Three key Lessons About Disability Inclusion in the Early Church

This blog was originally published on April 9, 2020 on Key Ministry’s blog.

Of late, I’ve been preparing for a breakout session titled “Learning inclusion from the Early Church” in which I cover some of the earliest Christian perspectives (outside of the New Testament) 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. Didymus the Blind, a fourth century Christian leader in Alexandria of Egypt, has long been one of my favorite saints from bygone eras.

For five decades he trained Christian converts and theologians in the truths of Scripture and doctrines of the Church. Blinded at the age of 4, he learned by listening and vigilantly memorizing the words of Scripture that others read to him. Didymus was one of the important articulators of the divinity of the Holy Spirit and his work On the Holy Spirit was formative for much early Christian thinking on the Spirit. Fellow Christian leaders, like Jerome, travelled across the ancient world to receive Didymus’ counsel and to seek his help in biblical interpretation. It’s an astonishing and under-appreciated fact that the global church in the fourth century was led, in large part, by a blind African theologian. We should rejoice in this part of our tradition.

Photo credit: Wikipedia.

And as I’ve looked at others from the patristic era (roughly 100-400 A.D.) I’ve found further treasures of insights from the early church’s view of people with disabilities. Among others, the writings of Clement of Alexandria, the Cappadocian fathers, Augustine, and John Chrysostom all make meaningful contributions to a Christian theology of disability. For brevity, I summarize three key lessons that I’ve discovered from studying some of the writers of this era:

I. People with disabilities were a priority for the early church. And they were a priority because of the church’s prioritization of and commitment to caring for the poor. “Disability” appears in their writings not as a one-off topic but as part of their larger interest in the materially and socially poor. Working from the teachings of Jesus, the church fathers saw it as part of their Christian vocation to live charitably towards those the world ostracized. Their example compels us to do the same.

II. People with disabilities were more than able to lead. Didymus the Blind provides us with one important example of a person with a disability in leadership. But there are more. Augustine, perhaps the most influential theologian in western Christian history, lived with chronic lung disease and was sidelined from ministry on more than one occasion due to illness. The early Christians seemed to have a knack for recognizing the ways in which God was glorified amidst weakness. This is perhaps best reflected in Didymus being paradoxically nicknamed “Didymus the Seer” on account of the profound insight into God’s Word that his peers glimpsed in him. We too must not miss the leadership gifts that God is giving to the people with disabilities in our churches.

III. Inclusion was possible for the early church, despite not having the tools and technologies that many of us have today. The example of the early church cuts through many of our excuses to not have “enough resources” or “capacity” to include people with disabilities. The early church did it with far less. They made inclusion a priority and a norm. “Inclusion,” in fact, would likely have been a nonsensical term to them; their writings have no vision for a church in which the poor were not an important part. Sensory rooms and adaptative technologies are great, but they have never been a prerequisite for including people with disabilities.

For further study on the early church’s perspective on disability, I recommend the very helpful resource Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader edited by Brian Brock and John Swinton.

Hunter and Amberle Brown help lead an organization called The Banquet Network that is based in Baltimore, MD. The Banquet Network primarily works with church plants to inspire, equip, and resource them to reach people with disabilities who are on the margins of their communities. Hunter works full time at Goucher College and is a part-time Masters of Theology student at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore. Amberle works full-time for World Relief, an international health and development NGO, and is passionate about helping churches include and reach people with disabilities based on her own experience of becoming visually impaired and her encounters with people with disabilities in her work in developing countries.