A learning group in the diocese of Niagara seeks to initiate a conversation about disability and belonging in the diocese, which proponents say can begin a transformation in the way people with disabilities relate to the church.
Ryan Weston, General Synod’s animator for social and ecological justice, says Niagara is the first diocese he knows of to begin such work following General Synod’s 2025 resolution to encourage disability theology work across the Anglican Church of Canada.
Jodey Porter, a parishioner at St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, is a member of General Synod’s Public Witness for Social and Ecological Justice Committee, a litigator and advocate for people with disabilities and a member of the team working on disability theology in Niagara. Porter, who has been mostly blind since the age of five and lost her vision entirely as an adult, says she and many others she knows with disabilities have often felt like outsiders to worship communities.
At one guide dog school she went to, for example, Porter spoke with 20 blind people from around the world and found “not one of them was comfortable in their ecclesiastical community,” she says.
“The issue is this: that our do-gooding theology tends to put disabled people in the [category] of those who need help, of people who are less than you. And it tends to, in many terrifying theological approaches, put people in the [category of believing] they’ve sinned or their parents have sinned and they’re being punished by God.”
The knowledge that people think of them this way forms a barrier that prevents people with disabilities from feeling at home in church communities, Porter says. The path to making church a home for them is to improve that theology, she adds.
“Wheelchairs aren’t enough, braille isn’t enough. It’s the theology that needs to move forward. That’s the stone in front of the tomb.”
The diocese put its working group together at the behest of Bishop of Niagara Susan Bell, Porter says. When Porter brought the way the church treats disability to her attention after the 2023 General Synod, she says, Bell treated it not as an individual pastoral issue, but as “a far more profound theological issue to raise that affected our church as a whole.” Porter says her conversation with the bishop led to the resolution at 2025’s General Synod, which Bell moved.
Bell also invited Canon David Anderson, rector of St. John the Evangelist, Hamilton, to chair the learning group. He tells the Anglican Journal he wants the work to start conversations among parishes about how they can better foster community belonging for members of their congregations.
Having begun by familiarizing themselves with foundational works in disability theology, such as Nancy Eisland’s The Disabled God and Amy Kenny’s My Body is Not a Prayer Request, Anderson sees the next phase of their work as collecting stories from people with disabilities whose experiences the group can share to give parishes a clear idea of what to aim for—and what to avoid.
One example of the latter is a story he heard from the mother of a girl with autism he met at a family camp run by Karis Disability Services, a charity the diocese has partnered with for guidance in this work.
Speaking about the summer camp, which provides recreation and respite for people with disabilities and their families, the mother contrasted the atmosphere of welcome there that had brought her daughter such joy with an incident at their home church. The priest had told her their family was welcome to worship there but asked that they not bring their daughter to church anymore, describing her presence as loud and disruptive, Anderson says.
“I might not ever make that phone call like that pastor did, but I can imagine in my own parish where I serve, that some quote-unquote ‘well-meaning’ person might actually say that to the family member,” Anderson says. “And that’s just not good enough.”
Bryan Gillmore, an organizational and spiritual life specialist for Karis, says there’s much about Karis’s role in the diocese of Niagara’s work that is still taking shape. But the goal is to address the uncertainty worship communities have about how to become places where people with disabilities are as central to life and decision-making as anyone else.
“I’ve never met a church that would say, ‘We don’t want people with disabilities to belong,’” he says. “There’s a barrier there of not knowing what to do. And so churches miss out on the gifts of those with disability.”
Change starts with an attitude of wanting to learn, Gillmore says, and with understanding the difference between inclusion and belonging. Inclusion is something a group does for people with disabilities, he says, while belonging is something they participate in building for themselves.
