Lausanne World Pulse – A Forgotten Barrier: Attitudes toward Disability

By David W. Anderson

Such misconceptions shape a person’s thinking, causing him or her to see the disabled as personally responsible for his or her condition. A stigma becomes attached to the individual or the entire family, while at the same time elevating temporarily able-bodied persons (at least in their own mind), allowing them to justify rejecting, neglecting, or even eliminating the disabled. Persons with disabilities are pushed to the margins of society. This is exactly opposite to the approach of Jesus, who frequently broke through barriers and freely interacted with, even welcomed, persons with disability during his earthly ministry.

Based as they are on misinformation, these attitudes about disability and the disabled reflect fear, embarrassment, guilt, anger, prejudice, or insensitivity. These lead to equating disability with something negative or evil—a valuation which easily attaches to the individual, so that the disabled person is seen as negative, evil, incomplete, unworthy of living, or someone to be ignored or discarded.

These attitudinal barriers also lead to blindness on the part of the Church to the spiritual needs of persons and families affected by disability. In African contexts, there may even be a blindness to the existence of disabled people. Informed of the intent of an indigenous ministry to reach out to people with disabilities, one village chief responded that there were no disabled people in his “realm.” However, when he came to the church through which the outreach was being done, he found himself among ninety-five people from the immediate area with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities.

The Church Creating Community
The role of the Church should be to create communities in which people who are not alike can be found living and working together.² This will allow the Church to assume its rightful position in shaping culture, and to become a visible expression of God’s love for all humanity through constructive protest against the social conditions faced by men and women with disabilities.

The role of the Church should be to create communities in which people who are not alike can be found living and working together.

The Church must seek to establish reconciled and reconciling communities which not only work toward restoration of right relationships between God and humankind, but also toward right relationships between individuals—all genders, all races, all cultures, all social strata, and all ability levels. Ministering to and with persons who have a disability necessitates a proactive approach by kingdom people with the same compelling spirit of which Paul spoke in 2 Corinthians 5:14, and the same urgency with which the servant was sent out to compel the poor, crippled, blind, and lame to come to the great banquet (Luke 14:21).

The Bible asserts the lordship of Jesus over the forces and divisions which bring enmity between people (Ephesians 2:11-18). Hence, Christians should engage the culture, bringing to bear on culture and social issues God’s transforming truth and the presence of Jesus, and leading the movement away from ignorance, insensitivity, and indifference toward acceptance and reconciliation, actively seeking to remove barriers which exclude disabled persons from all aspects of society. 

This must be done wisely and openly—acknowledging that church and culture are equally guilty of having neglected the disabled. There can be no escaping Jesus’ example and teaching in the parables about reaching out to “the least of these” (Matthew 25) and of including in the gospel invitation those whom society (religious and civil) has tended to reject (cf. Luke 14:15-24).

In seeking to meet the needs of all humanity, the Church of Christ must go beyond humanitarian objectives alone to minister holistically, addressing spiritual and relational needs as well as physical and social needs.³ For the Church to be salt and light in society (Matthew 5:13-14), it must speak out against any form of discrimination and injustice, especially against those who cannot defend themselves.

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Dr. David W. Anderson is president of Crossing Bridges, Inc., a ministry focused on disability issues and the Church. In 2007, he retired from Bethel University (St. Paul, Minnesota, USA), where he was professor and director of graduate programs in special education. He has lectured on biblical studies, disability ministry, and special education in Cameroon, Kenya, Ghana, Haiti, England, and Ukraine.