At face value, Jesus was engaged in the supernatural and people were being healed. Having worked with people with disabilities for two decades and now working with people in extreme poverty in under-resourced countries, I have been blessed to have a new lens through which to see this story. These people healed by Jesus had no hope. Their poverty and disability, in his day, relegated them to begging outside the city. Being healed enabled them to be known again in the general population. Healing brought them back to community.

I thought I had outgrown that keen sense of yearning, but then I became a mother of a child on the autism spectrum. I found a whole different level of yearning for all of the answers to be revealed as I contemplated an unknown future.

We are happy to welcome Nicole Reinders as a guest author for this post. Nicole is a PhD student in Kinesiology at Wilfred Laurier University. We encourage you to check out […]

It seems that when we see rich abilities in a person we are quick to label those things gifts – rightly so – and we easily see how those gifts are called into service. But what about the Jeremiahs among us?

Does disability ministry require its own staff person or volunteers? Does it require its own room and time to meet? As a parent of two children with autism, I would just assume that any church that we attended would provide ministry even if there were no other children with special needs. It would never enter my mind that ministry would have to wait until “critical mass.” I am not criticizing churches that have organized disability ministries that have specific events for large groups of people with special needs. I am just saying that is not the only form of disability ministry.

These parents all have stories of dropping off or picking up their daughter or son from a ministry environment only to be told that the church is not set up to handle their child. These families have all experienced what Mary and Joseph felt when they were trying to find a place for their child to be born.