Disabled Churches

From DS:
"Churches Work To Include People With Disabilities"

 

When Debra Petermann was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, church wasn’t a big part of her life.

Her brother, with his severe cognitive disabilities and related behaviors, didn’t “fit in,” she said, so their family couldn’t attend religious services together. They turned away from the community of faith and turned instead to community resources that supported them and assured them that they were not alone. Fifty years later, the Worthington woman has devoted her life to helping religious communities find ways to welcome families living with special needs. As church-relations program manager for the Ohio office of the Joni and Friends International Disability Center, she challenges faith leaders to reach out and learn from the myriad of community resources that serve people with disabilities. “As the world changes, not much has changed among churches in preparing the welcome mat for families affected by disability,” Petermann said. “Churches must do better offering a heart of welcome, not just an accessible entryway.” While 57 percent of people without disabilities attend religious services at least once a month, so do 50 percent of people with disabilities, according to a 2010 Kessler Foundation Survey by Harris Interactive. For people with somewhat or very severe disabilities, the attendance rate is 46 percent. U.S. Census figures indicate that about 12.1 percent of non-institutionalized Americans live with a disability. But if one child in a family has a disability such as autism and is made to feel unwelcome during services, then 100 percent of the family members will feel unwelcome, said Esther Kaltmann, who co-directs the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center in New Albany with her husband, Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann. “We want to be able to treat everybody as we would treat ourselves, and not do things for people but do things with people,” she said. Instead of assigning a person with Down syndrome the role of passing out books, for example, ask that person how he or she wants to participate. Full inclusion comes, Kaltmann said, when families don’t have to ask for special services but can expect that their needs will be met. Congregations by and large want to learn how to create “the Starbucks experience” — where “no matter what your needs are, it’s accessible, it’s built in, it’s part of the fabric,” she said. It’s a matter of learning how that can be done without exorbitant costs. Demand has led to a new Ruderman Chabad Inclusion Initiative with a goal of educating 4,200 Chabad Jewish communities around the world. Kaltmann said educating congregants is key: If presented with a need, they likely can work together to find solutions and help one another. Roman Catholic congregations have been responding to needs for years, with members of faith communities addressing issues as they come up, said Erin Cordle, director of human development and relief services for the Columbus diocese. “We all take care of each other,” she said. “A parish is a family. Once a need is defined and the concern is raised, I think people rally pretty quickly.” For example, the Special People in Catholic Education program was started by the family of a student with Down syndrome at St. Catharine Elementary School in Bexley, said Jerry Freewalt, who directs the rural-life and parish social-concerns ministries for the diocese. The program has expanded into other diocesan schools as well as other states, he said. The Catholic Church, like many faith groups and denominations, has an initiative that helps its parishes and other institutions find ways to be more inclusive of people with disabilities. The goal is to integrate people with disabilities — in Catholic churches, schools, hospitals, nursing homes, low-income housing — rather than provide separate programs for them, Freewalt said, and the church continues to search for new ways to make inclusion a reality. Among them: a smartphone app is being developed to help people with autism during Mass.

 

 

^ Every religion seems to teach the same basic concept of loving your neighbor and to treat others as you want to be treated and yet for centuries people with disabilities seem to have been left out of those basic concepts and made unwelcomed  to attend services or even life in the community. It is long overdo for the religious to start practicing what they preach (or are preached about) and include the disability as fully into their houses of worship and the community. ^

http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2015/03/20/churches-include-disabilities/20149/