Including the Excluded: Reformed Presbyterian Welcomes the Disabled

by Kelly Givens and Amy L. Sherman

In the gospels of Mark and Luke, and briefly in Matthew, we are told the miraculous story of Christ healing a paralytic man. Not far into his earthly ministry, Jesus’ words and works had already caught the attention of critical religious leaders and eager residents of the area. Luke tells us that the Pharisees and teachers had come “from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem” to hear Jesus speak. It’s no surprise, then, that a group of men carrying their paralytic friend on a bed couldn’t quite reach Jesus through the pressing crowd. Urgently desiring to get to the Messiah, they took the tiles off the roof of the house where Jesus was. And, in what must have been something to see, they lowered their friend directly to Jesus’ feet.

It’s easy to imagine Jesus in this situation gazing down lovingly at the paralytic—being filled with compassion and healing him. Pastor Tom Nicholas of Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPC) in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, thinks something else may also have been going on.

“This is really a passage about advocacy,” Nicholas explains. The text, he recalls, says that when Jesus saw “their faith, plural,” then he healed the man. Jesus wasn’t just looking down at the paralytic; he was looking up at the guys sticking their heads through the roof!

Nicholas, whose mother has been crippled by Multiple Sclerosis for over 60 years, can relate to the friends in the story. “As a kid, I always imaged doing that for my mom,” he recalls. “They had a lot of guts. They really believed if they could just get this guy in front of Jesus, that would be enough….It wasn’t just this individual faith; there was this advocacy for this person. We’re not even told if [the paralytic himself] believed. He might have been totally embarrassed….I know my mother would have been like, ‘Don’t you dare! I’d rather be paralyzed!’ But they knew this was the right thing to do. And Christ praises them for their faith.”

Nicholas’ family history with disability has sensitized and softened his heart towards those with special needs. So, in the mid-1990s, when a series of events started propelling Reformed Presbyterian toward a more organized ministry for the disabled, Nicholas says he was “all on board.“

At that time, RPC had recently added on to their building, purchasing an old, three-story, community hall. “It was a disabilities nightmare,” Nicholas jokingly recalls. Although church leaders faced sticker shock when presented with the costs to remodel the facility to ensure handicapped accessibility, they recognized the need to ensure welcome for all. Once the building had been restructured with elevators, ramps, and other accessibility features, an influx of families with disabled members flowed into the congregation. Pastor Nicholas believes this was God’s providential timing. “Before,” he explains, “our facility wasn’t prepared to handle it. Maybe our hearts weren’t either.”

Around the same time as the building renovations, multiple members in the church gave birth to special needs children. RPC member Stephanie Hubach, whose son Timmy was born with Down Syndrome in 1992, worked with these families to help RPC develop a more organized ministry for the handicapped. Soon a Special Needs Committee was formed, which serves to equip and resource the rest of the congregation on how to minister to and alongside those touched with disability.

“[When we first started] our emphasis was primarily on congregational inclusion,” Stephanie explains. The ministry enlisted the help of other local disabilities organizations to train teachers and other church leaders on how to include those with special needs. Although the church is relatively small--membership fluctuates between 200 and 300-- the congregation had a significant number of families with special needs children. Realizing the particular need was for the kids, RPC first focused on children’s ministries. “You start out with who you have and where they are,” Stephanie says.

Over the years, RPC has watched their children with special needs grow into teens, then adults. The process has presented unique challenges. “Churches are good at crisis care, but we’re not good at situations that are ongoing,” Hubach says. “I think one area where we can improve is: How do we stay engaged with families that have long term needs, needs that change over time?”

Hubach is passionate about congregational inclusion for those with special needs. She leads the Presbyterian Church in America’s denominational focus on this and is author of Same Lake, Different Boat. It’s a manual geared toward helping churches understand inclusion of the disabled—and how such an emphasis is rooted in deep Biblical theology. In an interview with ByFaith Magazine, Hubach explained:

“…[A]s Christians, we need to practice identification that is like God’s example to us: one that’s not solely based on what we have in common, or exclusively on how we’re different, but identification that’s intentional … This approach recognizes that as human beings, we’re essentially the same but experientially different. So identifying with each other is a choice—a choice that can have tremendous blessing.”

Hubach says that Westerners especially can find it difficult to be willing to identify with the disabled. As she told ByFaith, “In Western culture, we’ve been pretty effective at attempting to sanitize our lives of any association with difficulty or discomfort. If we’re honest, we don’t like to deal with people with disabilities because it reminds us of our own vulnerabilities.”

The willingness to truly see others and identify with them is part and parcel of treating them justly. The biblical perspective shows us that disability is a normal part of a fallen world, Hubach argues. A result of the Fall, it touches us all to some degree. Yet that same biblical perspective reminds us of the essential human dignity of everyone, regardless of our condition, rooted in the Imago Dei.

Besides working to include those with disabilities into worship services, RPC also labored hard to educate the congregation in this sort of biblical grounding on the topic. Leaders have addressed this subject as part of a broader focus in the church on the sanctity of human life. RPC has held several special Sanctity services—all of which, to varying degrees, have addressed ministry to those with special needs. These services steer clear of the highly-charged debates typically associated with pro-life gatherings, and instead focus on “being pro-life in the fullest sense,” Rev. Nicholas explains. “I think the church hasn’t always been kind and loving in its expression of being pro-life…if we have a Sanctity of Life Sunday, it’s rarely about abortion. It’s usually more about celebrating life and the glory of God and the image of God.” (Click the link in the right panel to listen to a clip from one of Rev. Nicholas’ Sanctity of Life sermons.)

Nicholas’ characteristic teaching during these Sanctity of Life Sundays focuses on the value of all human life—regardless of disability—because of the glory of the Imago Dei . “What gives human life value?” Nicolas asks. “The Bible’s answer is clear. It’s God who gives value. The Creator. He created us, and just by the fact that he made us, we have value. Just by the fact that he made anything, it has value…Not only that, we have value because he made us in his image. The likeness of God gives us value.”

After Adam and Eve sinned, the image of God in man was marred, Nicholas adds. And yet, it was Jesus, who is “the image of the invisible God,” who restores our value. “He restores the brokenness of our image,” Nicolas preached. “He begins to renew and make within us his image. He began to address the brokenness at all levels, not just on the inside of the heart, but the whole person—body and soul. That is the renewal Jesus brought.” The handicapped are in need of such renewal—and we are all handicapped to some degree.

 

“I think our premise as a church is that we’re all disabled.”

— Rev. Tom Nicholas, Reformed Presbyterian Church

In addition to holding such Sanctity of Life services, RPC partners with existing community organizations to reach those in the neighborhood touched by disability. For example, at the very onset of the ministry, Stephanie recalls the Special Needs Committee drafting a mission that they hoped in five years would lead to adopting a local group home. “Five weeks, not years, later, I got a call from the guy who was the president of Friendship Community (a local disabilities ministry),” she remembers. “ He said, ‘You know, we’re buying an apartment complex two blocks down from your church. Would you all be willing to be the sponsoring church?’” RPC jumped at the opportunity, creating “friendship families” that the residents could contact in order to get connected at the church.

More important that any programming the church does for the disabled, though, is the fact that church leaders have given this ministry focus such support and enthusiasm from the pulpit. As a result of it, Hubach reports, RPC has a culture of acceptance, of inclusion, one that doesn’t emphasize differences but sees the similarities in us all. “It’s really just the gospel,” Pastor Nicholas says:

I think our premise as a church is that we’re all disabled. We’re all broken, we’re all needy, we’re all disabled…there’s a brokenness in all of us, whether it’s from family of origin or how we’re born, things that occurred to us. We’re in a broken world. And disability is just part of being in a broken world. I think when Jesus came, His Kingdom ministry just immediately began to touch all kinds of brokenness, whether we call them special needs or disabled or sick, whatever. It was a full orbed, holistic view of restoration.

Throughout his time as head pastor, Nicholas has often used his time in the pulpit to speak into the hearts of his hearers about disability. Hubach, in her book Same Lake, Different Boat, lovingly refers to RPC as a model of excellent mercy ministry in this arena. Recalling the words of Pastor Nicholas at a denominational conference, she writes:

This ministry does require some flexibility. Sometimes when we sing, some of our members with special needs sway, or—horrors—even dance!...Sometimes I hear the ‘clack, clack, clack’ of seven-year-old Matthew’s metal walker as he ambles down the aisle during the prelude. Some Presbyterians may not like that noise. But we remember when Matthew could hardly walk, and to us it is a joyful noise. God in his grace has taught us these are the kind of worshipers that Jesus seeks. “Let them come, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

Over the years, RPC’s disabilities ministry has slowly grown from a mercy ministry to one that also emphasizes justice. Pastor Nicholas testifies to the way the disabilities ministry has evolved. “The problem with starting with justice is that God doesn’t start with justice for us. He starts with mercy. But then we find out that his mercy is just. His grace is actually just grace…we always thought of this as a ministry of grace and mercy and compassion. Bu I think once we crossed the threshold into really consciously not just inviting and including people with special needs, [but] really [making them] part of our Body, part of our life as a church…to think of going back and not doing it that way would be unjust. It wouldn’t just be unmerciful, it would be unjust.”

¹ Interview with ByFaith Magazine, Author: Stephanie O. Hubach, Same Lake, Different Boat: Coming Alongside People Touched by Disability . Accessed: September 2011