The God of Difference: Disability, Youth Ministry, and the Difference Anthropology Makes

Abstract

In their eagerness to love and care for young people with disabilities, youth ministers and lay people have often failed to appreciate the challenge of human difference. The author shows that studies in youth ministry struggle to hold in tension differences in culture, developmental categories, and disability among youths, often dismissing these differences as oppositional to Christian relationship or community. Drawing on cultural anthropology, humble, embodied attention to the situated character of knowledge can help both scrutinize and regard difference. Embracing difference as a spiritual discipline in ministry with youths with disabilities enables participation in the different, disruptive ministry of Christ.

Keywords:

• Disability
• difference
• cultural anthropology
• youth ministry
• developmental categories
• culture

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms.

2 I am thinking here of the way Jean L. Briggs’ 1998 ethnography Inuit Morality Play emphasizes the way in which babyhood, rather cross-culturally, is often a treasured stage that we seek to emphasize and acknowledge.

3 In fact, it was a recent podcast interview I gave with Princeton Theological Seminary’s “The Distillery” that first brought up this incident and made me realize that, despite seemingly resolving the tension between Bob and Veronica, I had really failed to treat difference as a gift, which was the very title of the podcast. For these reasons, I’m motivated to revisit the incident not just theologically but anthropologically.

4 Amy Jacober (2010, 2017) and Ben Conner (2012), both featured in this series, are two scholars that have been foregrounding this conversation about ministry with youth with disabilities, but only relatively recently. Indeed, they are the solitary scholarly, theological voices addressing an urgent, practical concern facing churches and ministry with youth in the 21st century.

5 See Lennard J. Davis’s argument in The End of Normal (2013) that warns that the transition from valuing “normality” to “diversity” in neoliberalism is predicated on the marked and continued social exclusion of people with disabilities.

6 I intentionally employ both the broader concept of culture against the more narrow classification of adulthood as a “social category” to hold in tension varying and overlapping experiences of constructed and embodied difference. Here I am drawing on both historical and contemporary anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz (1973) and Arjun Appadurai (1996) in taking culture to be broader, shifting symbolic systems of meaning, including rituals, practices, beliefs, and traditions, through which we express who we are in the world. When I use the term social category, I am invoking some of the differences between the fields of anthropology and sociology, as well as the important work of those in the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies, disability studies, and critical race studies, in speaking of a more narrow subset or a group that sometimes recognizes itself as contiguous or is recognized as contiguous by others around it, but necessarily constructed by those within a culture. For instance, an argument for youth or adulthood or even disability as culture loses sight of the fact that youth, adults, and people with disabilities in relationship and context share common cultures, even as they experience those cultures differently based on a variety of social categories they are assigned, inhabit, and sometimes circumvent. While cultures are hardly contiguous bounded wholes as anthropologists once improperly conceived them to be, concepts of culture must also be careful not to reify the very relations (youth, adulthood, disability) they aim to study, the very differences they aim to unpack. Clearly there is much more to be said about the way the concept of culture has been employed in studies of youth ministry, but, suffice it to say, my emphasis in this article is on tracking multiple experiences of difference both within and amongst cultures, a task I am hopeful anthropology, with its expertise in culture, can continue to help us sort out.

7 This is a point that concerns the challenging ethics of these research relationships as well, and one Wesley Ellis and I (2017) take up with a bit more precision in “Disruptive youth: Toward and ethnographic turn in youth ministry,” Ecclesial Practices, 4(1), 5-24.

8 In Almost Christian (2010), Dean much more ardently pushes practicing passion beyond the walls of the church, cultivating missional imagination, and even locating difference as a source of revelation. For instance, on page 162, she writes, “Encounters with others de-center us, precipitating momentary suspension of self in which we dangle precariously outside our comfort zones, uncommitted. We feel vulnerable and unattached. We frequently experience the Holy Other intensely in such spaces.” However, this section on “Reflexivity and the Encounter with ‘Otherness’” is but two pages (pp. 161–162) in a 200+ page book, demonstrating the need for the study of youth ministry to take seriously not just the potential for encountering God through encountering the other, but the formidable discomfort, vulnerability, and challenge that accompanies these encounters.

9 See Root, Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry, Chapter 6, “A Ministry of Place-Sharing.”

10 For a robust critique of developmentalism, especially its interpretation of adolescence, please see Wesley Ellis’s piece, “Diagnosing Adolescence: From Curing Adolescents to Caring for Young People” in this issue.

11 In placing these distinctions in quotations, I acknowledge both the constructedness and the permeability of these categories. We are all temporarily “able-bodied,” and people are always people first, even if they are people with disabilities.

12 Indeed, Scharen and Vigen directly address James Clifford’s and George Marcus’s critique of ethnography’s partial truths and Kirin Narayan’s aforementioned concern about the transcendental, when they write: [E]thnographers, theologians, and ethicists alike do not need to be “all-seeing” or “all-knowing” in order to offer up relevant and illuminating insights about what is true or relevant. Instead, they can offer up as valid the partial – but no less true or significant – perceptions they glean through situating themselves in particular contexts, listening thoughtfully to others, and reflecting upon their own lives, emotional responses, and even (or especially) internal biases. (p. 69)

13 Here I am seeking to return to and reference Root’s thorough interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s who and where of Christ, but also his work to instantiate these theologies in a practical theology of ministry with young people with disabilities.

14 See Nancy Eiesland, The Disabled God (1994), Abingdon Press.