Amplifying Our Witness

Giving Voice to Adolescents with Developmental Disabilities

Benjamin T. Conner

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781467436052
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Nearly twenty percent of adolescents have developmental disabilities, yet far too often they are marginalized within churches. Amplifying Our Witness challenges congregations to adopt a new, practice-centered approach to congregational ministry -- one that includes and amplifies the witness of adolescents with developmental disabilities. Replete with stories taken from Benjamin Conner's own extensive experience with befriending and discipling adolescents with developmental disabilities, Amplifying Our Witness

• Shows how churches exclude the mentally disabled in various structural and even theological ways
• Stresses the intrinsic value of kids with developmental disabilities
• Reconceptualizes evangelism to adolescents with developmental disabilities, emphasizing hospitality and friendship.

chapter 1

Introduction

“Life Is Liturgy”

Disconnected

There is no way to enter a high school lunchroom as a forty-year-old without feeling like you are a visitor in a foreign culture. And you are. You don’t understand how the spaces have been defined, you don’t know the appropriate gestures or protocols for navigating the lunchroom, your clothing sets you apart as an outsider (especially the prominently placed “visitor” sticker), and the conversations have a rhythm and language to which you are not attuned. It is a loud, busy, and intimidating flurry of activity. Tables, too close together for comfort, are organized to hold sixteen and most tables seem to have a theme — kids who have interests in common sit together.

I couldn’t locate Edward. I saw where the special education class was seated, accompanied by one of their aides. There were three students and a teacher’s aide sitting at the end of one table near one of the three entryways into the lunchroom. At the far end of the table was another small group of students. The two groups didn’t interact with one another. I asked the aide where Edward usually sat and she responded that he usually sits somewhere else, with his friends. She assured me he had plenty of friends in his lunch period.

I found Edward sitting alone at one end of a table made for sixteen.

Asperger’s syndrome is a particularly challenging condition for kids who long to be connected to their peers. Edward is socially awkward enough that he has had a very difficult time engaging his peers. Most high schoolers can only talk about Halo¹ for so long and are not terribly impressed by the complex storylines from Edward’s homemade Bionicle YouTube videos. Furthermore, his excitement and enthusiasm about his chosen subject matter come across as aggression and quickly alienate his peers. As I sit down across from him, Edward opens, “This is a table for misfits — because I’m a misfit.” He is, unfortunately, socially aware enough to be able to discern his own standing in the lunchroom. He directs my attention to the interactions around him and explains, in a voice that is inappropriately loud for the task, that he sits alone because he has no friends. Students around us cannot help but hear the conversation, but nobody argues. They know that if they did choose to sit with him they would be overwhelmed by his effort to connect with them (by talking incessantly about his own interests).

Edward has a strong desire to be connected with his peers. Sadly, the game is rigged against him. If he has to navigate the complex social world of high school relationships to win friends, he will always sit alone, he will always be an outsider, and he will remain on the margins, disconnected. His inability to read facial expressions and posture, his difficulty detecting peers’ emotions or empathizing with them, combined with his limited range of age-appropriate interests translates into a devastating social deficit. I realized the moment I sat down with him that for Edward to have friends in high school, it would take an act of election by another student — a student who is spiritually mature enough to choose him outside of the usual social considerations.

I know Edward to be humorous, thoughtful, playful, and creative. I am not blind to the things that make his peers reject him; they simply don’t matter to me.

Edward has a developmental disability. As Special Education scholar Erik Carter describes it, a developmental disability is “a label shared by an incredibly diverse group of people who often experience substantial difficulties in several major life activities — such as mobility, self-care, language, socialization, learning, or independent living. For these individuals,” Carter continues, “their disabilities affect them cognitively and/or physically, and their need for support is expected to last throughout their lifetimes.”² Since nearly 20 percent of children are diagnosed with a developmental disability, that means: if you are committed to youth ministry then you need to consider what it means to minister to and with adolescents with developmental disabilities. A principled commitment to the idea of ministry with adolescents with developmental disabilities, “like-ing” the idea on your Facebook page, or believing in the value of it will not transform you or your congregation the way that participating in their lives as friends will. My purpose in writing this book is to consider the life experience of the nearly 20 percent of children under the age of eighteen who have a developmental disability, to draw out the profound consequences of this experience for ministry, and to promote an approach to ministry that accounts for their perspectives, faith responses, and witness.

This is a book about ministry and not about disability. Therefore, rather than dedicate space in this book to information about various disabilities (explaining etiologies, describing deficits, etc.) that can be found quite easily on the Internet, this book will promote a practice-centered model for ministry with adolescents and adolescents with developmental disabilities. I will attempt to support the following theses:

1. One faithful and effective way to minister to and with adolescents and adolescents with developmental disabilities is to create spaces³ through practice-centered ministry in which durable friendships can develop.

2. When it comes to bearing witness to God’s ongoing redemptive work in the world, nobody is impaired and they should not be disabled.⁴

3. Developing a proclamatory program (our program includes all of our activities over the course of the year that support the ministry) will help us to be more effective in reaching our friends with developmental disabilities and will increase our capacity to communicate the gospel more holistically.

Key Concepts of the Book

When in seminary I asked a professor what book I should read to develop an understanding of Karl Barth’s theology, she encouraged me to read Bruce McCormack’s Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909-1936.⁵ The title was almost enough to frighten me off. However, after consulting a theological dictionary (What is “realism” as opposed to “idealism”? What are “theological realism” and “critical realism”? What does he mean by “analogy” and “dialectic”?) and a Webster’s Dictionary (I was not attuned to academic lingo at that time) and after reading the introduction, I had a pretty good idea of what was going to follow. In the paragraphs below I will expound the title of this book, Amplifying Our Witness, and its key concepts in hopes of providing some direction for what follows. The words were carefully chosen to tie together my academic training as a missiologist and my practical experience of ministering to and with adolescents with developmental disabilities.

Amplifying Our Witness

This book is about the witness of the church and how a plurality of voices and perspectives enhances our understanding of God and our community’s witness to that God. The term “witness” (the Greek stem from which we get the word martyr) is 1. a person, 2. a testimony, and 3. a process of giving or bearing witness. The witnesses, their words and actions, point beyond themselves to the gracious action of God. Darrell Guder, who was a key figure in initiating the missional theology discussion, believes “witness” is a term that can comprehend the various aspects of a congregation’s participation in the ongoing mission of God. As he explains, “[Witness/marturia] serves as an overarching term drawing together proclamation (kerygma), community (koinonia), and service (diakonia). These are all essential dimensions of the Spirit-enabled witness for which the Christian church is called and sent.”⁶

If bearing witness is what the church is “called and sent” to do, as Guder suggests, then we should find it particularly troubling that the witness of adolescents with developmental disabilities is rarely included in the testimony of the church. We place so much emphasis on human agency, competency in verbal communication, and individual initiative that we forget that we bear the witness of another, or as missionary scholar Lesslie Newbigin phrased it, “It is not that they must speak and act, asking the help of the Spirit to do so. It is rather that in their faithfulness to Jesus they become the place where the Spirit speaks and acts.”⁷

While it is the Spirit who ultimately provides the power of the witness, we have a responsibility to participate in Christ’s prophetic action to the extent our capacities allow us by being, doing, and saying the witness.⁸ Adolescents with developmental disabilities have perspectives and experiences that can inform and contribute to the witness of the congregation. Too often, however, these gifts are marginalized or ignored. Our responsibility as partners with them is to amplify their witness in a number of ways, including offering them settings in which to use their gifts and making sure other people are aware of their contributions to the community of faith. By employing the word “amplify,” I am insisting that people with disabilities have something to share that needs a hearing, something that our communities and churches can’t do without.

Practice-Centered Ministry

The approach to ministry that I am advocating is practice-centered. This means that the curriculum for Christian discipleship is common participation in historic Christian practices like hospitality, forgiveness, prayer, friendship, honoring the body, etc. These practices are “Spirit-filled and embodied signs, instruments, and foretastes of the kingdom of God that Christian people participate in together over time to partake in, partner with, and witness to God’s redemptive presence for the life of the world in Jesus Christ.”⁹

In this book, I am arguing that by participating together with adolescents with developmental disabilities in Christian practices, especially the practice of friendship, we open up spaces where their faith and witness and ours will be nurtured and amplified.¹⁰ While the past two decades have seen a proliferation of literature on Christian practices, Craig Dykstra is certainly a doyen of the practices discussion, and my understanding of Christian practices is deeply influenced by his theology of Christian practices.¹¹ Dykstra draws on Alasdair MacIntyre’s conception of practices as explained in After Virtue and Edward Farley’s phenomenological theology.¹² Dykstra draws upon MacIntyre’s theory of practices to make the distinction between a notion of practice, even strategic and patterned actions, carried out by professional agents to create change in other persons using social-scientific theories outside of larger moral considerations and his notion of Christian practices that is grounded in a community of faith. A mechanical view of practice may appear “effective” or “efficient” but misses the transformative element of habitus, the central motivating and organizing ideal of the community, and the state and disposition of the soul, or, as Dykstra puts it, “profound, life-orienting, identity-shaping participation in the constitutive practices of Christian life.”¹³

There is another meaning of practice, argues Dykstra, which is a historically elongated, social, and communal way of responding to fundamental human conditions. For example, Christian friendship addresses, among other things, the fact that we are fundamentally communal beings, created to be in relationships. Any embodiment of the Christian tradition is contextual and participates in, modifies, and extends practices through which individuals and communities are able to realize goods that are internal to that tradition. In each new context, we learn more about what it means to be a friend. We learn more about the goods internal to friendship (intimacy, self-revelation, encounter of another) that are not available outside of such relationships. We recognize that there are also “goods” that are external to the practice of friendship (the relationship can be instrumental to any number of ends like achieving status, influence, or personal satisfaction).

To MacIntyre’s insights, Dykstra adds Farley’s appropriation of Edmund Husserl’s studies in phenomenology that tie the apprehensions of the realities of faith to a community. Farley acknowledges a nonrational knowledge, a prereflective, preconscious perceptivity that is brought into existence as it is mediated through participation in the Christian community. Whether or not one completely agrees with Farley’s argument, one can certainly agree that participation in a community of faith can have a transformative impact that may have more to do with intuition and impression than any cognitive appeal, and does not necessarily correspond to our intellectual or psychosocial development.¹⁴

Simply stated, practices like healing, hospitality, and Sabbath keeping are entrusted to us from our living historical traditions, and we shape them in the present to address our particular circumstances. Our practices persist in the present and are extended into the future because they find expression in social forms of embodiment. Our practices are universal in that they address fundamental human needs that are experienced across the globe, yet they are contextualized such that each practice is shaped to fit each culture. The practice of healing outside of the city in a sub-Saharan African country like Malawi, for example, while maintaining a family resemblance to the practice of healing in my home town of Williamsburg, Virginia, is textured and informed by the fact that it is practiced in a setting that includes a wider world of ancestral spirits, superstition, and witch doctors.¹⁵ Whether in Malawi or Virginia, however, the practice of healing addresses the issues of illness, frailty, and finitude.¹⁶ Finally, and most importantly for my argument, Christian practices have a transformational quality related to a spiritual reality such that participating in Christian practices puts one in a position to recognize, experience, and participate in God’s active presence for the world.

In Dykstra’s words, Christian practices are constitutive of “the kind of community life through which God’s presence is palpably felt and known” and “place us where we can receive a sense of the presence of God.”¹⁷ Participation in Christian practices opens the door for n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: “Life Is Liturgy”
• 2. Awakened to the Issues: Visio Dei
• 3. Affirming Presence: Imago Dei
• 4. Amplifying Our Witness: Missio Dei
• 5. Advocating an Approach: Opus Dei
• Epilogue: Taste and See That the Lord Is Good: Toward a Theology of Evangelism Informed by a Life Sharedwith Adolescents with Developmental Disabilities
• A Parable
• Bibliography
• Index