Identities

             As for other matters, brothers and sisters, we instructed you how to live in order to please God, as in fact you are living. Now we ask you and urge you in the Lord Jesus to do this more and more. (I Thessalonians 4:1)

Recently, I saw a post accusing churches of not accepting neurodivergent folks. I asked what was meant by accepting, and got a wonderful spiritual response that included no concrete answer. We’re to extend the right hand of fellowship, etc., to a person who might not want to be touched.

I suspect the complaint has at least some validity. But here’s my first problem (you guessed it!): definitions. “Neurodivergent people” suggests that all the members of the group can and should be treated according to some stereotype, when the truth is that each person who is neurodivergent has his/her own preferences. There is no one way that all people of any group. What one neurodivergent person needs may be different from what another does. Treating each individual as member of the group violates that person’s personhood.

There’s a company that has adopted a “quiet hour” for their stores, with the idea of keeping ambient noise to a level tolerable to the neurodivergent. There’s also a group of people who have been complaining about the music in church services for decades. They have been rebuffed, sometimes unkindly, for one reason and another. Should we (finally) provide a place for those who don’t like loud music? Should we stop instructing the congregation, “Before you sit down, turn to someone and say…”? Can we possibly accommodate every single group? Part of one answer is that we define each group by its averages. The problem is that few if any people are actually the average for their group. Ultimately, in the name of accommodation, we accommodate fewer and fewer people because even those who had fit in before are pushed out to suit the preferences of a new group. If the goal is to bring more people in, this will be an abject failure. It the goal is to destroy the original group, it’s likely to be a raging success.

Another answer is to not try to accommodate groups and not work with the averages or typical description of groups, but to deal with individuals with their specific needs. Along with that, we must not lose sight of the purpose of the church: to please God by  loving Him with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strengths, and by loving our neighbors as ourselves. Our identities, then, are as disciples of Jesus Christ, not as members of all the other groups. If a person has a specific need, it is the church’s obligation to attempt to meet the need of that Christian, not to bow to the dictates of a group seeking to impose its will on the church.