One Body with All Abilities
Thursdays: October 13, 20, 27, & November 3 2022
1:30 - 3pm ET or 7:30 - 9pm ET
In partnership with the Church Network for Disability Support
The church is the body of Christ and should comprise many different members. Yet many people living with disabilities have trouble finding belonging in the church. The difficulties they experience go beyond physical accessibility. People with disabilities are often not chosen as friends and not invited into the fabric of community life. They face barriers to participation in rituals such as baptism and communion, and are frequently barred from exercising their spiritual gifts. The challenges they face reveal the underlying issues of relationships we have as a community, urge us to revisit the concept of belonging as a family of God, and reconsider how our community life is an embodied gospel for the world.
We invite you to join us this October for a 4-part New Leaf Learning Centre series in partnership with the Church Network for Disability Support. Guided by the expertise of the presenters, together we will learn what the church can do to live as one body with our siblings who live with disabilities.
Learning Centre sessions are recorded and made available afterwards for those who sign up but cannot attend in person
Schedule
October 13 - Overview
In this introductory session we will discuss the complexity embedded in the term “disability” and how different ways of understanding disability convey underlying assumptions that affect our relationships with people with disabilities. The hope is to explore together why it is important for the church to receive one another as gifts of God for the community.
October 20 - Belonging in the Body
In this session Heather will look at the concept of belonging - what creates and sustains belonging - and the way cultivating belonging across diverse abilities is crucial to the health of all those who are part of the Body of Christ. Lynne will share from her experiences what it means to belong to a church community, how their church has supported her daughter, Elizabeth, in becoming a member of the church, and their struggles and joy on that journey.
October 27 - Communities of Care: God’s Call to Love One Another
Mutual care keeps our communities living and vibrant, and is God’s call to the church. “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2, NIV) How might Christians live into the Kingdom-calling of caregiving and receiving care? In this session, Keith will speak to the theology of care and the way it transforms our conception of what it means to be human. Stella will share from her personal caregiving experience and spiritual formation work to address the need for the church to be a community of care.
November 3 - Opening a Space for Mental Health in the Body
What does theology offer for the days when I struggle to get out of bed, eat cereal for all my meals, send another email apologizing for missing a deadline and ask for another three days? What does theology have to say about the toll my loved one’s mental health crisis has taken on me as a person and on our relationship? How do we make spiritual sense of the way that brain chemicals affect our experiences of ourselves, the world around us, the Divine?
When theological questions come from a place of lived experience and profound suffering, they demand something more than theories in response. These questions require a community of people who feel the weight of suffering and despair and anxiety and panic, who wonder where God is in all of it, and also continue to show up, to encounter, to be curious.
Join Jayden and Beth Anne for a conversation about the intersection of spirituality and mental health, to hear stories of struggle, hope, and God’s presence in the midst of mental health struggles and diagnoses.
Register
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