Disability, faith and church communities
This is a personal testimony reflecting on the experience of being a disabled person within faith communities which have been predominantly Baptist.
By Martin Hobgen
I have always used a wheelchair, since my parents were able to obtain one small enough for a non-toddler to sit in and manoeuvre independently. Using a wheelchair to move around is ‘normal’ for me and far easier than using the cumbersome steel-framed callipers that physiotherapists and doctors insisted that I used to ‘walk’. I gave up on ‘walking’ (at the speed of crawl) at about the age of eight years old when the time-consuming activity of walking began to impinge on the time I was able to use on gaining a good education. I normally use ‘walk’ as a metaphor for wheeling myself in a manual or electric wheelchair, as in ‘My wife and walked into town today.’
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I was fortunate that my parents and local GP, with the support of a far-sighted head-teacher, argued that I should attend the village primary school. Finding an accessible secondary school proved a greater challenge and resulted in our family having to move across the country. At both my primary and secondary schools I experienced some bullying, some arising from my use of a wheelchair and some arising from my being academically able. The schools managed to ensure I was included in most of the curriculum although I was not able to participate in sports and PE classes. Most, but not all, teachers were supportive of my presence. The only negative attitude came from my maths teacher who taught me throughout the school. It is ironic that on leaving school I studied Maths at University. As with finding a secondary school the search for an accessible and supportive University began in the lower sixth form, some months before my peers. I eventually gained a place at a Bath University not far from my parents’ home although I lived in halls throughout my course. It was while studying at University that I began to experience being accepted and included by my peers with little or no regard being paid to my use of a wheelchair. This experience was deepened very considerably by meeting fellow students who were Christians and I made a personal commitment in the autumn term of my second year.
My interest in Christianity had been awakened by the media coverage of the visits of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979 and England in 1982. I was fascinated by the huge crowds that gathered to attend the vast open-air services. The joyous and peaceful gatherings were a powerful contrast to the images of riots and recurrent violence between football supporters that usually filled the media.
I became a Christian while attending a three-day mission put on by the Christian Union, which was part of the UCCF organisation. This group of students welcomed me into their community and encouraged me to become part of a local church community in the city. My musical talents enabled me to join groups of musicians supporting the sung worship in both communities, I participated in and later helped lead a student small group and was actively involved in prayer ministry that was part of the weekly services at the low Anglican church I attended for a number of years. I was both baptised, by affusion, and confirmed while I attended this church. While on a University sandwich course placement I was actively involved in the music group and helped lead a small youth group in an independent evangelical church. It was during this time that I had a dramatic encounter with God while reading Psalm 139. This shaped my perspective on the nature of miraculous healing,
explored in a related article.
Following a gap-year, when I finally achieved my full independence, I did a PGCE course and became part of a flourishing local Anglican church in north Bristol. In this thriving church community I was once more involved in a music group, house group and met my future wife, Ruth. After getting married we briefly attended a Baptist church in Thornbury, a few miles north of Bristol, before moving to Swindon, where I worked for 6 years as an analyst programmer in the airline industry. We started to attend an Anglican church where my father-in-law had been the curate many years previously. Being patronised by the vicar meant that we quickly moved to the local Baptist church where we were warmly welcomed and quickly became involved in many aspects of church life.
Ruth and I soon became members of Upper Stratton Baptist Church. They are a closed membership church, requiring baptism by immersion as a pre-requisite of membership. Ruth had been baptised in the sea during a mission trip to Albania with my parents. The church accepted that I had only been baptised by affusion because my reliance on a wheelchair made immersion difficult, particularly as this was performed in a Anglican church with no baptistry. My baptism had also been immediately preceded by my public confession of faith through a short testimony. I was therefore welcomed into full membership by Upper Stratton Baptist church in Swindon. Ruth and I were actively involved in many aspects of the church community life and mission. When I received a very clear call to ordained Baptist ministry the church tested and supported my call. One aspect of this was through serving the church as an elder for a term prior to beginning my ministerial training at Bristol Baptist College.
Prior to beginning my time in Bristol, I had worshipped in a number of Baptist churches and preached in a few some as I tested my call to ministry. I only began to experience the range of attitudes of the wider Baptist family to disability and disabled people once I began my formal training as to become and accredited minister. Life in college was very inclusive and the only barriers I faced were due to physical access to different parts of the buildings. Some of these were overcome by the support of fellow students and members of staff. Ministerial students usually preached in local Baptist churches on a frequent basis. Some of these were larger congregations in pastoral vacancy or supporting students by providing opportunities to lead and preach. Many of the preaching opportunities were in smaller churches. Upon first visiting churches of all varieties there was sometimes an element of surprise that the visiting preacher was a wheelchair user. This might be expressed as being disappointed that I wasn’t going to preach from the pulpit or lead from the dais. The combined knowledge among the students of the local churches meant that I was never booked to preach in a very inaccessible building.
The settlement process towards the end of my time at college proved to be a challenging and frustrating experience. The process of students finding a position as minister in a local church is as far as I know unique to Baptist. As I prepared to leave Bristol the process was as follows
2: the student prepared a two-page profile answering three broad questions about their theological position and church experience. Some personal information is included at the end of the profile. The Regional Minister who is responsible for the settlement process wrote a covering recommendation and profiles were brought to a national settlement team meeting of Regional Ministers. They prayerfully discerned which profiles to send to which churches. The churches received the profiles on a monthly basis and contacted the minister or ministers who they wanted to initiate a discussion with. I felt strongly that my use of a wheelchair should not be mentioned in the covering letter or recommendation. From previous experience I knew that many people would read this information and set my profile aside. My use of a wheelchair was briefly mentioned at the end of my profile alongside indication that it didn’t not prevent me fulfilling the role of a minister. My profile was sent to in excess of 60 churches over a two-year period and I finally settled in a church in the Midlands a year after my peers. I utilised this delay to initiate an MA where I explored understandings of disability and church responses to disabled people. The issue of my use of a wheelchair was a recurrent aspect of subsequent periods when I was in the settlement process. When I removed any mention of my wheelchair from my profile I found a significant rise in the number of churches contacting me to initiate a discussion. My use of a wheelchair was always disclosed and discussed early in these discussions.
Once in ministry I found that attitudes were much more inclusive and empowering. This range from within the local church congregation, among the local churches who maintained good ecumenical relationships, with the local community that the church connected with more significantly during my pastorate, the local Baptist association and within the wider setting of Baptists Together. Within these diverse church communities I found very few barriers, other than some physical ones, that excluded me from full participation. There were some occasions when members of the local community, service providers and organisations that the church worked with, expressed surprise that a disabled person was a church minister. Once a relationship had been formed then my use of a wheelchair faded into the background.
I moved out of pastoral ministry after 12 years in the church that I had settled in from college in order to pursue academic study examining the inclusion of physically disabled people in Baptist Church communities. This research has drawn attention to the difference between my experience, which has mostly been positive and one of inclusion, and the experience of many disabled people in many different church traditions, which have been negative and sometimes of exclusion. This has motivated my desire to raise the profile of disabled peoples’ participatory inclusion in Baptist church communities through the work of the Baptist Union Disability Justice Hub.
1 The language used to refer to disability and disabled people is the subject of another article on this website.
2 The process has since changed significantly but those changes could be the subject of another article in themselves.
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