By Siân Joyner (From Seeds December 2025 – January 2026)

At AUC’s October Church Meeting, Siȃn Joyner and Mike Holroyd spoke about disability in a faith context. They hope it will be the start of a journey towards disability justice at AUC. Here, Siȃn identifies some of the issues.

Would you like prayer for your leg?’ someone asks.

As I stand in a bus shelter, waiting for a friend for a coffee date, he wakes me from a daydream. I think about lecturing him and his two accomplices on the figurative nature of the healing stories; I think about telling them to ‘do one’. But I’m tired, and nodding seems like the path of least resistance. These three students are on a mission. They have no banner, no identity; they have randomly approached me on their way to church. They are young. They pray for healing. I thank them. They walk away. They saw the ankle-foot orthosis. And, having seen it, I guess they assumed my leg was broken, in need of healing.

Recent books, such as Amy Kenny’s My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, assure me that I am not alone in this experience. Amy, a disabled academic herself, writes about ‘prayerful perpetrators’ who want to pray for bodily change in her, when in fact a cure is not wanted. She discusses the distinction between ‘cure’ and ‘healing’.

Such anecdotes speak volumes to deeply ingrained prejudices and attitudes toward disability. In sacred spaces, they point to an ableism that ‘others’ disabled people, and casts them as a metaphor for weakness, or even as a reflection of sinfulness.

So, how can we embrace a theology that celebrates disabled people as an equally valuable part of the diversity of God’s realm?

I didn’t always view disability as positive. As a small child, my father told me about how the ‘whole church’ prayed when I was born, and in hospital. My parents took me to spiritual healers to ‘maybe, make me better’. Where disabled people were to be found in the Bible stories that were read to me as I grew up, none of those people stayed disabled. They were cured, and I was not. That wasn’t fair. Throughout my childhood, the narrative that being disabled meant that there was something ‘wrong with me’ loomed loud from a pulpit that readily associated disability with sin and punishment. I was angry with a world made for two-handed, mobile people, and with a God who would render me disabled from before I was born.

But what if there was a different understanding of wholeness to be found?

It was my academic reading that first suggested that the wider Church’s teaching I had heard as a child, that disability and healing are about deficit in a person’s body or mind, was wrong – or, at least, ill-informed. The social model of disability tells us that disability isn’t about a person, so much as the place in which they find themselves. A woman may need to use a wheelchair to get around, because her legs are weaker in some way, but it is when the lift is broken, or the ramps absent, that she becomes disabled. A child may not be able to hear the spoken word. But it is when their signed language is not understood by those around them that their communication may be disabled.

Affirmative models of disability go further still, challenging the nondisabled person’s gaze on a disabled person as a lesser being, and holding out a positive collective identity for disabled people. In this frame, disabled people are to be celebrated. In this frame, disabled joy, refusing to be aligned with a narrative of pity or pain, is resistance.

With this in mind, upon returning to the Gospel stories, I sought out and heard more contemporary exegeses of the stories of disabled people in the Bible, as well as the ‘healing’ miracles. When we read the story of Zacchaeus, for example, who climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus, we are told that because he was short in stature, he could not see through the crowd (the Gospel of Luke, 19:3). It is the crowd that disables him, not his height.

Elsewhere, at the pool at Bethesda (John’s Gospel, chapter 5), Jesus heals a disabled man, freeing him from the poverty that was associated with paralysis in biblical times. Such healings may be read as stories of social emancipation and condemnation of such roots of poverty.

What does that mean for a disability-affirming sacred space?

This theology offers me an actionable frame of reference today, to understand both my own relationship with God and with disability, and to think about ableism and disability justice more widely. From here, we can begin to think of ways of making our church community more welcoming and inclusive of disabled people. We can think about the language we sing in our spaces. What does it mean if we sing:

Gather us in, the lost and forsaken
Gather us in, the blind and the lame…

How can we challenge (and if you’re paying close attention, we have challenged, in our singing) disability as a metaphor for weakness? How do we make our spaces more accessible? Who are we remembering to include, and whose needs aren’t being met in the way that we worship and meet together at AUC?

When we, as Christians, seek to make our communities more accessible and inclusive, by changing the places, rather than the people with which we find ourselves, we begin to re-imagine the world as one where everyone is welcome, and where we undo years of systemic injustice.

Mike Holroyd and I began to unpack this at a church meeting in October. Watch this space for how you can become involved in our work towards greater disability equality at AUC.

Siân Joyner (née Jones) is a queer, neurodivergent and disabled Elder at Augustine United Church, Edinburgh.