Disabling the Church from the Center for Disability and Ministry

Becoming the Baptized Body with Dr. Sarah Barton

• Center for Disability and Ministry at Western Theological Seminary • Season 1 • Episode 9

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In this episode Dr. Sarah J. Barton (ThD, MS, OTR/Ll, BCP) joins us to share her research and insights around the practice of baptism and its implications for the church. Dr. Barton' ethnographic work centers intellectual disability and  baptismal witness to better plumb the breadth and depth of the body of Christ. Dr. Barton is the author of Becoming the Baptized Body: Disability and the Practice of Christian Community.


https://www.baylorpress.com/9781481316873/becoming-the-baptized-body/






Speaker 1:

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. Join us now for this special bonus episode.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to the Center for Disability and Ministry podcast. I'm here with Dr Sarah Barton, an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School and Duke School of Medicine. She is an assistant professor in occupational therapy and theological ethics. She's also a former Henry Nouwen doctoral fellow from here at Western. We served together for a time and so it's good to be with her again.

Speaker 2:

We're going to discuss her book Becoming the Baptized Body Disability and the Practice of Christian Community. So, sarah, you spend a lot of time interacting with divinity students and one of the things that comes up often within a sort of a Christian context is the sacraments, liturgy, but also baptism as a core part of our identity and how we understand ourself in relation to the church, the body of Christ and Jesus. But often this isn't talkedself in relation to the church, the body of Christ and Jesus, but often this isn't talked about in relation to disability. So could you give us just a bit of a walkthrough of how you came to relating these two things disability, baptismal identity and then we'll sort of get into more of the structure and content of the book from there.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, perfect. Structure and content of the book from there yeah, perfect. So I think I started bringing these things together when I was a little bit, I guess, dissatisfied with some of the work in the field of disability theology. So I was looking at things like talking about the image of God, themes of like friendship, things like inclusion, which are really important themes.

Speaker 3:

But I was wondering about why is disability and the identity of those of us who are disabled Christians and disability experience in general, like how does that relate to kind of the core practices of the Christian faith? So you know, there's some shared practices that Christians partake in and really diverse in different ways, but baptism is one of those, and so I wanted to ask the question like how does this core practice of Christian life, of discipleship, relate to the experience of disability and disabled Christians? And it really came about through lived experience, through meeting people with disabilities who have been denied baptism, through meeting people with disabilities who have been denied baptism, meeting people with disabilities who are living into their baptismal identity and their sense of vocation as a living out of their baptism, of a gift that the Holy Spirit had given them.

Speaker 2:

The amazing thing about sort of integrating these pieces that may previously have been seen as separate. It sort of actualizes this idea that various parts, when you bring them together, make up a coherent body that functions right. So how does your sort of convictions around disability and ministry impact, how you sort of construct or engage theology, especially in the context of the book?

Speaker 3:

sort of construct or engage theology, especially in the context of the book. Yeah, so I would say at the end of the day, I don't want to read or write or come up with a theology, that doesn't matter for communities on the ground and that's not informed by the communities on the ground.

Speaker 3:

And, in particular, with this book and the other work that I do, I don't want to talk about God in a way, I don't want to talk about church in a way, and I want to talk about Christian practices in a way that has a big asterisk at the end and says, like only for non-disabled people or you need to add on like this extra bonus, you want this to count for disabilities, like I wanted disabled Christians to be able to see themselves in this.

Speaker 3:

Theology, which is part of how the book came about, is that I interviewed Christians with intellectual disabilities and spent time worshiping together with Christians with all different kinds of disabilities, and that's part of what the book is rooted in. It's also rooted in the tradition and a lot of reading and things like that. But just as important to me was that Christians with disabilities could see themselves as included and as informing and even leading some of these conversations, instead of an afterthought or someone who couldn't even see themselves within the claims that I try to make about Christian practice and about who God is and what the church is.

Speaker 2:

That makes a lot of sense. So then you could in theory have a conversation in this way, sort of engaging people who live with disabilities in constructing theology, so that there's sort of theologians in their own right rather than just objects for reflection. You could do that around any number of things right, and for you the central choice was baptism. So why does baptism matter in conversation about disability in the church?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think baptism is kind of a touch point for a lot of people. Like I mentioned before, I've heard stories of people who have been wanting to be baptized in a church. Maybe they're non-speaking, maybe they just don't meet some of the requirements, due to their disability, that a church community has for someone to be baptized and they've been denied baptism. They've had to go to a different church or maybe had to go to multiple churches and can't find a community that will baptize them. So that's one reason why I think it matters. Another reason I think it matters is because in my tradition, which is I'm a member of the Episcopal Church, but in a lot of mainline Protestant denominations, in Orthodox traditions, in the Catholic Church, in many Reformed contexts as well, baptism is a really central theological theme for how we think about, how we relate to Jesus and how we relate to one another and what our identities are.

Speaker 3:

For many people with a more sacramental theology, the practice of baptism and the recognition that we are brought together with Jesus in baptism and linked to all the other people who have ever been baptized is just such a central part of not only church theology and documents and prayers and liturgies, but also just how a lot of people think about themselves in the day-to-day world, including disabled Christians. So again, nothing had been written about that. And then I think, also for churches who practice baptism, not necessarily as a sacrament but an ordinance or something that is more symbolic, it is still an action that is mirroring or paralleling an event from Jesus's ministry, really the event that started Jesus's earthly ministry his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist. And if we are called to be Jesus's disciples, following after Jesus, participating in Jesus's ministry, and we don't have a way to think about disabled Christians as doing that, yep I that really worries me.

Speaker 2:

So as I'm listening to you, it sounds to me like some of what you're bringing up touches on this idea of sort of baptism being intimately and inseparably connected to community membership and discipleship Right, separately connected to community membership and discipleship right. So can you say a little bit about kind of how you engage this idea of a particular way of understanding baptismal practice in relation to this sort of life of discipleship and how that all kind of comes together for you?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I think about it in a couple of ways. In some traditions being baptized means you become a member of the church and kind of this full disciple, or it's a symbolic or sacramental mark of the beginning of that discipleship. Or it's a testimony to someone who's been following Jesus for a while and then publicly wants to kind of proclaim that and go forth. Or, in the case of tradition, to baptize babies and small children or even anyone who's non-speaking and communicates in different ways. It's a way for the community to promise and the community to anticipate that person's discipleship and life with God and say you have something to teach us.

Speaker 3:

I also think baptism kind of at its most basic definition, it's water administered Well water. Baptism is water administered in the triune name of God, the Father, son and Holy Spirit. No-transcript. What that vocation is, whether it's lay ministry or ordained ministry at some point, ministry in the neighborhood or community context, ministry within the walls of a church building, that's up for communities to decide and I think communities need to feel the responsibility and accountability to discern that for all Christians.

Speaker 2:

Right. So framing baptism as sort of a communal practice and the body of Christ and the church taking responsibility for the people and the formation and the discernment process of a vocation. I can understand how sort of considering the context of disability might complexify that for some right. But what are some of the ways over the course of constructing this book where engaging theological conversation, partners that live with disabilities for you sort of challenge some of your own initial frameworks and then sort of in the end you were like, oh, this seems way more faithful. Like what was that journey like for you? Can you invite us into a bit of it Though I know it comes up in the book just a bit of an intro to how your own sort of formation along these lines took place too. It wasn't just in a vacuum.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, no, absolutely yes. I did theology with almost 40 other people or this book would not. The book would not exist and a lot of the ideas in the book I've mentioned in conversations with people before. You know like I thought that everyone, when I was talking to them about baptism, they were like going to talk about their bodies and going to talk about sacraments and people just didn't really end up talking about it that much. People talked about community. They talked about Jesus all the time, which makes sense, but especially the story of, you know, jesus's baptism. And I was honestly like convicted doing the work of this book because part of me thought when I started this book, like wouldn't it just be better if everyone baptized infants and small children like we do in my tradition? Wouldn't it just be better if we removed this requirement for, like a spoken testimony, for example?

Speaker 2:

Right, right right.

Speaker 3:

Because it's really it's not accessible to some people with disabilities. But I really came to see that even churches that do baptize you know infants or young children and make those promises to them as a community at baptism. When that child gets older, say they have a disability and they have some ways of communicating or making their needs known that other people consider like challenging or disruptive or uncomfortable. I've met really too many families to count and any one family would be too many families that have been asked to leave their church community. So I think the work of being witnessed to by folks with really really radically different baptismal theologies than I had helps me, like you say, kind of complexify and complicate these questions but also really see, like, how rich theologies can be inclusive and how, like different theologies of baptism really can be inclusive of people who are non-speaking, people with intellectual disabilities and some communities who baptize only adults who can give some kind of testimony.

Speaker 3:

These congregations were also baptizing people who are non-speakers and just hearing how they worked that out faithfully with their theology was incredibly encouraging number one. But that also kind of changed my mind. I think something else that came up over the course of writing the book as a practice that was really influential for me was thinking about what is baptismal testimony. You know, for these churches that is something that's really common for someone to get up and give a testimony, or for someone to give a testimony on another's behalf. I was like, oh, that doesn't seem like a good practice, because a lot of people can't read or can't write or can't talk.

Speaker 1:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

But then I learned in many of these contexts there's actually small groups of people at a church who are coming together not just to write a testimony for the baptism of a disabled person at their church, but really to compose each other's stories of ministry church. But really to compose each other's stories of ministry like how they've seen the Holy Spirit working in this other person. And this is why we need this person in the church, because we wouldn't be the body fully without them here.

Speaker 2:

That's really, really beautiful, but it's also, in a sort of hyper-, hyper individualized culture, a radical move to make. Yeah, Right, so what? What is some sort of type of encouragement or or maybe some some guidance or advice that you can offer a listener who says I like those ideas, I like the sort of communal bent toward it and the fact that it's sort of folding us into the body of Christ out of a sort of individualized, hyper-autonomous lens. But that's really hard, right. So what's like a piece of advice that you could say okay, yes, it challenges a lot of our cultural frameworks.

Speaker 3:

Here's a step you can take in a good direction, and it's only a step, but it's still a step right and take it and it might not work, and he talks about like universal design for learning, like you're probably gonna fail as a teacher and I can say as a teacher I fail all the time but it's all about like trying that next step. So, in terms of baptismal testimony, one next step that I might try out is, um, thinking about people's birthdays and I'll'll say this my song, kind of random, but in the course of doing interviews with people in the book, one of the lay leaders that I was interviewing was kind of deeply troubled. Her pseudonym in the book is Anna and she talked to me a lot about how she was really struggling that churches hold up this thing that she called a cultural success. So she was like churches often really celebrate, you know, someone's wedding or their anniversary or a graduation from high school or college or getting a promotion at a job or retiring, and I'm not here to say like those are bad things to celebrate in the church, like I think we need occasions for joy and celebration and those are great places to start.

Speaker 3:

However, anna's worry when we were talking about disability and baptism for the book is that some disabled people not all some disabled people, some non-disabled people don't have these cultural successes we don't have. Some of us don't have these markers of success that are recognized publicly. Some of us don't have these markers of success that are recognized publicly. And so we got to talking about how baptismal testimony could be something in addition to celebrating these in the church that we could try, because it's something for everyone. So the reason I say remembering people's birthdays is because in some traditions, including in my own, there is like a prayer for people on their birthdays, and so we might have everyone with a birthday in June come up to the front of the church or every week. If you've had a birthday in the past week or coming up, we're going to celebrate you, and one thing that I would encourage churches to do is every time someone has a birthday, we could think about using a one-word descriptor of what we would lose if that person wasn't a part of our church and ministry.

Speaker 2:

Or one word descript invite the spirit to help you discern the impact that this person's presence has on your life and on the community as a whole. And we are naturally sort of wired in Western culture to do that at a time when someone gets a promotion or whatever else. But we're not sort of hardwired just to do that. Because God created that person, died for that, because God created that person, died for that person, loves that person, right. And the church ought to be a space where, if God's willing to sort of be incarnate, step down into the reality of the human mess and then say I love you and extend shalom to this person. Isn't that reason enough to then say I'm going to take a moment and invite the spirit to give me space to reflect on the value, the good, the blessing, the impact of this person. And yeah, that is one step that may naturally lead to a series of other ones, because it changes our disposition as people relating to one another.

Speaker 3:

And it can lead to other things too. I mean it can lead to that too. I mean it can lead to that we don't actually know that person well enough to faithfully name that, and that's like yeah that's a little bit more complex.

Speaker 3:

There's a little bit of a call out or call in to say all right, holy spirit, like thank you for convicting me, but let's see how we can connect with this person a bit more amen, or listen to a bit more. That's good. It can actually, yeah, lead to repentance. Maybe it is a disabled church member who we recognize that actually we don't know them that well because they've been excluded from our programming or affirmation offerings or from sitting anywhere in the sanctuary, anywhere near anyone else.

Speaker 3:

There's only one place that a wheelchair user can sit in our church space that's good.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's good. Dr barton, thank you for the effort, the time, the sleepless nights and the tears that go into putting together something like this faithfully. Um, it's a lot of work. At least which or at least somewhere on that list it's the fact that you're engaging 40 plus other people, right? So when you get a chance, pick up Becoming the Baptized Body, disability and Practice of Christian Community by Baylor Press, and keep in mind that the Center for Disability and Ministry often consults with associates within our network. Dr Barton is one of those. She also is embedded in and teaches at Duke. Thank you very much for being with us. We look forward to spending more time together in the future. God bless you.

Speaker 1:

This has been a Center for Disability and Ministry production. Join us next time for another insightful episode.