Video Transcript: Ten Dimensions of Belonging

Anika - Hello. I'm Anika Minnima, a ready for life student at Calvary, and I really  like to welcome to the January Series, 2019, 

Amanda - and my name is Amanda Potts, a senior studying speech pathology  from Illinois. And we would also like to give a special welcome to three of our 52  remote webcast sites, Bradenton, Florida, Portland, Oregon and Marquette,  Michigan. 

Anika - And now, will you please pray with me, dear Lord, thank you for this day, all the people here today. Thank you for Calvin college and all the speakers of  the January series, thank you for Eric and his information he's about to deliver.  And we ask that the world and our hearts that inclusion may become a part in  our daily lives. Please our Please bless our time together and that we glorify  Your name in Jesus name, we pray amen. 

Amanda - And now John Whitley, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian  worship, will introduce our guest. 

John - Dr Eric Carter is the Cornelius Vanderbilt professor of special education  at Vanderbilt University, the recipient of several distinguished awards for his  teaching and research, author of a wonderful book, including people with  disabilities in faith communities, and we are so pleased to say 2019 recipient of  a vital worship teacher scholar grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian  worship here on campus. Dr Carter is a passionate teacher scholar and  advocate for inclusive community life, and a collaborator in a dynamic network  of national leaders eager to advance this vision, a network that includes several  Calvin College alumni and faculty and our own philosophy professor, Kevin  Tempe, who is hosting Dr Carter and several other presenters on campus this  week for a conference entitled disability and social structures. Professor Carter  will be available in the West lobby of the Covenant Fine Arts Center following  this presentation, Calvin College is deeply grateful to Howard Miller for  underwriting today's presentation. Please now welcome Professor Eric Carter, 

Eric - well, good afternoon. It's an honor to be back at Calvin College and in the  company of so many people who care so deeply about creating communities  where everyone can flourish together, where people with and without disabilities  can live and learn and love and serve and worship together, and where those on the margins are brought to the middle and the stranger is made a friend. I'm just  so pleased that disability is part of this January Series conversation, and the  topic for my lecture today will be on the church and people with disabilities  incomplete without you in my short time with you today, what I hope to do is  highlight what we're learning through our research with young people with 

disabilities and their families about what it means to be a community that's  marked by belonging, and for members of our community who sometimes  encounter wounding as much as they encounter welcome. This is a  conversation that matters so very much. And although my focus will be on  individuals with labels like Down syndrome and autism and intellectual and other developmental disabilities, I think what you'll find is that this conversation about  belonging is really about what it means to make sure that anyone finds a  community of belonging. So I want to challenge you to think about the  communities that you care most about and you're part of, your churches, your  schools, your neighborhoods, your workplaces, this campus, and think about  how these dimensions of belonging might play out here in this community. But I  want to start by just sharing a little historical perspective on the field. Some of  you are deeply involved in work around disability. For others of you, this is a  brand new conversation, but I want to take you back in time a little bit and give a sense of the history of this work. And I think actually my own life provides a little  bit of a sense of a time frame for this change that we've seen that's been so  dramatic. Now I'm 45 years old. I didn't think that was very old until my son,  when we were curling up with him in bed at night to put him down, asked my  wife and I Dad, what was life like in the 1900s we got kind of angry, and we  realized, oh, okay, but I was born in 1973 and the time I was born, most  individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities were wholly excluded  from public education and so many other community activities. Imagine each of  these circles reflects a different community member. And you see, there are  holes in our community. And then even as those early advocacy movements  started to take hold in the 1970s and we began to advance legislation and  policy. So often, the opportunities that emerged for people with disabilities were  offered entirely in segregated context, entirely apart from anyone else who didn't have a similar label. Then throughout the 1980s and throughout the 1990s those were the years I was attending elementary school and high school and then into  college. Our pursuits as a field began to change even further. Our work focused  on integrating people with disabilities into the same schools they would have  attended if they didn't have a disability. And this was a time of incredible  progress, but what it most often meant was students in separate classrooms,  near, but not really among other people who didn't have disabilities near, but not  really, really among and most recently, I think even today, we've talked about the efforts to invest in full inclusion of people with disabilities, inclusion in the same  classes and clubs and cafeterias as their classmates without disabilities, in the  same workplaces, in the same community programs, in the same  neighborhoods, even in the same colleges, moving from among to with do you  see the very different portraits of community reflected in these images? I could  pause for the whole hour unpacking each one of these, but I share them now for three very particular reasons. The first is, it turns out, this isn't the history of our 

field. This is actually a portrait of the present right now. This reflects the  landscape in communities and states all around the country, where you'll see  exclusion and segregation and integration and inclusion occurring right  alongside one another. And second, these are portraits, not just in our schools  and in our workplaces, but they're also portraits that play out in our churches as  well. And third, the reason I share this progression of images because if you  think about it as a journey, I don't think we've yet arrived at our destination. If  you spend time talking to young people with intellectual and developmental  disabilities and their families about the things families about the things that  matter most. They talk about wanting to be much more than just integrated or  even simply included. They talk about wanting to belong. We all want to belong  beyond integration and even further than inclusion is belonging. And how would  that be depicted? I'm not really sure. I think it means somehow, we  fundamentally come to see each other in different ways, not as the ins and the  outs, not as the members and the strangers, as the labelers and the ones who  are labeled, but as a single community, diverse each of inestimable worth,  inestimable worth, but equal or at another level. I think it also means that we do  much more than just share space. We actually share lives together. We enter  into relationships with one another. We're not just co located, but we remain  involved in each other's lives the other six days of the week after the  benediction, there's an important difference between inclusion and belonging.  It's the difference between being present and having a real presence. It's the  difference between making room for someone when they arrive and missing  them when they fail to arrive. It's the difference between welcoming someone's  presence and actually aching for their absence. And it's that last destination that  you see on your screen, this place of belonging, that I want to spend most of my time with you today. How might our churches become communities of belonging  for people with disabilities and their families, and what does it even mean to  belong? Well, you could reflect on that in your own lives. Think about the  communities that you're part of, the churches you're part of, the neighborhoods,  whatever groups you're part of. What are the things that would tell you that you  really do belong in those communities? It's one of those things that when we  don't belong, we feel it viscerally, but it's harder to pinpoint what that means.  Well, that's a question that's cut across the work of my colleagues and I for the  last 20 years through our research at Vanderbilt and elsewhere, as we strive to  foster belonging in our schools and in our workplaces, in our neighborhoods,  and yes, even in our churches. What will tell us that we've arrived and what are  the landmarks along the way that we can point to that tell us we're moving in the right directions? And so that's what I want to offer you, some answers that  emerge from a multi year research project where we've partnered with nearly  500 young people with intellectual disabilities and autism and their families to  learn about their Faith Journeys and the things that help them feel like belong in 

their faith they belong in their faith communities. And out of those conversations, 10 different dimensions of belonging have emerged. Let's think closely to what  these families and individuals shared with us. They said, we feel like we belong  

when we're present, when we're invited, when we're welcomed, when we're  known, when we're accepted, when we're supported, when we're cared for,  when we're befriended, needed and loved I'm going to spend my time walking  through each of those 10 dimensions, challenging you to think about the  communities you're part of and the extent to which they reflect an investment in  these 10 different dimensions of belonging. But I think you'll notice a couple  things right off the bat, belonging isn't about location, which is often what  integration and inclusion focus on, where people spend their time. It's much  more about posture than it is about place. And belonging is much more likely to  be fostered through personal relationships than simply starting a new program  or ministry. And I hope you'll see as I walk through these that belonging is  fostered through ordinary gestures, gestures you know already know how to do  much more than extraordinary responses. So let's begin with presence, because belonging always begins with presence. And yet in so many communities, the  principal barrier to someone feeling like they belong is simply the absence of  people with disabilities from worship and service and learning and other aspects that make up congregational life. It's really hard to feel like you belong from the  outside, and I should emphasize here that the absence of people with  disabilities from your church is not reflective of the absence of people with  disabilities from your local community. There's 60 million Americans with  disabilities. That's about 19% of any community, one in five members of any  community and about 3% of any community has labels like autism or Down  syndrome or intellectual disabilities. They are numbers that cut across every  single demographic group, racial, ethnic, economic, geographic. So I know it  was not in the program that I'm going to ask you to do some math, but I want  you to do some math. Think about the community that you're part of, what's 1/5  of Holland, Michigan or Kalamazoo, what's 1/5 of Frankenmuth or Wyoming.  And here we are in Grand Rapids. A million people reside in this community.  That means there are nearly 200,000 people with disabilities, about 25,000  children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities call this place home. And so you start to think about that biblical question, who's my neighbor?  And you start to come up with quite a different answer. It includes people with  disabilities. Now I know as soon as I mentioned math, most of you disconnected in this room and online. So let me make the point in a different way. Sometimes  these statistics feel a little bit too abstract to move us. So I actually rented a  satellite for this event, which was quite expensive to do, and I'm zooming in on  where we are right now. What if we left this building and walked together into the communities that surrounded this campus or the communities that surrounded  your local church, and we started to just kind of knock on doors throughout any 

community. I'll just pick one here, sort of at random. If we were to go door to  door in any particular community and knock on doors, we'd find that one out of  every three households whose door we knocked on includes a member who  identifies as having a disability, it might be these houses. Now I might have  pulled up your neighborhood and you're like, Well, I don't know if that fits, but it's for illustration purposes, right? So when we think about our communities that are filled with people with disabilities, how do we make sure that our congregations  are filled with people with disabilities as well? And that's just one neighborhood  that I zeroed in on people with disabilities are present in our communities, but  are they present in our churches? And I park here because most of the available data that I'm familiar with and that we collect suggests that ministry, apart from  people with disabilities, is the dominant ministry model across the country.  Consider just a sampling of the statistics from our research and my colleagues,  more than half of adults with intellectual disabilities in the United States have not been connected to a religious service or any kind of spiritual practice in the prior  month, more than half of parents tell us that they've kept their child with  disabilities from participating in religious activities because There just wasn't  support provided. Nearly three quarters of teenagers who would love to be part  of a youth group in their local church don't have that opportunity, and we find  that less than one in five congregations are said to offer supports related to  respite or family support or inclusion in their religious education programs for  people with disabilities. What are the things that are standing in the way of  presence of people in our faith communities. Is it barriers of awareness or  attitude, barriers of program access or something else? You know, it used to be  that the primary or barrier to getting into any congregation was architecture. We  used to build our churches historically without people with disabilities in mind. I  collect a lot of weird things. One of them is pictures of the most inaccessible  churches around the world. This is one in Germany built into the side of the  mountain, a quite beautiful one out in the middle of I don't know where or how  you get there, a church in Italy that has taken inaccessibility to new heights  literally, and the most inaccessible congregation I think in the world is actually in  East Eastern Europe. It's technically a monastery, right? But you get the point. I  think actually there's a ladder that kind of goes up to it, right? These pictures  always get the Chuckle that they just got here, because they're a caricature. But  I wonder if subtler barriers send the same message. What do our buildings say  about our theology? What do those steps say the pulpit that someone can't get  to, the curriculum that some kids just can't participate in, the classroom that's  inaccessible does where and how we choose to gather as a community  sometimes suggest that we're thinking about our community just a bit too  narrowly, even if it's inadvertent. I've always loved this quote by Ed Wood. He  says, If shut ins can go to Walmart, but not your church, they're shut out, they're  not shut in. And there's a really important lesson there. What if the rest of our 

community is far more accessible and welcoming than our faith community.  What a challenge for us to think about how we push beyond prevailing practices. So the point of reflection is to think about what stands in the way of presence. If  presence is a barrier to belonging, presence is the baseline for belonging, but  it's really just the starting point. It's not the destination. It reflects ministry among  people with disabilities, but we're called to press deeper and deeper in this  space. Well, in a lot of churches, increasing presence is just going to require  extending some new invitations. And this was the second dimension of  belonging that we learned from families. It was the notion of being invited. And  belonging begins with a personal invitation to be sought out, to actually be  pursued. When we're not intentional about reaching deeply into our  communities, we inadvertently leave people out. As one pastor reflected, it's not  that we deliberately excluded people with disabilities. In fact, we weren't  deliberate at all, and it's that is what was the problem. So as congregations, I've  kind of noticed we like to proclaim that we are welcoming. We do that on our  websites, our church signs and our outreach materials, goodness. We even do it on our coffee mugs, right? And that's probably worthwhile, but we presume that  proclamation is sufficient. Everyone is welcomed. But there's quite a big  difference between an announcement and an invitation, and that's important to  recognize here, an invitation is very personal. An announcement is not an  invitation says, I'm actually thinking about you. Specifically, an announcement  always leaves open the possibility of that asterisk or that footnote, that  unspoken qualifier that makes someone wonder whether you really mean me  when you say you're a place of welcome and hospitality. And I emphasize that  because there have been far too many asterisks in our proclamations of  welcome. For many people with disabilities and their families, that statement of  a warm welcome has not always been honored, and so know that your  announcements about your hospitality may not resonate with families who've  been excluded in the past. We were struck in one of our studies when we found  that nearly one out of three parents said they had left their place of worship  because their son or daughter with developmental disabilities had not been  welcomed or included one in three families. So perhaps the call is both to  announce and also to invite together. I do think that the language and the  imagery and the messages that you incorporate on your websites and your  other outreach materials are important. They do send a cue to families and  individuals that you really are thinking about them when you talk about your  community and you describe it as a place of welcome and hospitality. But again,  it's those active, personal invitations that are going to be so powerful for families. Third, we heard from individuals and families about the power of being  welcomed. And what was interesting is they weren't talking about what people  said to them when they walked in the building. They're talking about how they  felt in that community. It's not the host who determines what's welcoming, it's the

guest who determines that. And even though attitudes have changed  dramatically over the last few decades in society regarding disability, there are  still so many people who are uncertain about what to say or what to do. They're  hesitant or reluctant or uncertain about what to what not to say or what not to  do. And when we feel that uncertainty, that almost always leads to avoidance,  doesn't it? When we don't know what to say or we're worried about what to say,  we just step out of the picture. Well, when people go over. Looked or  unacknowledged, it stopped coming. So what does hospitality look like for  people with developmental disabilities and their families? It's pretty ordinary. It  means greeting people when they arrive, introducing them to others, drawing  them into conversations, inviting them to other church events, inviting them to be part of your small group, asking them to go out for lunch, and noticing when  they're not there, and following up to find out why. Those are the sort of ordinary  actions that families in our project said. One family said we just felt like we were  wanted. The principal requirement here is not having disability expertise. You  don't need a PhD. You don't be have to be a professor in special education, and  you definitely don't delegate the work of welcoming to your hospitality  committee. This is everyone's call in the congregation. But there are times when it can be helpful to get a little guidance on what language to use, or etiquette, or  things like that, about how to extend a warm reception. What do you do when  you meet someone who has complex communication challenges or behaves in  kind of unusual ways, a little bit of guidance can be sometimes helpful there.  And the great thing is, there are so many denominational and national and  regional ministries that are here to come alongside you and give you the kind of  resources and guidance you might need there to be more confident and  comfortable in those roles, not to mention people who are part of your church  who work in disability fields or in special education or local disability agencies  that would love to help you widen your welcome to people with disabilities.  Fourth, we talked a lot with families and heard from them about the aspect of  belonging that involves being known as Christians, we called to welcome the  stranger, aren't we, but people are not supposed to remain the stranger for very  long. They're supposed to move from stranger to friend. And yet people with  intellectual and developmental disabilities so often find themselves in the role of  perpetual stranger. They're known about, but they're not known personally. So  what we heard from families is that whether their sons and daughters are known was important, but what they really parked on was how their sons and daughters were known, not first and foremost by their labels, but by their names, and not  solely by their struggles, but also by their strengths and gifts and passions.  Some of you are professionals who work in the disability service system, and  you're very familiar with the language and definitions we use to talk about  disability, almost always in terms of what people cannot do and struggle to do. I  put a couple definitions up on your screen. You'll notice they're not in your 

handouts, because I don't want you to write them down and I don't want you to  commit them to memory. I just want to point out where we park on so often when we think about a disability, right, what an odd way to know someone, what an  incomplete way to define someone, and how prone we are to mislabel people.  And so when a church considers the question, how do we welcome people with  autism into our faith community, or a youth pastor thinks about, how do I really  include someone with an intellectual disability in our youth programs? And all  they have to work from is this kind of image that makes for a really hard  introduction, and I just don't think there's this place for that kind of labeling within our congregations. How we come to know people really does matter, and what if we made at least as much of an investment in understanding people in terms of  their gifts and their passions and their strengths and positive qualities that they  bring to relationships and bring to communities, the things that remind us of just  how indispensable they are to communities, not how incapable they are. In  some context, can we think about young people with developmental disabilities,  first and foremost, in terms of their strengths? That should evoke an amen or an  absolutely we can right? So when we talk with parents in our studies, they  absolutely can. We surveyed about 500 families, parents of adolescents, 13 to  21 who had children with intellectual disability and autism, and we asked them  not about what's wrong or what the challenges are with their kids, but the  strengths and positive traits, the extent to which their child exhibited qualities  like kindness and humor and gratitude and empathy and courage and optimism.  And there's a great scale if you don't know if you possess those traits, I'm glad  to administer it to you after the talk, but the portrait that emerged from these  families was very different to that deficit based view that I just put up on your  screen. The blue bar that will pop up is the percentage of parents who said  that's a lot like my son or daughter. 93% of families said my son or daughter is  happy and filled with joy. My child enjoys life and is thankful for life's simple  pleasures. My child has a great sense of humor. My child is thoughtful and  helpful to others. My child is quick to demonstrate care for other people, and is  bothered or concerned or upset when someone else is uncomfortable or  distressed. Is filled with empathy. Right? My child's courageous bounces back  quickly. My son or daughter does not try to retaliate or get back at others who've hurt them. And remembering that this is a study of parents of adolescence, only  half said my child doesn't lose their temper, and I don't believe that half actually,  but you get the point, right? Can we find a place for people with those strengths  in our congregations. How many churches can find a place for someone known  for their gratitude and their empathy and their kindness? How many people  would love to develop a friendship with someone who's funny or happy and  thoughtful? How many businesses would be quick to hire someone if they knew  they were known for their persistence and their joy and their kindness. For those of you who are pastors, how many of you would love to have a congregation 

filled with people who exhibit those traits? Right extend some new invitations.  How we know people matters, and we as the church can come to know people  in an entirely different light, through an entirely different lens that takes us to the  fifth dimension, which was to be accepted. And real Acceptance comes actually  through being known personally, not just being known about the families we talk  to, talk about their child, being welcomed without condition, treated like family,  embraced for all of who they were, and even though attitudes have changed  dramatically over the last couple decades in society. They still those less  accepting attitudes still permeate our culture. They still permeate our church.  When we asked parents to share their perspective on the extent to which their  current congregation, the one they go to, was accepting of their son or daughter  with disabilities, only a little more than half strongly agreed that church leaders  really accepted their child. A little less than half strongly agreed that other  members of the congregation did right. The other thing I collect, it's a more  disheartening one, is those statements that we overhear that are just these  reminders of prevailing attitudes. Why is he part of this class? If we don't know,  he'll get anything out of it. None of us are trained to work with those particular  children. The most disheartening, Emma doesn't really understand the meaning  of communion. I'm not sure she should really participate. Is that really the bar for taking communion? And how many of us might actually be excluded if that was  but that's another talk for another day. So I think churches can really invest in  thinking about promoting acceptance. That might be a disability inclusion  awareness Sunday that you do, or thinking about how you embed sort of  content into your religious education curriculum. Those can be ways that sort of  are formally promoting greater acceptance. And I think there have a place as a  part of our portfolio of investments. But again, it's personal investment in  someone's life that is really the most powerful way to change attitudes, not  through information, but through relationships, because when you step into  someone's life, all of your preconceived ideas about who they are get  overturned pretty quickly. Right now, I want to emphasize because I assume that some of you might be church leaders here in this room or streaming online, how  important it is what happens or what's communicated from the pulpit in terms of  promoting acceptance. And I understand a lot of you come from very different  religious traditions, and so some of you are going to struggle more with this than others, but let me make a few suggestions. You're in pretty good shape in your  church. If you've got a pastor who's completely unfazed when someone answers aloud his rhetorical questions in the middle of the sermon, that's a pretty good  sign. Who designates the entire sanctuary a no shush zone. You are not allowed to turn and shush someone. If you've got a pastor who, instead of sending a  person who's making a little noise to the cry room, instead says, let's take the  people who can only worship in total silence and send them to the cry room. And the rest of us who are okay with a little noise can be out here. That flips, sort of 

where the real barrier is, doesn't it? The pastor who doesn't require you to  master all points on a sermon to be able to come back to the sanctuary next  week. The person who says we're willing to try things a little bit different if it  brings someone else into community, I can share with you in the Q and A if you  want some of what we're learning about how theological schools are preparing  pastors, but we've got a lot of work there to do as well. Six the individuals and  families that we spoke with needed support, and sometimes that support had to  be substantial. I think lots of congregations take steps to ensure that anyone  who wants to be part of their church is able to do so, whether that's through  childcare, helping with transportation, financial support, connecting families to  small groups do those things for families impacted by disability. But also think  about the more individualized and intentional ways you can support families.  This is not a place for presumption. This is a place to invite input. We found that  almost half of all parents of children with intellectual and developmental studies  have never been asked the best way to support their son or daughter in  congregational life. So ask the questions, what could we do to make Sunday  morning the best day of the week for your child? How can we support your  family to be part of all we do in and through this congregation? I don't know what their answers will be, but ask those questions I can share from our research.  When we've done this with 500 families, we've seen some themes that have  emerged from these congregate conversations. We say, what kinds of things  could churches do that would be helpful for your son or daughter? I've arranged  14 different practical ideas from those that were considered most helpful to least helpful by families, things like simply having disability awareness efforts in your  church, making sure information is available to families who are really struggling to navigate this world of disability and the service system, having an advocate  for families who's intentional about making sure the supports and welcome are  there for people impacted by disability, spiritual counseling from a  congregational leader, a support group that connects families, respite that just  helps families go out on a date or do some shopping or something, that gives  them a brief time together, modifications to religious education activities, an  intentional plan for supporting their child support in religious education, support  during worship services, and a host of other things. I won't read them all  through. My point is that there are a number of things that families might  suggest that might come up. What struck us is that it was we asked as we asked families what would be most helpful. We also asked them whether their church  actually offers this the percentages that are popping down the side of your  screen now are the percentages of churches that actually do these things. 10%  offer any kind of disability awareness, 8% any kind of respite care. The gap the  opportunity for disability and ministry, is the gap between these numbers. If  you're not sure how we would even do that as a church, we've put together a  guide that walks you through how to do this, step by step for the next 24 hours, 

it's completely free to download. After that, it's also completely free. It's always  completely free. I just want to create some urgency for you. Seven, healthy  family. Faith communities are marked by care for one another. They strive to  meet the spiritual, the emotional, the practical needs of their members. And we  heard that from families as well, when families were connected to a strong faith  community and had a vibrant faith their family quality of life was significantly  higher. This is a place where we can think about ministry to people with  disabilities. What happens after the benediction the other six days of the week?  How are we helping people with disabilities and their families to flourish in the  workplace, in their relationships in other ways. What can we do that thinks  beyond the walls of our congregation? How can churches collectively come  together to meet deep needs in their community? There are no shortages of  congregations that can help care for people with disabilities and their families.  There's 335,000 churches across the country, most of them turn out are actually  here in Grand Rapids, almost, almost all of them, a few of them are also in  Nashville, Tennessee. Every red dot is a church in our community. Think about  how collectively the church could address the unemployment rate of people with intellectual disabilities. It's 90% that's not the employment rate, that's the  unemployment rate, inadequate housing abounds. Poverty rates are nearly two  or three times what they are for people without disabilities, inadequate  transportation. These are places for us to think about making a difference that  doesn't require expertise in disability, but expertise in other areas, like your  congregation, is filled with potential employers and actual employers, people  who work all throughout your community. Think about what would happen if the  congregation came alongside people with disabilities, got to know their strengths and their passions and their sense of calling, and said, Who do we know in our  church or through our church, who could use someone exactly like that? That's  the putting faith to work model that we've been partnering on and connecting  lots of people with disabilities for the first time to jobs or think about faith based  residential initiatives like the Friendship House, which is now at seminaries,  growing across the country, including, of course, one down in Holland, Michigan, they're creating inclusive housing options that are not just good for people with  disabilities, right, who need safe and supportive housing options, but it's  fundamentally transforming future clergy and how they think about their  community when they live in community with people with disabilities. Eighth,  we're made for relationships, and the relationships are really at the heart of  belonging, having people in your life who know you, who accept you, who love  you, and who miss you when you're not there, that companionship, the intimacy, the reciprocity, all of that that comes through friendships is really vital to our  thriving. There's actually been research in the US and in the UK that says that  loneliness and isolation are greater health risks than obesity and smoking, right? It doesn't just hurt to be lonely, it actually. Can kill you, and all the other 

dimensions of belonging that I've talked about, you can kind of do those at arm's length, but to befriend someone takes belonging to new levels. It takes it deeper, and yet the friendships so fundamental to human flourishing are so elusive for  many people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. One nationally  representative study says that half of all high school students with autism have  not been invited to any other kids social activities in the last year, not once. one  out of every four adults with intellectual disability who are living in group homes  and other service system residential facilities have no one in their life beyond  family and paid support staff. This is a place that ministry can really happen to  step in people's lives and build out their social connections and relationships. All  of you know lots of people. In fact, social scientists tell us that the average  person knows about 150 to 600 people. Now social scientists don't know that  many people because people don't want to hang out with social scientists too  often, but the average person does, right? You've got family members. You've  got people you name as your close friends and companions. You have people  you talk with every now and then occasionally, that you spend time with and  engage with, but they're not your close friends. That's where Facebook friends  are actually but, and then you've got people who are paid to be in your life, your  doctor, right, your auto mechanic, couple, you have a defense attorney, those  are your issues, right? When we do the same activity with young people with  intellectual and developmental disabilities, we actually find a similar number of  names that go up on the chart as they do for young people of the same age  without disabilities. They just go in entirely different circles, into the inner circle  of family and the outer circle of staff and providers and therapists. I hope you  see here the power of what you do between Sundays and after the benediction.  It's about life lived together beyond the walls of the congregation that pushes  people from acquaintances to becoming friends, and it's simple things that you  do, like inviting someone to go out for a meal, participating in a favorite hobby  together, going for a walk, going to the mall, catching a movie, watching the big  game, joining the small same small group for adults with intellectual disability,  those ordinary gestures so rarely happen outside of the service system. And the  great thing about this dimension is you don't need any training to be someone's  friend. You know how to do these things. But I also think this dimension has  important implications for our ministry models. Are we doing ministry in ways  that put people in a, in a in a place where they're likely to get picked as friends,  and that pushes us to models that are more inclusive? Ninth dimension, we  know we belong when we're needed and we feel needed when others in the  congregation see us as bringing gifts and talents that benefit the entire  community, that are really essential to its thriving. This is ministry by people with  disabilities, and it reflects the recognition that they, like anyone else, has gifts  and talents that make them indispensable to the body. More and more churches  are investing in ministry to people with disabilities. Lots of them struggle to move

into a place of ministry by people with disabilities, they're still seen as the  designated recipients of support, the focus of ministry, rather than ones doing  ministry. And those roles of who's the giver and the receiver remain far too static and often predetermined. Certainly, people with disabilities have much to gain  from being part of a faith community, but our faith communities have much to  gain from making sure people with disabilities are part as well. And this is quite  counter cultural in a society that increasingly and very comfortably, argues  against the very existence of certain people. It sees people in instrumental and  transactional ways. The idea that people with disabilities have gifts that we need to receive seems so counter cultural, so hard to fathom, and yet that's how  things are. They're upside down in the kingdom. That's why I love this church  sign so much I stopped to take a picture of it a number of years ago while I was  driving my son to school. It suggests a posture that I wish every church had as it relates to people with disabilities. We need you here ASAP. As a community, do  we see ourselves as incomplete without people with disabilities and their  families? This is the chapter that that church sign, I think referred to. I've picked  a few pieces. I don't think they had disability in mind, but I like to read that into it. When we're convinced this is true, we start to do things a little bit different. We  don't think of inclusion as something nice to do because it's good for someone  else. We think it is something to do because it's essential to the thriving of our  community. We don't wait till people arrive to start thinking about how we're  going to welcome them. We actually start pursuing people who are missing. We  don't try to just tinker and retrofit our programs and our church activities so that  work for people with disabilities. We design our programs and activities from the  outset as if people with disabilities are going to be part of that. And we move  people from an afterthought to a forethought. Well, that takes us to the final  dimension that I wanted to park on today, and that's the dimension of love. To  Belong is to be loved. And if you are at all worried that a social scientist from  Vanderbilt is going to lecture you on love, never fear, right? I don't think I have to make that connection for you. Some of you know the work of a man named Wolf Wolfensberger, a pioneer in our field, who really was instrumental in bringing the institutions to a close and returning people to life in their community. He offered  the observation that healing for wounded people with disabilities begins with  three messages, you are valuable. You are as valuable as anyone else, and you are loved by those around you. The Scriptures remind us over and over that all  we do, all we are, must be marked by love and service systems as critical as  they are, they were not designed to love, but the church was, and that's the  portrait of belonging that we learn from these families, and it's one I think, that  ought to push us further towards points of reflection as we think about our own  congregations and people with disabilities. Are people with disabilities and their  families personally invited? Are they present in all aspects of congregational  life? Are they experiencing a warm welcome when they arrive? Are they well 

known throughout your faith community? Are they accepted without condition  and without caveat? Are they provided care in ways that enable them to  flourish? Are they developing friendships with one with others all throughout  your community? Are they seen as needed and indispensable to the thriving of  your community, and are they loved deeply and unconditionally? And you could  ask yourself in each of those areas, what are we doing really well right now?  What could we be doing better or more of or differently? And in fact, it provides a nice point of reflection for anyone in your community. How well we do? Do we do these things for anyone who's part of our congregation. So you see that an  original portion, initial portraits I provided of the progression of our field also end  up being a progression of ministry models as well. With just a quick flip, how do  we move people from ministry, apart from people with disabilities to ministry, to  people with disabilities, to ministry among, to ministry with, to ministry by people  with disabilities. I'm convinced that we come to see our communities as  incomplete without people with disabilities when we're doing ministry with and  ministry by And so that leaves me with just a few quick myths that I want to  dispel before we wrap up our time together, myths that I actually haven't always  heard, but I want to dispel them anyway. They're sort of implied in our practice.  And the first is that people with disabilities have special needs, right? I just want  to challenge or push back on that a little bit in this way, if those 10 dimensions of belonging reflect our deepest needs. They don't seem special to me. They  actually seem pretty ordinary and they seem pretty universal. These are all of  our deepest needs. So how do we think about not doing special needs ministry? But actually, what I would say is universal needs ministry, to welcome people, to  invite them, to know them, to support them, to befriend them, to need them and  to love them. And the second myth that emerges from all this that I hear, no one  actually says this, but it's kind of implied in practice, that we should start new  programs, right? That's our first inclination when we respond to the presence of  people with disabilities, is to begin a new program. It's not that I'm against that.  It's just that belonging doesn't come through a program. It comes through  relationships. And our inclination when we start a program is so often to look at  schools and workplaces and design things that are separate or specialized. And  when we do that, we inadvertently limit the chance people have to be welcomed, to become known, to become befriended and needed and loved. And so if  programs aren't leading to belonging, programs should be abandoned. We want  to think about putting people in a position where relationships are fostered. Myth three, belonging is the best left to the experts. I hope I've dispelled that. Think  about, how do you invite anyone? How do you welcome anyone? How do you  come to support anyone or befriend them or need them? Do those things for  people with disabilities and their families and let them do those things for you as  well. And the last myth that I want to bust, I know some of you have been sitting  here thinking, Okay, I'm convinced I get it, Eric, someone ought to be doing this. 

But I'm not really sensing a call on my particular church. And I'm wondering kind  of, maybe we could establish, you know, there's a church down the street that  does this really well. They do disability ministry. Maybe we could just establish a  ministry of referral. Would that sort of meet what you're talking about? So the  myth is not that someone else should be doing it? It's that someone else  includes me in you and your church and my church, this is a call on every one of us, and the last thing I want to share with you is my collection, not of pictures or  statements, but of position statements from different congregations and faith  traditions and religions that tell us the scriptural call for why we ought to be  about this. The call is wide and on every one of us. If you don't see your  denomination popping up, I've got it somewhere. So this is really something  we're all to invest in somehow, in some way. So that brings me to my close of  my talk, and I just want to leave you with your own sort of questions for  reflection as you think about the communities you care about, how might the  attitudes and actions of congregation members and leaders and other  community leaders in all corners of our community aim towards those  dimensions of belonging, and what are the steps that you and your community  could do to take to make sure that everyone is present and invited, welcomed  and known, accepted and supported, cared for, befriended, needed and loved.  Thank you.