interactional disabledism that can be very damaging to people. So for example, a lot of storytellers shared access requests and they have those access needs invalidated by the churches. Who said you don't really need that? And for neurodivergent people, that can be a particular problem because there can be poor recognition that our access needs are really needs and that we really can't attend church sometimes because our access needs are invisible. But sometimes just because of low awareness. And some people found this really humiliating in their own words when they said I really need this to change and they were made to fight for access to their spiritual community. And I really feel that it shouldn't be a fight for disabled or neurodivergent people to participate in church. It should be somewhere where everyone's needs are accommodated and everyone's welcome. And we've got a theology that says that. But whether it's really happening in churches, that's a difficult question. And I think in some churches this comes out of this theological culture. Again, that says disabled people are there to be ministered to, and perhaps our own voices aren't listened to as much because it's expected that the ministers will decide what we need. But we need to, you know, be listened to when we advocate for ourselves, because as some storytellers said that their needs were treated as complaining, but what they were really doing was advocating for all disabled people, and they wanted to be seen as kind of asking for justice, not just for inclusion. And that shift from this nice idea of including people to an idea of justice where we interrogate the way we do church and we say who is not included in the way we do things and how is that unjust?
Krysia:
I think so much of what you just says resonates with my own research in this gap between what we say and what we do. Which is just so telling the fact that there's been other people with other people's stories have found this really shows this is something that is a glaring kind of blind spot in regards to inclusion more broadly, and I wondered, Emily, if you could talk a bit about church on the margins. How did the storytellers in At the Gates do church differently?
Emily:
Yep, we had so many examples of creative ways that people are gathering with each other where churches have been inaccessible to people, they've found ways of gathering together a lot of that were done online since COVID, we know that that is quite a usual way for doing church now, but before it would not have come. And but there were these communities out there on social media, in Facebook groups and disabled people ministering to each other and using their gifts and living into their gifts, helping one another. They were really inspirational in the way they'd gathered together. I think about groups like YouBelong, which is an online community of disabled, chronically ill Christians who meet on zoom and on Facebook. And I also think particularly with neurodivergence of Wave church in north London, which was born out of a woman whose daughter had learning difficulties and they built this community, this worshipping group around specific needs for people with learning difficulties and it would just.... They've been going for over 10 years now, which is amazing, this group of Christians, of all ages gathering together, doing church and being church together. Yeah.
Krysia
And did you have anything to add to that? Naomi, in particular, was there anything specific in how your neurodivergent storytellers did church differently?
Naomi
Yeah. So in some of the communities we looked at, there was a real kind of coalition of neurodivergent people and physically disabled people. Like there's the inclusive church, St. Martin in the Fields Disability conference, where a whole community has grown up. And because one year we have centred the stories of neurodivergent people, there's now a high number of neurodivergent people involved there and shaping an accessible community for everyone involved with a range of different impairment needs. And then we also spoke sort of in terms of church that's not online. We spoke to Sarah, who's autistic and has experienced mental distress and parish church life was always a real struggle for her. And she'd faced a lot of barriers there, and she had stopped attending church. But she had these great memories of attending Lee Abbey as a child, which is a Christian community and retreat centre. And she asked us to contact Lee Abbey and confirm that we could name them because she loved that community so much and it became a real accessible sanctuary for her, partly because, partly because she had familiarity with the building and the community she knew, really simple but important things like where the exits were up to quiet spaces in the garden. If she got overwhelmed. And there was a real acceptance that that might be her need, and she might just disappear. And that was welcomed. But it was also about the accessible culture of that community, who I don't know if they would have realised that they were creating a neurodivergent accessible culture. But Sarah just felt that she could come as she is and could bring whatever she was able to bring to that community on any given day, whether it was more one day and less another day and that everything and that she was and brought was appreciated and valued. And she ended up having informal ministry there with other neurodivergent people. We're really discovering what it meant to become visible in a community that welcomed that and to be able to pray with other neurodivergent people and say you're struggling now. But this is kind of I'm at a different point in the story and this might be useful for you to see. And so she had, like her own ministry as well as receiving pastoral support and that lovely story of both giving and receiving ministry for Neurodivergent people was really revealing. And we talk in the book about some of these disabled and neurodivergent people as edge walkers on the edge of the church, which. We take from your paper, actually, Krysia doing church during COVID-19 where you write a bit about that. And there are lots of social theorists who talked about the margins, like Bell Hooks, who talks about the margins as a space where things can change, but also as a space of risk, and where you need a community around you. And so in your paper, Krysia, you talk about why are there margins and why are so many disabled and neurodivergent questions having to find each other on the edge of church. And it's a good first step for us if we can find safe community with each other. But the next step is the question why are we not able to be part of mainstream churches and community with many people, not just people like us, and we might also need communities where we can feel even safer and even more able to explore issues related to disability and neurodiversity. But we need to be included in in mainstream churches. So yeah, I think that's a big question that churches need to explore with neuro, divergent and disabled people and for us to lead those discussions.
Krysia
I completely agree, and it's almost one of the things coming out of my thesis is there's more questions than answers because it's more showing the way that churches and mosques operate as social groups. But then there's what about this bit? And what about this bit? And what about this bit? So there's just so much, so much reflecting and questioning, which still needs to go on. And I know you wrote as part of At the Gates, Emily, a chapter on church and COVID-19 and online church. And I wondered if you could share some of what you wrote. Did anything change for you or the other storytellers during COVID?
Emily
Of course, I wasn't anticipating this at all when we were in the talks about the book, with the real work in progress, that as we were gathering this information, church was fundamentally changing for so many people – not just disabled Christians. And in some ways, disabled and neurodivergent Christians saw lockdowns and COVID-19 as such a prophetic mirroring back to the church of what our experience was like, because suddenly no one could get into churches, The gates were closed to everyone. And I spoke to a lot of people about how this would almost be a liberating time for them, because spaces and communities that had been inaccessible to them would suddenly opened them in new ways, and there was a bit more imagination surrounding the way we think of doing and being church together. And similarly there was a real fear towards the end of lockdown that nothing would be learned from what we have been through and churches would go back to business as before, and the access that had been gained would be just quickly taken away. So there were lots of conversations around how do we advocate for our needs for online and remote access. And there’s been success stories and they live and they know things with the church and how it moves forward.
Naomi Lawson Jacobs
Yeah, there were a few people, I'm thinking of Fern, Emily, who had major issues accessing churches both for reasons of physical disability and being neurodivergent – she’s Autistic, and she found this wonderful community in Australia during lockdown, a church that had decided to respond to lockdown by moving online and making it accessible for people.
Emily
I think that what's wonderful about Fern is that she found that before lockdown, she had been going there since before this began. And that was a good example of how she had found a church where she could attend on her own terms and almost watch the service in stages if she was overwhelmed and come and go and that really fed her.
Krysia Waldock
That's fantastic. And I wanted to wrap up our discussion on at the gates. If, where, where people can buy the book, if they'd like to read it.
Naomi Lawson Jacobs
So at the gates can be bought in all good Christian book shops and online, but you can buy it direct from the publishers at www.dartonlongmantodd.co.uk. And I'll give Krysia that e-mail to share in the show notes.
Emily
And we also have a new audio book. So it is a very available in audio format.
Krysia Waldock
And is there if in people who listen to our the podcast would like to get in contact with you, how is the best way to reach you both?
Naomi Lawson Jacobs
So I can be found at naomi@batterybridge.com.
Emily
Yeah. And I can be found @EMJRIC, that's EMJRIC on blue sky.
Krysia Waldock
Super. And is there anything current? Any projects you're both currently involved with that you'd like to share?
Emily
And I would just recommend inclusive church .com / disability for a real world of information from over 10 years of disability conferences. So that's a really great resource to go and eat some more.
Krysia
I think both the mad and crip theology press, and the Inclusive Church disability resources, are just so great. So I would also highly recommend both of those resources and I'm really looking forward to when the anthology comes together and I can we can, we can talk about the anthology that would be fantastic. So thank you both so much for joining me on today's episode. It's been absolutely fantastic and also thank you so much to our listeners. If you have any questions you can message us at @autismtheology on X or Instagram. Or you can send us an e-mail at cat@abdn.ac.uk we would love to hear from you, even if it's just to say hi. You could also send a picture of your cat to say hi to spooky and biscuit. I'm sure they'd absolutely love to see you as well, and we will see you soon.