Waiting for a Different Miracle
To help disabled people, churches must offer more than prayers for healing.
By Shannon Dingle
Waiting is the most common state of being for disabled people. We wait for medical equipment to be customized and delivered, a process taking at least six months in the U.S. We wait for the person who “is just dropping something off, real quick!” to vacate the disabled parking spot. This past weekend, we waited until a restaurant’s garage door in the back could be opened because my daughter’s wheelchair couldn’t enter any other way.
To be disabled is to wait.
In theory, the church should be a place where disabled people don’t have to wait, because a robust and sound theology is inclusive of all abilities. In practice, the church has lagged behind accessibility improvements in the world… most of the time. Yet sometimes the church steps up and provides the care modeled for us by Jesus, and that’s why the game of waiting on and receiving from the church is complex for disabled people.
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Disabled people stopped traffic, blocked buses, and crawled over obstacles in the years leading up to 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed and signed into federal law. While the ADA’s language was being drafted, though, special interest groups were lobbying for loopholes. Churches and Christian schools were one such group. (Technically, religious organizations as a whole are exempt, but only Christian ones argued against the ADA.) In archived documents, reasoning is given for religious exemptions:
“The ADA would impose extensive requirements on religious organizations. There is no indication that these requirements are at all necessary, for the evidence does not establish that religious organizations discriminate against Americans with disabilities. In fact, we believe the evidence points the other way.”
“Nothing can be clearer than that the free exercise of religion will be seriously impaired by imposing the ADA on religious bodies. Nothing has been shown to indicate that there is a national necessity to apply the ADA Bill to churches, religious schools, and other ministries.”
While arguing the ADA wasn’t needed, church leaders declared—without evidence or testimony—that churches were already accessible. Meanwhile, inaccessible structures were just as likely to exist in religious buildings, especially older churches.
Other legal arguments acknowledged religious organizations didn’t comply with the provisions of the then-proposed ADA legislation but argued they couldn’t because any religious inclusion in the ADA would be “excessive demands by government,” violating First Amendment rights. Still others insisted accessibility was too costly.
But disabled people didn’t wait. Waiting well, I think, means knowing when waiting isn’t the best or only choice. No, disabled people showed up, protesting in favor of the ADA. Nonetheless, the fight for religious organizations to be exempt from the ADA won, and legally they are unaccountable to ADA provisions.
There were exceptions, though. Some churches did push for the passing of the ADA, asking that their spaces to be held accountable like other private spaces. Eighteen religious organizations, including the National Council of Churches, supported their inclusion in the ADA requirements.
It’s easier to lambast and lament the church’s resistance to the ADA, but our wait for justice isn’t as clear as that. The church is not a monolith, and those eighteen religious organizations joined us in affirming the full humanity of all disabled people by supporting the ADA. Disabled people have been waiting for churches to acknowledge the need for accessibility, but then and now we don’t wait alone.
Yes, we are disabled. No, that doesn’t mean we’re in need of a spiritual fix from you.
When I was first diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a well-meaning couple asked me if they could pray for me, their hands upon my swollen digits. I don’t remember the beginning of their prayer, but in the middle they confidently declared, “God, we know you can heal Shannon, if she only has the faith in you to do so.” I wanted to protest, to insist that my health diagnoses weren’t caused by a lack of faith, but I didn’t. I simply waited until they were done and I was no longer being held hostage by insulting judgment of my connection with God, dressed up as prayer and good intentions.
My friend Dr. Amy Kenny put it well with the title (and contents) of her 2022 book My Body Is Not a Prayer Request. Strangers or fellow church members stop us if we’re visibly disabled, asking to pray for our healing, when what we really need is their partnership in advocating for a ramp to be added to our favorite bar or for the pulpit not to be only accessible by stairs.
Yes, we are disabled. No, that doesn’t mean we’re in need of a spiritual fix from you.
In John 9:1, Jesus sees the blind man before anything else, a comforting reality in a world in which disability too often means unseen. When the disciples saw him, blind and begging, they saw differently. They thought they knew the story already, much like my friends and the prayer drive-byers thought they knew my story and Amy’s.
Clearly, they figured, the blind man had done something worthy of his affliction, or maybe his parents held responsibility, with their consequences playing out in the eyes of their son. For a disability to be present, they supposed, someone failed or asked for it with behavior unacceptable to God.
Begging always involves waiting, awkwardly diverting eyes from those unable or unwilling to help. In first-century Palestine, begging was expected from those who had no means to support themselves. The community was meant to show up and offer tangible help. In many contemporary communities, we see the same in GoFundMes and other fundraising efforts. But the resources of individuals can’t pay every hospital bill, especially for disabled people with significant medical fragility.
Jesus tells the men with him, bluntly, that this man’s blindness did not result from his sin, nor his parents’. Rather, this happened so that the works of God might be displayed. Then Jesus heals the blindness of the man—but healing isn’t the miracle here. If healing were the point, then Jesus would have stayed in every city until every person was healed.
No, healing restored the man who was blind to the community in which he lived, no longer literally living on the margins of society. This is good, and this displays the works of God. Conversely, Amy didn’t need physical healing in order to be restored to her community, despite prayers from strangers and church members urging God to “fix” her. I didn’t need to be taken hostage by prayer. We need restoration to community, especially in a time in which some churches offered online services and cautious COVID protections while others didn’t. Now, as some declare the pandemic over but around six hundred people in the U.S. still die daily, we wait. Which churches will declare the medically disabled to be worthy of safety in worship, continuing to offer online options for those who can’t attend in person? Which won’t?
I don’t know what it will take for us to be seen and what steps we’ll have to summit to crawl our way to being treated with dignity.
To push the ADA legislation through being passed and signed, disabled people protested in a way only disabled people can. In what’s called “the Capitol Crawl” on March 13, 1990, wheelchair users dangerously left their mobility aids and climbed the steps of the Capitol, crawling painstakingly over the stairs that prevented them from entering the building otherwise. What could it look like for disabled people to make such a protest for inclusion in the church? I don’t know. What I do know is that incremental progress alternating with unapologetic ableism leaves us waiting at the bottom of the Capitol steps, figuratively speaking.
I don’t know what it will take for us to be seen and what steps we’ll have to summit to crawl our way to being treated with dignity. Having disability theology classes in the general curriculum at seminaries and divinity schools would be a start. So would a corporate confession of the church’s failure to hear the cry of the needy. Funds, perhaps in the form of grants, would help to update buildings and buy specialized equipment for churches, especially smaller churches whose giving isn’t sufficient to make changes on their own. Even research is too often missing disability information, so adding a couple of questions to existing data collections could help us define the gap in ministry. Having keynote speakers, not just workshop leaders, who are disabled and teach about disability justice is a needed change as well.
For any of this to happen, we’d have to be aided by abled folks, but that’s a world of uncertainty. Christian abled people have been fickle and unpredictable in response to ableism, and these solutions have been available since before churches rallied to be exempt from the ADA. Would we have the allies we need to counter ableism in the church?
We’d have to wait and see.
And we will, because we have waited well throughout history.
Shannon Dingle is a disability activist, freelance writer, sex trafficking survivor, and recovering perfectionist. She has written for USA Today, the Washington Post, and Teen Vogue, and her story has been featured on TODAY.com, NPR, and Good Morning America, and in The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Daily Kos, Christianity Today, and Slate. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
