Hunter and Amberle Brown

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The Ultimate Church Comeback Plan

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The Ultimate Church Comeback Plan

Many of the concepts that the general population have experienced for the first time in 2020 are all too familiar to some in the disability community. The new reality that many of us are experiencing for the first time is all too familiar for many families living with disabilities who face manifold barriers to leave their home on a typical day. So what if we took this opportunity to re-imagine a church that was accessible to 100% of people—rather than just the 85% who don’t live with disabilities?

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The Gospel, Disability and Purpose

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The Gospel, Disability and Purpose

As The Banquet Network is working to develop a training on disability for international missionaries, we’ve had the opportunity to listen to people with disabilities, across the world, share with us what they want missionaries to know. There is a significant theme that has continued to emerge in these interviews: people with disabilities want missionaries to care about disability, because it is in Christ that they have found purpose.

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Four Insights from Paul's Prayer Requests for Disability Ministry

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Four Insights from Paul's Prayer Requests for Disability Ministry

Any of us involved in disability ministry have a vision to see people with disabilities living out their divine vocation, but that vision often feels fraught with all kinds of barriers. As I have been reading through Paul’s letters, I have been struck by the regularity with which Paul asks for prayer. Here are four things we can glean from Paul’s prayer requests and how these should shape our own prayer requests, particularly as we carry out our disability ministries.

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How Disruption Can Teach Us to Include People with Disabilities

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How Disruption Can Teach Us to Include People with Disabilities

By now, disruption has become a familiar friend to each of us. But though coronavirus may be new, the concept of disruption—whether from a global pandemic, broken washing machines, or relational strife—is not. In much of scripture, it seems that God uses precisely the disruption that we hate to jolt his people out of negative patterns—whether it be their blatant worship of idols or their comfortable but self-serving career paths. God does not waste these disruptions.

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Three Key Lessons About Disability Inclusion in the Early Church

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Three Key Lessons About Disability Inclusion in the Early Church

Recently, I’ve been preparing for a presentation titled “Learning inclusion from the Early Church” in which I cover some of the earliest Christian perspectives on disability. Looking at how the post-apostolic church viewed and incorporated people with disabilities has been illuminating, and there is much we can learn from our forebears.

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Outreach to People with Disabilities: Finding Today’s Pools of Bethesda

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Outreach to People with Disabilities: Finding Today’s Pools of Bethesda

Fifteen percent of the people in the world have a disability, but if a church doesn’t have any members or regular attendees with disabilities, this is all the more reason to “go to the highways and byways” to find and invite them in.

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Looking to God in the Midst of Unpredictability

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Looking to God in the Midst of Unpredictability

It always seems like the crises of disability come at the most inconvenient times, doesn’t it? A meltdown just as you’re heading out the door, a shot of pain in the middle of a nice dinner, a hole In your eye when you’re far from home. But perhaps the unpredictability of disability is an invitation—an invitation to pay attention to God.

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Out of Isolation and Into Community: The Church's Solution for Loneliness

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Out of Isolation and Into Community: The Church's Solution for Loneliness

Loneliness kills. Loneliness is especially ravaging the disability community, where 85% of people with disabilities report being lonely, and 1 in 8 of them spend less than 30 minutes a day with other people. But the encouraging thing about all this is that the antidote to this pandemic of loneliness—and the loneliness of people with disabilities in particular—is remarkably simple. You and I already have the answer: God has designed the church to be the remedy.

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Disability and the Protestant Reformation

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Disability and the Protestant Reformation

Disability is often at odds with our plans. But it was disability that first landed Paul in Galatia. The passionate language about justification by faith and not works of the law, so finely conveyed in this epistle to the Galatians, flows from a relational context colored by disability.

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The Million Dollar Question: How Much Does It Cost to Start a Disability Ministry?

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The Million Dollar Question: How Much Does It Cost to Start a Disability Ministry?

The cost of starting to include people with disabilities is often not primarily monetary. The cost of including people with disabilities is primarily love.