London, Ont.
Council of General Synod (CoGS) will work with ecumenical partners to encourage the study of principles of accessibility and inclusion across the Anglican Church of Canada, including the tenets of disability theology, after General Synod voted for an amended resolution June 25.
General Synod passed Resolution A202-R1, which directs CoGS, “in consultation with ecumenical and full communion partners in Canada and internationally, to initiate a process across the Church for the dissemination and study of the principles of ability and inclusion”—building upon the 10 tenets of disability theology, which theologian Nancy Eiesland outlined in her 1994 book The Disabled God—and to report back to the next meeting of General Synod.
Jodey Porter, a member of St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. in the diocese of Niagara who serves as Anglican appointee and co-chair of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s (ELCIC) Task Force on Ability and Inclusion, offered context for the resolution in a June 24 presentation to General Synod.
Porter, who became mostly blind around the age of five and has lost all vision in recent years, said disability is an issue for Christian communities, noting that 27 per cent of all Canadians identify as disabled according to Statistics Canada.
“By disability we don’t just mean an ailment or we’ve broken an ankle playing golf … We mean a mental or physical issue that transforms your life,” Porter said.
“It changes your access to mobility, perhaps your access to work, quite often your relationships with others and your inclusion with other people. It alters who you are in some ways, because suddenly people think of you as a blind person or a person in a wheelchair or a person who’s somehow beyond the pale of being what we consider—it’s an awful word—‘normal’.”
“The sad thing is that many disabled Canadians do not feel a whole part of our Christian communities in Canada or internationally,” she added. “So our committee took a hard look at what the issues are, why they’re there, and where can we go from here.”
The ELCIC, which is in full communion with the Anglican Church of Canada, established the Task Force Addressing Ableism at its 2023 Special Convention. Porter defined ableism as “discrimination in favour of able-bodied people, or discrimination against disabled people.” Following a request by task force members, who wanted a more positive focus, the ELCIC National Church Council changed the committee’s name in 2024 to the Task Force on Ability and Inclusion.
Porter drew General Synod’s attention to the history of struggles within the disabled community for accessibility—including her own in the 1980s and ’90s as part of a group of activists who fought for and won rules from human rights commissions in provinces across Canada that stipulated reasonable accommodation for disabled people in buildings and work environments.
The leper’s window
The title of Porter’s presentation to General Synod, “The Leper’s Window,” hearkened back to medieval Europe and what she described as a means of accessibility that churches made for lepers, who were excluded from their communities because of valid public health concerns. In response, churches placed special “leper windows” in their buildings far from the main doors.
The leper windows “stand for something extraordinary,” Porter said. “They stand for the fact that the church in the 11th century cared deeply about its leper community, so deeply that it allowed them at least access at a distance to the Mass. Not only were they allowed to witness the Mass through the lepers’ window and view it and participate in it at a distance, but they were also allowed in many churches to receive the host.”
The Task Force on Ability and Inclusion, she said, “believes that as Christian communities, we are still at the lepers’ window. We are good. We care about disabled people. We give them access. We want to share with them. But access is not inclusion, and that is a huge issue … The barrier isn’t accessibility. The barrier is our theology and the way we teach it.”
For Porter, the way for the church to cross that barrier was through disability theology, a school of thought Eiesland pioneered. A professor at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Eiesland was a disabled activist who fought for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, a U.S. federal law that banned discrimination based on disability.
Eiesland, who suffered from a congenital bone defect and chronic pain and disability until her death from lung cancer at the age of 44, “was tortured by her sense of exclusion from Christianity… feeling not part of what was the whole community of Christ,” Porter said.
Tenets of disability theology
In The Disabled God, she said, Eiesland “puts aside, in an incredibly radical rethink of the gospels and Christian teaching … the link between sin and God’s punishment in disability. It opens disabled people up to being wholly accepted with their diverse gifts into the Christian faith and being not just given access, but fully included in the whole community of God.”
Porter outlined Eiesland’s 10 main tenets of disability theology from The Disabled God. These include imago dei—the idea that all people, including disabled individuals, are made in the image of God—and rejecting the idea that disability is caused by sin or divine punishment. Disability theology views Jesus’ interactions with disabled people as focused on inclusion, dignity and community rather than fixing their disabilities. Rather than “fixing” disability, Eiesland’s theology emphasizes wholeness through love, inclusion and full participation of disabled people in the faith community.
Disability according to this theology is not an individual problem, but viewed in terms of societal barriers that serve to exclude or marginalize disabled people. Within this social model of disability, churches have an important role by serving as places of hospitality, accessibility and leadership opportunities for disabled individuals.
While acknowledging suffering that results from disabilities, disability theology does not define the lives of disabled people through their suffering. Rather, it uses lament as a means of expressing pain while maintaining one’s dignity. Eiesland questions the assumption that one’s disability will be “fixed” in the afterlife, arguing that resurrection can include diverse physical bodies.
Disabled people for Eisesland play a role as prophetic witnesses who can provide unique theological insights and challenge injustices, both within the church and society as a whole. Rather than ideals of self-sufficiency and independence, disability theology emphasizes interdependence, shared vulnerability and mutual care.
Debate over language prompts amendment
The day after Porter’s presentation, Bishop of Niagara Susan Bell moved and introduced Resolution A202, describing its support for the tenets of disability theology as “an opportunity for the church to seize the moment to come alongside the Holy Spirit and be leaders in this work.”
“It is time that we as the body of Christ challenge ableist assumptions and begin to critique and correct the ways in which our religious institutions and theological frameworks have historically excluded or marginalized people with disabilities,” Bell said.
Many General Synod delegates expressed their support for A202. Gary Russell, lay delegate from the diocese of Rupert’s Land and an Anglican Franciscan, said a transformative experience in the life of St. Francis of Assisi was his encounter with a leper. Overcoming his initial fear of disease, Francis returned and hugged the leper. In the same vein, Russell supported Resolution A202 as a means of “not just supporting disabled people, but engaging with them in what is a transformative experience.”
Alicia Sandham, lay delegate for the diocese of Algoma, shared her own experience as a disabled person suffering from mental-health issues and a chronic health condition in the form of an autoimmune disorder. Due to not being able to eat gluten, she said, the Eucharist is a source of anxiety for her. “Talking about any aspect of church needs to be thought about in an accessibility context,” Sandham said.
Bishop Riscylla Shaw, suffragan bishop in the diocese of Toronto and a Canadian representative to the World Council of Churches (WCC), supported the motion and noted the WCC has many resources on ability and inclusion available online. ELCIC National Bishop Susan Johnson said the resolution offered an opportunity for Anglicans and Lutherans to work together.
Canon Murray Still, co-chair of the Anglican Council of Indigenous People (ACIP), expressed support for A202 based on his experience as board chair for the non-profit Initiatives for Just Communities in Winnipeg and southern Manitoba. A majority of its program areas support Indigenous people, he said, many of whom suffer from disabilities such as mental-health issues and fetal alcohol syndrome disorder.
“Our whole point is that no one is left behind,” Still said. “All people are loved for who they are. The history of the Anglican Church’s residential schools and other churches’ residential schools have played a small part in terms of some of the addictions that we go through.”
The Rev. Christopher Samsom, clergy delegate for the diocese of Caledonia, spoke against the motion, highlighting the issue of sin. He pointed to instances in the Bible such as God inflicting Miriam with a skin disease for complaining about her brother Moses’ wife; or striking dumb Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, for doubting the prophecy that his wife would give birth to a son at their advanced ages.
“We have instances where changes in potency are clearly sent from God as a consequence of certain circumstances,” Samsom said. “We speak too broadly here. What does it mean that different abilities are made good? … There’s a lot of difficulty in this theological statement that will cause pastoral confusion.”
Some delegates expressed concerns about the wording of Resolution A202. Karen Chapeskie, lay youth delegate from the diocese of the Yukon said “disability” was not a word she or her colleagues in health care continue to use. “The language has changed and I think if we’re going to look at this, we need to look at a little bit broader scope to be accessible and inclusive,” she said. Meanwhile, Bishop of Kootenay Lynne McNaughton sought an amendment that would acknowledge the goal of working ecumenically wherever possible.
Chapeskie moved and McNaughton seconded an amendment that incorporated the principles of ability and inclusion as a means of building on the 10 tenets of disability theology, as well as ecumenical and full communion consultation.
Finn Keesmaat-Walsh, a lay youth delegate from the diocese of Toronto who identifies as disabled, said the language of “disabled” and “disability” is not outdated, noting, “It is the language that us in the disability community most often use for ourselves.” The Rev. Kyle Norman, clergy delegate for the Territory of the People, made the same point. General Synod voted in favour of the amendment, then in favour of the amended Resolution A202-R1.
Corrections:
This article has been updated from an earlier version to correctly identify the diocese of Jodey Porter and Bishop Susan Bell, both of whom are based in the diocese of Niagara; and to reflect that Alicia Sandham is not a youth delegate.
