When I am weak, then I am strong

Since my previous post, I've been to see a couple of people connected with Prospects; studied the DVD-Rom, 'Opening the Doors' made for the Archbishop's Council Learning Disability Working Party; and read The Strength of Weakness by Roy Clements. This book is an exposition of 2 Corinthians, approached from the perspective of Paul's repeated assertion that God's preference is to use those who utterly depend on him, rather than those who are 'strong in their own strength'. The title of this post is taken from 2 Cor, 12.10, which follows shortly after the famous 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness' (v 9).

In other words, it isn't simply a case of saying that the church needs to be nice to people with learning disabilities. Our call is to so include all people that we might grow together in Christ, discovering more about Him from one another, and thus being more effective in our evangelism and mission. Making the church more inclusive means taking seriously the comments about accessibility in my last post. A small example from Stephen Cotterill, Bishop of Reading: "I believe the songs from the Prospects groups have a lot to teach the wider church". How might each local church have its sense of identity enhanced by having its own congregational song? How much more attractive might our worship be to not-yet believers if we kept it simpler and more contemporary? What if Sundays were essentially about the various groups of the church coming together for praise and celebration, with the hard yards of prayer and wrestling with the scriptures being done in appropriate groups through the week? (Yes, I know, it's called Cell Church.)

Joe Halfpenny kindly showed me round Marion House, Bournemouth, to give me a glimpse of the other side of Prospects' work in residential and day care. Many of the residents are Christians, some because of the work of Prospects.

My sincere thanks to Andrew Mackie, Prospects Mission Development Co-ordinator, Central South. Andrew freely gave me of his time and energy in preparation, during, and at the end of the sabbatical. Over pizza, we were able to talk about what I'd discovered. I had found that, after all, the experience had not been so daunting as I thought at the beginning. It was good to spend so much time around people with learning disabilities.

Was God in it all? Oh yes. I rather sidled into this sabbatical, not at all sure how it was going to be of relevance post-retirement. It was about a month ago I discovered that the URC in the area where I now know I'll be retiring is already working with learning disabled people, and is planning to extend its ministry. I wait to see what He has for me!

If you want to discover more, you will find resources and information on the following two websites:
http://www.throughtheroof.org/
http://www.prospects.org.uk

Thanks for your partnership in my sabbatical.

Penultimate Post

My thanks to those who responded to my previous post. The funeral went well - thank you for your prayers - but for the purposes of my sabbatical, it meant that the main activity looking at issues around physical ability didn't happen. So the sabbatical essentially has been about the work of Prospects. I will summarise my thoughts about that in my next and final post.

However, I had always intended to reflect on issues around the church and physical disability, and the following thoughts will be fairly random. My primary concern is about making our premises accessible to those whom we seek to reach with the Gospel.

Hearing disabilities. Induction loops were already commonplace when I became a minister, but why is there so little signing? For profoundly deaf people signing is not only useful for the spoken word, but also for following hymns. I appreciate signing will only happen as people sense a call to train, but perhaps we are not encouraging this idea as much as we ought. There is anecdotal evidence that churches which use signers attract people who depend on signing. This is hardly a surprise.

Visual impairment of course comes in a variety of forms. In my first church, a lady who had been blind from birth joined us. We gave her cassettes (it was that long ago!) of songs she didn't know, so she could learn the words. We were also able to provide many of the songs in Braille. A church member recorded the content of our church membership booklet so she had the same information as the others in her membership group. The use of data projectors is of great benefit in improving the quality of worship and teaching, but the needs of people with serious visual problems, such as macular degeneration, need to be born in mind. Different conditions require different responses, so talking with people in the church is a good idea! Glare is to be avoided, no matter what the impairment. Fortunately, most screens sold today have matte surfaces.

Pews are not good for people with chronic back pain etc. A local church has wooden seats with no cushioning. Other churches have cushioned seats but with large gaps between seat and backrest, offering little support. Emmanuel, Worthing URC has a substantial number of seats (not just one or two conspicuous) with full backs - easily the most comfortable for people with a variety of pain problems. All of this is perfectly obvious, yet still churches make bad decisions about seating.

Often it seems churches fail to see needs, only reacting when legislation forces them to. How did people with physical disabilities get to some of our Victorian churches, accessible only via long flights of outside stone steps? One church I know installed an outside lift to respond to this. Unfortunately, it's slow and conspicuous - not attractive to someone thinking about beginning to attend church. A church I came across on this sabbatical was built above a supermarket, possibly in the 1970s or 80s. It is only reachable via a series of long ramps. My wife, for example, would be unable to reach the front door on foot and I would be unable to push her in a wheelchair. Again, what kind of message does that send to the people we are trying to reach with the Gospel? The church I currently serve was built on two floors at the beginning of the '80s. There is no lift, and it is difficult or impossible for our wheelchair bound people to transfer to the stair lift, thus shutting them out of all events on the upper floor. There is now nowhere a lift could be installed..

I'm well aware that lack of finance is an ever present factor in deciding how to make our churches accessible to people with physical disabilities, but I wonder whether we care enough. A friend tells of a recent conversation with the leader of a church with poor access for wheelchairs. The leader's view was that there was no problem as they didn't have any wheelchair users in the congregation. Mmmm.

A life well lived

Following the death earlier this week of my mother, Franziska Maria, néé Navratil, this blog is on hold for a while. Mum had had a long, varied and fruitful life which included a (deeply scary) adventure as a civilian worker in the German army behind the Russian lines; a happy but too brief marriage; rearing five children - four of them on her own following Dad's death; in her forties qualifying for entrance to and a degree from Edinburgh University, subsequently becoming Head of Languages at a local High School; and being a counsellor, then a supervisor, then a branch founder for CRUSE, being recognised in her 80s as Fife Volunteer of the year.

Most important, Mum became a follower of Jesus Christ in 1970 or 71. 18 months or so later, partly because of her testimony, Tricia and I followed suit. She is rejoicing with the saints in glory, but we whom she has influenced will badly miss her.

Please pray for my siblings (Mary, Frank, Helen, John) their spouses, children and grandchildren, and, of course, for Tricia, me, and ours.

Through Changing Scenes

The title is also that of the book by David Potter about the history of Prospects. He and his wife founded the charity, and led it for many years. I hadn't appreciated that the purpose of 'A Cause for Concern', the charity's original name, was to enable Christians with learning disabilities to live together in appropriately staffed communities. Local groups meeting for worship came later, as the need became apparent.

One of the things that has interested me is the motivation of people involved in leading and helping with the local groups. David Potter's was quite clear. When their disabled child reached age 10, he was challenged by a friend about what her life would be like (care was still highly institutionalised at the time) when he and his wife were no longer able to care for her. Prospects is the result. I had rather assumed this would be the norm, but my conversations revealed many stories and motivations. What is central to each is a clear sense of calling. All speak of how much they find fulfilment and pleasure in what they do.

I've now been to two more local groups, deliberately chosen for me because of their dissimilarities. It's clear that one size doesn't fit all. One leader told me how 75% of the members of a nearby group can read. 90% of his can't, so the way the bible is studied has to be much different. What the groups had in common was a vibrancy and joy that our churches can learn from. And the tambourines, shakers and flags wouldn't go amiss in some places!

I shall be coming back to Prospects towards the end of the sabbatical. Meantime, some reading on how God is building his church through those who are weak and powerless, and some thinking about issues of physical access.

A couple of visits

Last week we went up to one of our old haunts, Gillingham URC (Kent), to talk to Pam Tolhurst, the church's Local Leader. Pastor Pam, as she's better known, leads a monthly act of worship at Gillingham Deafblind Club.  Apparently very few people are completely unable to hear or see, and the people in the club suffer from various levels of disability. Communion Services are are kept very simple, as the hand language used to communicate with a profoundly deafblind person is laborious.

A number of members of the club are now Members at Gillingham URC, including one who went through a clear conversion experience after he started worshipping there. However, none of the more profoundly disabled club members is involved at the church. The hand language is fairly basic (although Pam showed us how to say, "God loves you"), and profoundly deafblind people tend to live in a very enclosed world. For example, prayer is only asked for close family and friends.

We are in the same territory as in the story of the severely disabled teenager of 'Wrestling with Angels', and those in severe dementia. The normal rules of the challenge to faith and the reasoned response don't apply. But God's grace always applies.

On Palm Sunday we had a great time of worship and celebration at Sonshine, a Prospects group meeting monthly in the West Sussex village of Climping to worship God and share the Good News about Jesus. The congregation consists mainly of people with learning disabilities and some of their carers. We started with the group's own worship song. We had simple praise songs; sketches; bible readings taking us through the stories of Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday; a little teaching though nothing remotely like a sermon; two 'sharing times'; and a couple of short prayers partly linked to the sharing. There was also an excellent demonstration of how it is possible to communicate by puppetry, and the group hopes to develop its own puppet team. It felt not unlike many Family Services Tricia and/or I have led in the past, and it was good to be there.

Over the next two or three weeks I shall be going to some more Prospects groups and finding out about the work the organisation does. After that, I'll offer some deeper reflection on what I believe the Lord might be saying to the wider church through Christians with learning disabilities.

Between remembering and forgetting

Now for the helpful things about this book. One thing which would have been good to know before is that people with dementia live 'in the moment'. Hence the importance of visiting, even when it seems like a waste of time and energy. On reflection, this may seem pretty obvious, but I can't help thinking the quality of our visits to Auntie would have been higher if someone had explained things to us in this way, and emphasised what a positive thing it is. It's one of the things I will want to offer my congregation, many of whom faithfully visit old friends who are much changed by dementia.

The emotional difficulty relatives face is acknowledged by some of the contributors, and it was helpful, in that context, to read: "Treating people as people rather than objects is a profoundly spiritual task".

On spirituality, we noted that Auntie, a committed Christian, would respond to the reading of scripture, especially the Psalms. Of course, the Authorized Version was essential for this. She had been a speaker at women's meetings for decades, and one time we visited she was (without any acknowledgement of her visitors!) addressing such a gathering. This was one of her most lucid moments. Whatever one's cognitive ability, our relationship with God goes well beyond mere reason, and the book makes it clear we must not fall into the trap of thinking otherwise.

One contributor suggests a new way of seeing things: "By giving the gift of time and helping people to feel occupied, included, respected and loved, the Church has a very special ministry to offer those who have dementia." "Imagine a world where the local residential home or sheltered housing scheme was the hub of community activity in an area, with doors open to a variety of interesting experiences inside and outside the home - a place that people enjoy visiting rather than dread that they might end up there." I started reading the book looking for ways in which people with dementia might be most blessed through our acts of corporate worship, but have come to a point where I recognise we may do better the other way round, by partnering caring institutions in offering acts of worship accessible to people with dementia, and inviting the rest of the world to join in. But always the problem of time and resources! Meantime, people with dementia need to be loved and cherished by the congregation, and I wonder whether the mere practice of 'coming to church' can not in itself be a blessing.

I'll come back to this in a later post, but there are comments about making worship more accessible (colour and font sizes on service sheets; symbols and pictures to"amplify the purpose of the text"; audibility, etc) which have great value for many people with disabilities.

Finally, a quote which expresses the frustrations of many of the contributors, and which links two of my themes for this sabbatical. "What goes wrong, that we can no longer recognize our fellow humanity in a person with dementia? It is the same problem that used to blight the care of people with learning disabilities.... It is a valuing of people according to the functions of their brain, ignoring the rest of their personality."

Between remembering and forgetting: the spiritual dimensions of dementia, edited by James Woodward, is published by Mowbray. ISBN 978-1-4411-3114-0. Available from Amazon.

Two confessions and a whinge

Confession 1: One of the reasons for including dementia as one of my topics was my experience with visiting Tricia's aunt. When she died last year at the age of 95 she was in a nursing home, and had been in residential care for the last seven or eight years. Tricia had power of attorney, and we were her only regular visitors. Although never formally diagnosed with dementia, in the last four or five years Auntie displayed many of the symptoms. She had no idea who we were, was confused generally, and conversations were very difficult. I often felt the visits were a complete waste of time, and found it difficult to communicate with this person who wasn't the Auntie I knew. Often it was a real drag to even go in the first place. And yes, that did make me feel guilty, especially when I felt I was making things difficult for Tricia.

Confession 2: One of my responsibilities has been to conduct services about once a quarter at a local home. A new chaplain came, and made some excellent suggestions for making worship accessible to the residents, more and more of whom were dementia patients. The suggestions involved set liturgies and extensive use of the visual and tactile. He was absolutely right, but my main feeling was of relief that I would soon be retiring! It shames me to say it, but there's something of the old dog and new tricks about this.

Whinge: In my last post I mentioned the book I was looking forward to reading. Thus far it has been a disappointment. Written by health professionals (including chaplains), it seems to also be for health professionals. The only time a congregational or parish minister is mentioned is in an extended complaint by a chaplain who felt her mother was neglected by her church's Rector. Apparently regular visits by the parish pastoral team weren't enough. In my church are 9 people either diagnosed with dementia, or clearly at some stage in the process. I'm busy enough - an Anglican parish minister even more so, with a much wider range of responsibilities than any health service chaplain. Having said that, there is some justification in the complaint, but it has been galling (thus far) to find this as the only comment on the wider church.

However (always good to have a however after a whinge), I've just begun a section about helping people with dementia to worship. The context is separate services in day centres, hospitals and care homes, but there looks to be some help for those of us who are responsible for leading worship in a wider context, but whose congregations include people with dementia.

So the next post should be much more positive, and will include the good things I have found in the book. Hopefully I'll post in the next day or two.

More details

I said in my first post I'd let you have some more details about what I'm doing to achieve the purpose of the sabbatical. It happens that the first half will be concerned with people with learning disabilities and people with dementia. The second half will be to do with physical disabilities. That will involve visiting at least one church which has made major changes to its building with the aim of improving access; some reading; and reflection on what I have experienced and observed over the years.

In the first half I'm going to be spending time with people and local groups of Prospects. From their website http://www.prospects.org.uk/: Prospects is a dynamic Christian organisation working together with people with learning disabilities so they live life to the full. The plan is to visit a number of local groups, observe and talk to people. I'm especially interested in issues concerned with worship, communication, and spirituality.

Similarly, I have just started a book which I hope will enable me to explore similar issues in relation to people with dementia. The full title is "Between remembering and forgetting. The spiritual dimensions of dementia". The book is a collection of related essays edited by Canon James Woodward. A short comment in the Introduction will, I hope, give a picture of what is to come: 

The problem is not simply a malfunction in the person's brain, but a malfunction in the philosophy and understanding of society's understanding of personhood.

Hooray to that.

If you want to be a Facebook friend, I'll be posting there every time I publish a blog entry. Find me at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1486686681.

Wrestling with an angel

A Story of Love, Disability and the Lessons of Grace by Greg Lucas

- only available on Kindle in the UK.

The angel in question is the author's strong, severely disabled (and definitely less than angelic) teenage son. The wrestling is literal. The struggle to get his son out of bed (he's a teenager in this, if not in his mental capacity!), get the incontinence pad off him, clear up the mess and get him into a bath he doesn't want is graphically told.

How do the author and his wife cope? They don't, really, but they find evidence of the grace of God in all their suffering and trials, right from their first coming to faith: “When people ask me how I became a follower of Jesus, I always tell them that a two year old, non-verbal, mentally disabled, autistic boy led me straight to the cross and since then has been used to display God’s grace in the most amazing ways”.

The book is all about grace. Jake can never give any sign whether he's a follower of Jesus. But the author is aware that God's grace overwhelms any attempt we might make at defining who is or isn't a Christian. A short book, it is definitely not to be read at a single sitting. Emotionally draining without being remotely manipulative. For a more detailed review, with which I concur, see: http://www.thirstytheologian.com/2011/02/14/book_review_wrestling_with_an.php.

A frightening (how would I cope?) and encouraging (God's grace trumps my fears) start to the sabbatical.

What it's about

This will be a simple blog because I'm a simple blogger. During my sabbatical I'm looking at good practice in helping people with disabilities access Church in the fullest sense - buildings, people, the heart of the faith.

There are three areas in particular I shall be looking at:

• How we enable access to buildings for people with physical disabilities
• How we help people with learning difficulties to worship and draw closer to Jesus
• How we help people with dementia to worship and maintain/discover a relationship with Jesus.

Some of you will be concerned already about my use of language. There is no way to talk about these issues without either offending some or making others laugh with scorn at convoluted efforts to say the right thing. So may I make it clear that I agree with the trailers for the new BBC1 series on how people live full lives with their disabilities (Tuesdays, 10.35 pm) that we should be about removing limitations, focusing on abilities, and so on.

The sabbatical will involve reading, interviews, observation and visits. I shall also be doing a lot of reflecting on what I have observed over the years of both good and bad practice in the Church. I believe I'm at times going to find things uncomfortable, and will try to be honest about those times.

More detail on my plans soon. Meanwhile, let's get this posted and see if it actually works.