The Social Contexts of Disability Ministry

A Primer for Pastors, Seminarians, and Lay Leaders

Herzog

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532607714
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book provides pastors, seminarians, and interested laity with the background necessary to understand the need for disability ministry and the contexts out of which the church's ministry among people with disabilities must emerge. This is true not only for descriptions of ministries over the past sixty years, but also the challenges disability poses for biblical studies, church history, Christian theology, and ethics.Insights are gained not only from mainstream secular and religious sources but from evangelical and other conservative materials. The blending of items from different religious resources reveals just how ubiquitous disability is and the need for disability ministry--now and for many years into the future.The book's format is such that either it can serve as a text for courses on disability ministry, or individual chapters can be employed in various courses on selected topics in biblical studies, history, theology, and ethics. Pastors and lay leaders will enjoy the depth of coverage for each topic. This is a book about a serious subject, for serious readers. Its materials are designed to inform, stimulate, and promote disability ministry as a topic worthy of serious study.

1

Disability in Society: An Overview

The social context of disability in the United States sets the stage for any discussion about how the church has responded to disability. Whereas an obvious case for understanding the social context of disability can be made in relation to including people with disabilities in the church’s life, discussions of disability in Scripture and in church history as well as disability theologies and ethics have also emerged as contemporary developments because of efforts to include people with disabilities in the church’s life. They are also products of the current environment in which disability is situated.42

Three Levels of Analysis

In order to produce a thorough analysis of the social context of disability, I will discuss disability as interfacing three levels of social life—the individual level, the social level, and the societal level; these levels come from the work of Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare43 in the wake of work of Bryan S. Turner.44 While Turner’s aim is to provide an analysis of health and medicine at each of these levels, Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare apply Turner’s model to disability.45

At the individual level, Turner analyzes the “illness experience” using “phenomenology (the analysis of everyday life to establish its underlying assumptions) and symbolic interactionism (the study of social life as a system of communication of symbols).”46 In turn, Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare suggest that phenomenology and symbolic interaction might be employed to analyze the experience of disability and impairment in terms of challenges to self-identity, to look at disability not as a

permanent position but as a ‘career’ which is affected by changing personal and social circumstances and texts, and interactions with others, including, most significantly, professional experts. The outcome may be compliance and reciprocity or conflict, but the crucial aspect for micro-level approaches is that the outcome is part of a negotiated and emergent, rather than fixed or determined, social process.47

At the social level, “medical sociology,” according to Turner, “would focus on the social construction of disease categories (‘illness’, ‘sin’ and ‘deviance’) whereby individuals are classified and regulated by professional groups.” Turner also maintains that at this level there is an “attempt to explore the emergence of institutions with a special responsibility for the sick and the deviant (asylums, hospitals and clinics)” as well as “the concept of the sick role.”48 In contrast, Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare argue that in addition to the specific concept of the sick role, attention should turn to “social roles and norms, and the social construction of concepts, such as disability, impairment and stigma, through which individuals are classified and regulated by the main institutions of social control.” They believe that the sociology of disability at the social level should be extended to include “the perception of the ‘disabled body’ itself as the product of social and cultural practices.”49

It is at the third level where disability is related to the overall structure of society. For Turner’s medical sociology, this level of analysis “concerns the societal organization of health-care systems, their relationship to the state and the economy, and the problems of social inequality both within and between societies.”50 Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare specify their analysis to include “the overall organization of systems of health, education and social welfare of disabled people, [and] how these link to the state, economy and social policy.” This extends to “issues of conflict and power, social disadvantage and discrimination,” as well as to the ways advantaged groups dominate and “force or persuade weaker social groups into a subordinate position.” People with disabilities are viewed as belonging to a “weaker social group”that is socially dominated, with the dominant group having “access to disproportionate power, economic resources and knowledge.” Nevertheless, “social domination may be achieved by persuasion, overt control and constraint, as well as by more covert manipulation, or ‘ideological domination.’” At the same time, it is important to examine how far social order and relations are destabilized through individual resistance and collective mobilization.”51

Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare seek to employ political economy models in analyzing societal responses to disability. They use neo-Marxism or materialist analysis, particularly in reference to the structural relationship between capitalism, power, and inequality. This raises specific questions about the institutional and policy links between the state and organized medicine, especially since medical practitioners “enjoy power, status and material rewards that rank them within the dominant class.”52

Because of the general tendency to reduce various phenomena that are social in nature to the personal level, I will start with an examination of disability at the societal level. Then, I will discuss the individual level and the social level as one unit because both are influenced by society’s response to disability, and because individual level responses to society are normally reflected in the immediate social context. In my view, this is a logical follow-up to what Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare have outlined.53

Disability and the Overall Structure of Society

Joseph Stubbins once commented that “The toughest item on the agenda of disability is that modern America has no need for most disabled persons.”54 This forthright statement probably exceeds what most people would regard as an acceptable critique, and while most people who work in various rehabilitation fields would label Stubbins’s comment unthinkable, the statement does force the question, are we as good a society as we claim to be? That depends on one’s perspective. If one has received benefits from the “system,” then perhaps one can develop a positive view of it and how it works. On the other hand, if a person with a disability has not received a good response in terms of understanding and service, then disappointment, even outrage are both possible and necessary. Most programs offered through the state, either directly or through agencies contracted by the state, are not designed to change society’s attitudes and treatment of people with disabilities. Indeed, they are often engaged in making do with what is, often so as not to endanger financial support for their services.

In order to understand the system’s offerings and benefits in larger context, both historically and presently, I will discuss four areas of action that have shaped how society has responded to disability: medicalization, education (including special education), program and supports, and disability rights.

Medicalization

Historically, industrialization and medicalization of previous centuries brought about “a significa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Disability in Society: An Overview
• Chapter 2: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Disability Advocacy in the Church
• Chapter 3: Congregational Movements and Disability Ministry
• Chapter 4: Ministry among People with Physical Disabilities and Chronic Illness
• Chapter 5: Ministry among People with Sensory Disabilities
• Chapter 6: Ministry among People with Developmental Disabilities
• Chapter 7: Ministry among People with Mental Illness and Dementia
• Chapter 8: Disability and the Christian Biblical Heritage
• Chapter 9: The Church and Disability through the Ages
• Chapter 10: Theology and Disability
• Chapter 11: Life Worth Living: Christian Ethics and Disability
• Chapter 12: Where Do We Go from Here?
• Bibliography