The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship

by Rebecca F Spurrier

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people’s participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently.

Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart?

Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church’s embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.

Genres: Disability

272 pages, Hardcover

Published October 1, 2019

Reviews

[Cody Bivins-Starr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spurrier is a rare gem in disability theology in that there are little pretenses toward the insistence on language uniformity, performance, or the idealist notions of “inclusion and participation” as perfectly realizable end goals. The key difference that grounds this difference is difference itself. Spurrier is not afraid, in assessing her subject matter of a community with vast differences, to name or not name the dissonance.

Many texts on disability theology almost assume a phantasmagoric community ideal in which even those with disabilities appear as ethereal amalgamations of individuals who absorb the typographies of various representations yet hardly move beyond the symbolic. I find this to be the case even with disability theology written from within disability itself… it is difficult to “imagine” “community” when we simply don’t interact with one.

Thus, the strength of Spurrier’s work is its mess. It’s not neat to peer into a community of difference. Having participated in such a community with its varieties of negotiations, smells, textures, complications, I found myself transported back to the complexity of navigating true difference. Academics beware!

What Spurrier contributes in ethnography she lacks in theological discourse. The limited engagement with theological reflection on the “how” of this community is likely due to the commitments here. “God” in this conception seems at times a mere name to the gathering, rather than the agent of the gathering itself. It makes little sense for communities of such difference to be able to function if not for the inbreaking work of God. One would think this is self-evident, given the fact that most communities in which difference is present almost always result in the violent suppression of difference. This to me seems a failure of attributing God’s act solely in human capability.

[Candy Renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great account on how a church has reached out to the community that have a mental disability. Well written and interesting.

[Kit Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

For my thesis!