Disabling the Church from the Center for Disability and Ministry
Disabling the Church is a podcast by the Center for Disability and Ministry at Western Theological Seminary. This series amplifies the voices, giftedness, and perspectives of disabled people, challenging ableist biases and reimagining the church as a space of true belonging. Through conversations with scholars, ministers, and community members, the podcast explores how the church can dismantle barriers—physical, theological, and cultural—to create a more inclusive and enriched faith community.
Learn more about the Center for Disability and Ministry at Western Theological Seminary at westernsem.edu/cdm
Disabling the Church from the Center for Disability and Ministry
Rethinking Disability: The Power of Friendship and Community with Dr. Rustin Boyed
This episode delves into the profound impact of friendship among individuals with disabilities, highlighting how authentic relationships shape self-understanding and community dynamics. Through a heartfelt dialogue, we explore the necessity of embracing our identities and navigating life’s complexities together, revealing the essence of interdependence and the role of the church in fostering meaningful connections.
• Friendship as a necessity for individuals with disabilities
• Shared experiences fostering understanding
• The balance between independence and interdependence
• Redefining what is considered “normal”
• Theological considerations of disability and worth
• Navigating vocational awareness and expectations
• The significance of friendships in embodying one’s faith
• Encouragement for the church to foster inclusive communities
Disabling the Church is a production of the Center for Disability and Ministry at Western Theological Seminary. This series amplifies the voices, giftedness and perspectives of disabled people to enrich the ministry and witness of the church.
Speaker 2:and perspectives of disabled people to enrich the ministry and witness of the church. Hello and welcome to Disabling the Church the podcast. I am your host, dr LS Carlos, and I am joined here today with a good friend of mine, dr Rustin Lloyd. He and I became friends while we were both at Southeastern. Dr Lloyd is a couple years ahead of me in his undergrad and I was placed in a group with him that he'll tell you a little bit more about as the episode unfolds. And Rusty got a chance to serve as or maybe was given the task of serving as a mentor for me, and so it's been a blessing to walk alongside of him and be formed by him over the course of the beginning of my educational journey and some of my vocational discernment. So please join me in welcoming Dr Lloyd and Rusty. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about yourself? That would help some of our listeners get caught up to speed about some of why we might be sitting in this room having this conversation today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my name is Dr Rustin Lloyd. I'm the chair of the Department of Humanities, as well as the IRB and the foundational core at Southeastern University. But well before then, I was just a kid growing up with a disability, and I had no idea what to make of it or what to do with it, and so I was born at two and a half months premature and I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a result of being born prematurely, and so that is something that I've really had to wrestle with through my life, and it has influenced, you know, my work, my academics, but also my friendships.
Speaker 2:So hopefully we get to explore that a little bit today. Thank you, rusty. I appreciate the opportunity to sit with you and reflect a little bit on our own sort of journey and formation in friendship. In order to truly befriend another person, you have to be willing, maybe on some level to need them, which becomes somewhat challenging in a world where we both live with a disability that on paper has the same sort of diagnostic name and some of the same details.
Speaker 2:But just because we have a disability, there seems to be this sense of trying to grow up in a world that wasn't made for you or by you. We're kind of pre-programmed to be hyper independent and try to pass as non-disabled, and yet we also need to develop friendships, and so that can create this weird tension. So at least that's been the case for me in relation to people with disabilities. It's natural to kind of avoid people with disabilities and friendships with people with disabilities when you're growing up. Have you found that to be the case when you think back on your younger years? Were you at all sort of hesitant to enter into friendships with people with disabilities, or maybe you didn't even have the chance to?
Speaker 3:So I was never really able to fully vocalize my struggle with disability, mainly because of what you said earlier. We're kind of forced to be independent. We're born into this world and we have a disability. Our parents don't really know what to do with that. It's not like there's a guidebook that goes with someone that has a disabled child. So the result of that is they want me to be as quote unquote normal as possible. How can he live the best life that he can live so that this disability isn't a hindrance to him? So everything that I did in terms of building relationships with people, it was I'm not going to. I'm not going to focus on finding people with disabilities. No, I'm going to focus on finding people that don't have a disability, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Ah yeah, I think it does make a lot of sense. There's a couple of questions that come to mind as I listen. One would be do you think that approach maybe came with a cost to your ability to understand yourself and grow as a person?
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, it definitely did, because I constantly was pushing away from disability. I was rejecting disability. It's not something that you need to run away from. It's something that is in your life. It's reality in your life and you need to run away from. It's something that is in your life. It's reality in your life and you need to learn more about it and you need to learn how to interact with people who may not have a disability but will see you in their first encounter with you. Is not your personality, it's not how good you look, right, it's, oh, this person has crutches. Something is wrong. Right, so that medical model? Right, something is wrong with this person. That's just the instant reaction and, frankly, I don't judge people for that reaction, because I had that same reaction. That's the first encounter that you have to get over. Okay, they're going to see my disability first. How do I diffuse the situation?
Speaker 2:Right. So the opportunity to be in friendships and shared spaces with people with disabilities. It actually changes the frameworks with which people engage the word normalcy on some level, and so can you maybe invite us into a little bit our sort of first encounter? What led to that and maybe some of what came out of that as a result?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. So I didn't really grow up around people with disabilities. When I first saw you walking across that stage getting paired with the first year experience mentors, I was like, wow, that kid looks very similar to me. He's not exactly the same, right, there's still differences, but I can see forearm crutches, right, I can see Right. Right, I'm a relatively able-bodied disabled person, if that makes any sense, whereas before I would see people with cerebral palsy in electric wheelchairs. They had problems speaking, things like that. So I really didn't have that much experience interacting with somebody like me, even at a disability level, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah and I mean thinking about the context of our friendship over the course of that year and beyond there was this sense of commonality that wasn't primarily or only based on the fact that we shared the same disability, but there was a certain amount of I don't have to explain elements of my experience to you and I learned some of what it means to be disabled and interdependent by engaging you. And so, at least for me, there was this element of once I let my guard down and actually normalized the reality that I'm not that unique, right, I'm fearfully and wonderfully made by God, but I'm not that unique. I don't need to run from all that makes me me. Once that kind of became more normal in my way of being, then I could learn from you, because you've been doing this a little longer than me. So this idea of kind of a common ground being the base of a friendship that's actually really constructive did that impact how you understood yourself and maybe some of your vocational awareness?
Speaker 3:I think it definitely taught me a lot about myself, things that I thought were abnormal, that I really couldn't talk to or couldn't talk about with anybody else because they didn't have that experience. I finally realized talking with you wait a minute Okay, it's not that unusual. Talking with you wait a minute Okay, it's not that unusual. I'm not too. I'm not too. I can't think of the word but off base by complaining that it takes me, you know, four times longer to get dressed than the average college student, right Right? Who am I going to? Who am I going to complain to? Nobody's going to fully understand that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the idea of looking in the face of, or sitting alongside of someone and in some ways allowing them to invite you into the vulnerable spaces that you don't talk about can set a different baseline for normal. Then you begin to learn what it means to be healthy and embracing that need, or those needs, and you can begin to redefine things as just simple differences rather than obvious or destructive deficits. Right. And then you look around and you begin to observe people that have similar experiences pursuing what God has called them to do, regardless of the fact that it is hard and maybe harder than others. Right. And so for me, there was a sense of vocational discernment and a redefining of what's not just possible but probable in a community where I'm not the only person that is similar to me. The most important thing about understanding friendship, and how has that actually been impacted by the existence of Christian friendship?
Speaker 3:My parents. They didn't have high expectations for me vocationally. If I was happy and had friendships and was a nice individual, then I have succeeded in life despite my disability, and that's, again, not negative on them. But because I've been able to succeed so much, I almost sometimes feel like a token disabled person. Hey, look look at this, look at everything that this person was able to do. So that's part of what's going on here vocationally. How does that tie in?
Speaker 3:Theologically, I'm being told all the time, at least for my Pentecostal and Pentecostal circles, that I'm broken and I need to be healed. Right, that's. That's the subtext. The subtext actually is God messed up, but don't you worry, I'm here to pray for you, everything will be fine. Yes, yes, yes. So that ultimately caused a lot of damage to me theologically because I started to believe that message, even though intellectually I knew that not to be true. Ultimately, after wrestling through all that, I realized that I am broken. But my disability is not an example of my brokenness and that's something that I really needed to work through and I probably will continue to work through the rest of my life. My disability is not an example of my brokenness. My disability is not an example of my brokenness.
Speaker 2:It sounds like you had people in your life who were with you patiently through the process of restructuring a lot of your assumptions around what it meant to be you Right and this idea of saying, okay, well, my value is not based on what I can produce that is seen as valuable by the world. My value is because God created me and God placed me in the body of Christ and I can need others and, as a result of my presence, others can need me, and maybe existing in a disabled body is somewhat of an opportunity to be the kind of person that bends with a little bit more ease toward that reality that we have needs and we need each other and that's okay. And in that reality Christ's love is displayed and that might mean like you, like me. God says I will create you to be a professor or an academic or a pastor or a theologian. It might mean those things. It also might not.
Speaker 2:If you are listening to this episode, you're observing the interaction between friends and a friendship that forms in college. We have common experiences in the sense that we have been diagnosed with a diagnosis or a disability that fits within a common category called cerebral palsy, but we're also vastly different people. Rusty comes from a certain family dynamic that is different than mine. His race is different. Some minute details around his diagnosis are different from mine. I am also adopted and do not have a twin brother. I did not grow up in the same part of the United States as him. However, our capacity to thrive and fully live in, to understanding some of the minute layers of what it means for us to embody this life that God has given to us in the body that he's given it to us in and the vocation that comes with it, some of those layers were not accessible, apart from what came to the surface through our friendship with one another came to the surface through our friendship with one another. So I'm hoping that as you listen to this conversation and process some of what you're hearing, a couple of things will rise to the surface. One, friendship is not simply a luxury that we can choose to disconnect from or not involve ourselves in, and there isn't a cost. Two, befriending people who are disabled is crucial, not just friendships in general, but those kinds of friendships in particular.
Speaker 2:In order for me to fully live into what it means for me to be a person full of the Spirit with CP, I need to interact with people like Rusty who teach me how to faithfully be disabled in some way, and that happens best in the context of friendship. Friendship is a caring mode of discipleship. Rusty names on a number of occasions places where his understanding of self and his capacity to grapple with theological complexities is more fully lived into in the context of conversations that occur between him and I as friends. Friendship in general is important. Of course, there are a number of people that are named in our lives that we were interacting with that do not have CP, but there is a unique space given to the impact that interacting with people who do share diagnoses and share the lived experience of disability can have on helping us understand more faithfully what it means to live disabled lives that honor God and inhabit a call. I hope that, in addition to some theological categories and ideas around friendship and disability being reframed for you as you listen to two friends interact, I hope that you're also being invited into a moment where hope can become a reality as you listen to two people with disabilities interact as friends.
Speaker 2:If you are a family member listening to this podcast, take a moment and think about who their friends may be. Friends may be. Would you consider, after listening to this episode, thinking closely about the importance of the presence of friends? A family member that you may love, care for deeply, who lives with a disability but does not have any friends in their life who also live with disabilities, will pay a price. This is the importance, or one of the importance, of the church. The church ought to be a place where people are constantly engaging people as people in Christ, irrespective of their medically discernible categories around capacities or needs.
Speaker 2:But as you listen to this episode, take a moment and think about your family, people in your world, friends that you may have people at your own church who live with disabilities, church who live with disabilities.
Speaker 2:Would you invite them to befriend you and allow them into your life as people that you would befriend?
Speaker 2:Could you be a person who enters into that space not as a person who befriends a person with a disability, but a person who befriends an individual, seeking to learn from the image of God within them and inviting them to receive and learn from the image of God and the spirit within you, and that between you, you both would witness God in a unique way and more fully inhabit the vocation that God has given you as siblings in Christ and, if the opportunity presents itself, help to be involved in or encourage your relationship between two individuals who have disabilities, who may be able to teach one another and learn from one another and in that sense, then empower one another within their embodied vocation as people who live with disabilities.
Speaker 2:So, as you listen in to this episode, there's a lot that you can take from it, but, as a general conclusion, note the value and the essential nature of the crucial impact that friendship has on our ability not just to survive the world but to thrive in it, for the good of the world, the glory of God and the benefit of the church. May God bless you, may God keep you, may God cause his face to shine upon you and give you peace.
Speaker 1:This has been a Center for Disability and Ministry production. Join us next time for another insightful episode.