From Inclusion to Justice

Disability, Ministry, and Congregational Leadership

De: Erin Raffety

Narrado por: Hallie Haas

American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism--not a lack of ramps, finances, or accessible worship—is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice, Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God’s ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short.

Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God.

©2022 Erin Raffety (P)2025 Baylor University Press

Reseñas de la Crítica

This prophetic book offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of persons with disabilities within the life of Christian congregations. Raffety changes the focus from inclusion in the community to leadership of the community, seeing disability not as a problem but as a dignified experience in which God is at work for justice.

(William Storrar)

Erin Raffety writes as a pastor to pastors and as an anthropologist to anthropologists in this forceful, fascinating book which lays bare the violence done in the name of inclusion. In prose that is fierce, humble, and precise, Raffety issues a wakeup call to churches and, by extension, the institutions that shape our field. This book offers a stunning example of what an engaged anthropology could look like and where it could lead.

(Danilyn Rutherford)

In this powerful book, Erin Raffety calls churches to reckon with limits of inclusion by showing how prevailing practices and paradigms rarely challenge the structures of ableism and inequality that disenfranchise disabled people. This is essential reading for religious communities ready to grapple with entrenched assumptions and embrace deeper possibilities for justice and liberation.

(Julia Watts Belser)