A Relational Model and Understanding of Disability
By Martin Hobgen
This article suggests that a relational model of disability can provide a fruitful way of understanding both disability and how disabled and non-disabled people can participate together to build inclusive church communities. This provides a witness of radical inclusion to wider society.
Elsewhere in this series of articles on ways to understand disability I explored two models commonly used in the UK, the Individual/Medical Model and the Social Model, and a model that is commonly used in the US, the Minority Group Model. One of the implications of the Individual/Medical Model is a focus on the individual person in isolation. There is a long history of disabled people being excluded from society and experiencing limited opportunities for reciprocal relationships with non-disabled people. From the early eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, with the dominance of the Individual/Medical Model of disability, many disabled people experience highly asymmetric relationship, where non-disabled people, particularly those in the medical and allied professions, held power and influence over their lives. This experience inhibits the formation of meaningful relationships among disabled people and with non-disabled people in both society and church communities.
The Social Model places its focus on the attitudes of our largely non-disabled society towards disabled people in general. This addresses generalised relationships between large groups of people and provides effective ways of changing attitudes to foster the inclusion of disabled people in various aspects of wider society. This approach has made significant strides in changing attitudes towards disabled people and addressing exclusion and discrimination. The Disability Discrimination Act (1995) and the subsequent Equalities Act (2010) are partly the result of campaigners working with the Social Model of Disability. What this model fails to address, however, is the relationships between particular people, both disabled and non-disabled, that are vital to our well-being.
Baptist churches are deeply rooted in the relationships within each local congregation, between congregations and with other Christian traditions through ecumenical relationships, both formal and informal. At the heart of each Baptist congregation is the concept of covenant relationships, between individuals and the Trinitarian God and between members of each congregation.
Galatians 3:28 tells us that there ‘is no Jew or Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Col 3.11 provides a similar list ‘Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.’ It seem highly appropriate to add disability to this list, so that there is no disabled or non-disabled in Christ. This means that our covenant relationships with fellow believers and with God is not affected by human characteristics such as age, race, gender or disability and all are equally included in the life of God’s community.
There are key phrases that further describe the nature of Baptist church congregations: we are people who ‘walk together’ and ‘watch over one another… in ways known and to be made known.’ I believe that one of the best ways to express these aspects of Baptist church communities is through the idea of covenant friendships. Focussing on participatory inclusion of disabled people in our Baptist churches I would suggest that these friendships need to be intentionally inclusive, emphasise mutuality between non-disabled and disabled people, and take into account the particular context of the people engaged in the friendship.
The
implications of a relational understanding of disability are explored in a related article.
Want to comment on this reflection? Please leave your thoughts via this contact form.
Some comments may be shared below.