July is Disability Pride Month: Seven Invitations to Listen and Learn
Did you know that July is Disability Pride Month? It’s one of the awareness months that slips my mind in the swell of summer, so I wanted to highlight it here. According to The Arc,
“Disability Pride Month is celebrated every July and is an opportunity to honor the history, achievements, experiences, and struggles of the disability community. Why July? It marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), landmark legislation that broke down barriers to inclusion in society.
People with disabilities deserve to live full, self-determined lives, just like everyone else. Yet discrimination persists for the 1 in 4 U.S. adults living with a disability. That’s why we spotlight inspiring stories in July and beyond that show what’s possible with inclusion.
I want to use this space to amplify the voices of followers of Jesus who also walk with a disability. Here are seven invitations to listen and learn. I know summer is busy. I challenge you to listen, watch or read just ONE of these, or commit to at least one opportunity to listen and learn on your own in the next few weeks:
1. Consider a first person account of an experience you may take for granted: For some of our beloved friends, this is a familiar experience of beauty mixed with frustration. I appreciated the author’s description of her trip to the beach and the struggle to find accessible ways to enjoy it on this Anabaptist Disability Network’s blog post. For many of us, beach trips are an annual exodus, so I invite you to consider with fresh eyes.
2. Learn how to proactively welcome families with different needs. I include this one, even though it is a longer webinar (2 hrs), because I am committed to listening to it during the month of July as part of my continuing education in my Christian Formation role at IMC. I share it in case anyone else would like to join me in also learning from this wisdom and to ask you all as my community to hold me accountable to completing it!
3. Choose to read a book from IMC’s library of resources: Recommended by Dave and MaryBeth, we have a handful of books under the map bulletin board you can borrow to read and learn. Try My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church by Amy Kenny, Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality by Thomas Reynolds, Teachers of the Soul: The Heart of God Revealed through People With Disabilities by our own Dave Gullman, or At Church I Belong by Elrena Evans (I purchased this as a vision for what kids would experience at church, but do understand this is not what many, many folks have felt at churches in the past).
4. Enter into a Bible story with perspectives from those with disabilities: I stumbled upon this four part series (three of which are already published) looking at Bible stories that include someone with a disability or an account of healing. After discussing the story briefly, it includes a reframing by a scholar or writer with disabilities inviting us to think about it in a new way. I especially appreciated the perspectives and the artwork.
5. Engage Your Kids in Stories for Empathy, Curiosity, and Conversation with Attitude Videos: My kids love screen time, especially in the summer. Attitude, documentary filmmakers highlighting folks with disabilities have a WEALTH of short films for adults but also shorter films for kids. They are VERY well done, with the kids themselves getting to share about their lives and short explanations of different types of disorders or disabilities. The best way I’ve found to find the kid ones specifically is searching “Attitude Kids Disabilities” in YouTube. Our kids were so engaged in these.
6. Reflect on how culture, gender, race, class and more converge with disability, and hear how interdependence is a model we can pursue: Even though this article by Conchita Hernández Legorreta isn’t about Christianity and disability, I wanted to include a voice of a Latinx woman, since I’m the only one in our church community at the moment and want to amplify BIPOC voices however I can! I especially resonated with this article and how it had similar themes to what Seth preached at our church a few weeks ago about finding solutions to our problems in God’s ordering and God’s ways with God’s people instead of searching for top-down answers or our own strength/hustle. The author suggests that interdependence is better than independence, and challenges characterization of the Latinx community’s attitudes toward disabilities.
7. Hear the Stories of Disabled Christians: Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson have written a book At the Gates: Disability, Justice and the Churches which in and of itself is a wonderful place to begin if you want to hear more stories of diverse experiences with faith communities and what’s helped or harmed folks. I have a book stack that’s a mile high sometimes, so I appreciated this 35 minute teaser conversation. A bonus is getting to watch a BSL interpreter do her work.
How will you plan on learning and listening this July to celebrate Disability Pride month? I’d love to hear about what you do and what insights you gain!
