A Church for Everyone?

Script of Programme:

Please note: This script may not exactly reflect the transmission. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors.

Opening Announcement: Now time for Sunday Worship, this week with members of the Christian community who are autistic.

Hannah: The most common reaction. I get to my struggles as an autistic. Is that “it can't be that bad” or “you should just get on with it”.

PIERS: I'm sensitive to sound which means that I hear everything loudly and getting everyone to be quiet. Wouldn’t be reasonable, but I think my place in the body of Christ is not dependent on physically attending church. It is when I'm often too tired to cope with being around people and wearing myself out.

Rebecca: It was OK when the language of the service was what I'd been brought up with, was familiar and I knew what was coming and I could focus. Now there's an even wider variety of words and used and often. I don't know what is coming, get mixed up.

Stewart: Good morning, and welcome to Sunday Worship, I’m Stewart Rapley.

I wonder how you relate to those comments? They reflect the church-going experiences of some of the roughly 700,000 autistic people that the National Autistic Society estimate to be in the UK.

Today we explore the stories and thoughts of an often extraordinarily gifted segment of the population - whose needs are frequently misunderstood or even disregarded. These are people who are neurodivergent and in this particular case autistic.

MUSIC: All are welcome – Marty Haugen 

Hannah: I’m Hannah. Being autistic is about having a brain that 'processes information to create meaning’ in a different way than for most.

One impact is that it often makes social situations complicated and sensory experiences uncomfortable or even painful because of an information overload. This can be when dealing with people we don't know, like when we share ‘the Peace’, or when ‘mingling’ in unstructured events like coffee after Church. Some will also find various lighting, noise levels, or smells troubling.

Most of us would say that this is the way God has made us. There is no need for us to be healed and we do not expect to be ‘cured of our autism’ in the life to come. We simply need to be listened to, understood and taken seriously as we are. When given the opportunity to do so, autistic people can often make a distinctive and valuable contribution to the body of Christ, perhaps sharing a different perspective on God or some other aspect of faith and worship. We CAN engage in meaningful worship. We can and WANT to participate in the life of the church – we just need the chance to do so!

Sue: Dear father, thank you for loving us. And always being there for us as we share together in this time of worship, we pray that we would know the closeness of your presence with us. Bless us we pray and help us to see more clearly love you more dearly and follow you n=more nearly in the days to come in Jesus name amen

MUSIC: All are welcome – Marty Haugen 

Stewart: . All the voices you will hear today are from the autistic community and are part of a national online group called A Church for Everyone. We are not professional communicators and some of us find it quite hard to come out of our shells. Being online can sometimes be the most comfortable place for us. We hope you enjoy being included in our worship together, as we share some of the joys and the difficulties of being autistic. I was once introduced to a stranger as ‘This is Stewart, He’s a peripheral member of our church’. I’m not a peripheral member but perhaps that’s how some people see me, based on how many times I may attend a service.

As I reflect on Jesus Christ, the founder and perfector of our faith, I see someone who both understands what it is to be an ‘outsider’ and also accepts and loves me as I am.

Open The Eyes of My Heart – Christopher Duffley

Stewart: That was Christopher Duffley a musician and worship leader in the United States, who is not only autistic but partially sighted- using his gift in church.

One thing we can be sure of is that God understands the full range of human experience including that of autistic people. Christians look to Jesus and his experience of abandonment on the cross as encapsulating so much that is difficult in human experience. But our reading this morning – which we’ll hear in two parts - comes from the writings of St Paul, as he reflects on what it means to be part of the community of faith. Catherine will now read to us from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians Chapter 12.

Catherine For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - . Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to brink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?

MUSIC: Make me a Channel of your peace – Katherin Jenkins

Autism Discussion:

MUSIC: Oh Lord Hear My Prayer – Taize

Hannah Franceska in our discussion told us how she finds tradition and structure helpful in her worship with God. She took us on a tour of Coventry Cathedral – a place that heightens her sense of communion with God as an autistic person

AUDIO: Franseska at the cathedral

MUSIC All my hope on God is founded – St Martin’s singers

Grant: My name’s grant mcKaskill, I hold the Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis. I was diagnosed as autistic, as are a number of the students, who ar autistic or neruo divergent.

The image of the church as the body of Christ, which we find in 1 Corinthians 12, is one of the best-known representations in the New Testament of unity and diversity. On one level, this concrete image of a single entity with lots of interdependent parts simply depicts the way that different gifts and abilities complement each other within a community of faith. It’s a nice image. But when it is read in the context of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, other levels of significance can be recognized that are a little more unsettling. Paul is actually very critical in this letter of the way that the church in Corinth continues to treat some people as more important or more valuable than others, often because they conform to a particular template of social expectation or possess some qualities that are widely cherished in their society: they are smart, erudite, articulate, wealthy. They say the right things in the right way and are in with the right crowd. They are, if you like, the “right kind of people.”

The body image allows Paul to engage critically with these kinds of attitudes. Then, as now, people tended to treat some parts of their bodies as more important than others, usually in ways shaped by social values about beauty. We lavish them with attention, and put them up on display, while not being particularly concerned about the bits of the body that are invisible. The parts of the body that society doesn’t treat as beautiful—the bits that we may even consider quite ugly—we cover over, hide away, or simply forget about. Not many celebrities are worshipped because of the quality of their liver (not knowingly at least …). But if the body was nothing but perfect smiles, great skin and good proportions, it wouldn’t be a body; it wouldn’t be a living creature. For it to be alive, it needs to have difference within itself, and all those bits that get the public attention actually need the bits that are invisible if they are to be healthy. So, Paul uses the body image to say to those who are treated as most important: “you need the bits that are different to you.” And, building on that, he says: “if you make those parts suffer, by not giving them the honour they ought to have, it is ultimately you who will suffer. If one part of the body suffers, every part suffers.”

Brother Sister let me serve you – Daily Service Singers

Grant: If we are honest, most churches today still value people who conform to a particular kind of social template and marginalise people who are different. The sorts of people who usually form the core of church leadership, or are regarded as the heart of the church, tend to be the same sort of people who are idealized by society. And the cultural environment of the church is often constructed around the preferences of such people, with a tacit presumption that “this is what people will like.” Autistic people are generally not valued very highly: at best we are labelled “eccentric,” but are often described as “difficult,” “awkward,” or even just “different.” Of course, we may have learned how to mask our differences and may be very good at performing a kind of normality. But that’s not who we really are; it’s a tiring act to keep up and it stops us from doing what we are good at. We can also find the sensory environment of worship to be exhausting: loud worship music, crammed and noisy spaces, bright lights, the smell of deodorant and hair product. These things that neurotypical people might like and might find energising can often be tiring for us to process. As a result, we may not want to be there as much as others do and that can contribute to our marginalization.

This experience of church and worship really mirrors what we deal with in the wider world. Autistic people are often treated as deficient or abnormal, as somehow less than really human. The medical model of autism is often explicit in using this kind of language, since it identifies “normality” with the social or sensory profile that most people have, simply because they represent the majority. That’s not necessarily a very good way to think about anything, since it results in any minority profile being labelled as “abnormal.” That leads to some pretty awful stereotypes about minorities and you don’t need to think for very long to come up with a list of negative portrayals of autistic people in film and television. Things are beginning to change, but slowly. What we experience in the church is much the same as what we experience in the world.

And that’s what Paul is critical of. A community of faith should represent something different and should champion a willingness to see difference as something given by God, built into the way that God has made the world and built into the process of redemption. And not only that: a faith that centres on a crucified saviour—someone disabled in the absolute sense by society, put to death as the ultimate outsider—should be naturally wary of societal values and careful not to allow them to determine its own culture.

But one of the striking things about the New Testament letters is how much space is taken up by criticism of churches and their practices, even when their essential commitment to God is affirmed. This ought to caution us against any presumption that churches will automatically be safe or welcoming spaces, characterized by the inclusive love of the gospel. We may think that we embody God’s love, and may superficially appear to do so, but look a little deeper and we will often find people who are undervalued, marginalized or even excluded because they don’t conform to a template of social expectations. Autistic people are just one category for whom this is true. The real challenge is this: once churches and other communities of faith recognize that this is happening in our midst, what do we do about it? Churches will never be perfect, but we should be committed to an ongoing process of repentance, of addressing our failings.

How Deep the Fathers Love For Us – Angel Morgan

So much need of prayer and reflection to respond to those thoughts. Jonathan will lead us in prayer then Franceska will read the Coventry litany of reconciliation

Jonathan: Father may the church be a church where those who are autist, are valued and loved, without prejudice and judgmental attitudes and the difficulties we face are address .father may the church be a place where those who are autistic feel included, and made to feel they belong.

Franceska: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,

Father forgive.

The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,

Father, forgive.

The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,

Father, forgive.

Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,

Father, forgive.

Our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,

Father, forgive.

The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,

Father, forgive.

The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,

Father, forgive.

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

AUDIO: Mark and James prayer together

Music – Jesus Loves Me – Rosemary Seimans

Sue: You are a chosen people a royal priesthood, a holy nation, god’s special possession you are one god and you bring together what is scatted and mean that is broken, unite us that we may be one family of your children bind up all our wounds and heal our spirit that we may be renewed as disciples of Jesus Christ our savour and lord and may God who gives patience and encouragement give you a spirit of unity to live in harmony as you follow Jesus Christ so that with one voice you may glorify the God and father of our lord Jesus Christ and the blessing of God almighty the father the Son and the holy spirit rest upon you now and always . Amen

Music – Jesus Loves Me – Rosemary Seimans