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Most of the major denominations have councils for health and welfare, designed not only to work with the health and welfare institutions operated by or related to the denomination, but also to relate the denomination to the varied secular institutional responses and thus to keep open the lines of communication between religious motivation and secular response to need.

Eliminating the Barriers

The fourth area of response on the part of the church is the one with which I am most in agreement: efforts to "mainstream" persons of special need. In literally thousands of local congregations a minister or a lay leader has raised the question of why a disabled member of the congregation has to go elsewhere: "Of course we must make it possible for him -or her- to attend here," they say, and then they intentionally work at overcoming two kinds of barriers -- architectural and attitudinal.

The architectural barrier is to be found in all too many places. A survey in St. Louis, Missouri, by the former director of the Healing Community Project, O. Walter Wagner, indicated that only i per cent of St. Louis church buildings were accessible to wheel-chairs. Now more and more churches are building ramps and designing new structures or renovating old ones so that persons with crutches or in wheel-chairs, persons who have suffered coronaries, etc., can enter easily.

The attitudinal barrier is more difficult. Certainly the first step is that of making the church building accessible so that the congregation no longer says in effect, "We don't want you here"; but once means of easy access have been created, the response of the church membership to persons of special need requires intentional action on the part of individuals, supportive statements from the pulpit, and a deeper understanding of biblical acceptance of all of God's children.

A Lady Bountiful attitude which assumes that the ministry of the church is to such "unfortunate individuals" -- rather than with them -- misses the whole point of the gospel.

The recognition that healing communities exist throughout the world is pointed out by the Christian Medical Commission of the World Council of Churches. Some of the criteria for such groups (which exist in both secular and religious contexts) are these: (1) the healing community is supportive of individuals in it; (2) it must cope with the question of how much it will impose conformity and whether such imposition is inevitable or necessarily repressive; (3) it has self-awareness; (4) it can adapt to change and growth; (5) it is small enough to function effectively; (6) in some cases it may be institutionalized to reach out in love and service to those outside the group.

Perhaps the concept of Gheel and St. Dymphna may help us most in the matter of acceptance. When people from all over Europe began coming to Gheel to be cured of their mental illnesses, they found there total acceptance on the part of the community. No institutions were built for them; they stayed within the homes of community members. This situation still obtains today. Gheel represents a kind of community of acceptance which most of us have experienced at one time or another in our lives. You have felt it on occasions when you were accepted as a person just as you are, when you felt the "attributed wholeness" that society can and does give. We must extend to the person with a disability that supportive community of acceptance, which can in turn receive and learn from such an individual.