Luminosity Conference speaker asks church leaders to help neurodivergent Christians truly and fully belong

At the beginning of her “Better than Normal” workshop at the first-ever Luminosity Conference, the Rev. MaryAnn McKibben Dana confessed, “I am feeling very creatively conflicted right now.” 

She said this because she did not want her workshop to be a “glorified sales pitch” for her new book, “Better Than Normal: Virtues for an Off-Script Life.” She said when she attends such workshops, she comes yearning for something practical because church leaders are practitioners. But the Luminosity plenary from Mark Yaconelli[RD1]  had her mind spinning with new ideas.

Luminosity is a conference offered by the Presbyterian Foundation for pastors and church leaders that is designed to invite inspiration and spark imagination. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, March 9-11. 

Perhaps that is why Dana officially opened her workshop with a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer called “For When People Ask.” The poem begins this way:

I want a word that means

   okay and not okay,

      more than that: a word that means

devastated and stunned with joy.

   I want the word that says

      I feel it all all at once.

Such a “big feelings” poem spoke to the theme of the presentation: how the church can honor the presence and meet the needs of neurodivergent folks in its midst.

Processing questions can take time

Dana shared her own recent experience of being an associate pastor in a church in the midst of a discernment process as it plans to celebrate the retirement of a long-time senior pastor. Part of that process involves groups of people who answer questions at tables. The consultant helping the church in the discernment process instructed those gathered to answer the questions with a “top of the head” (i.e., quick) response. For certain people, such an approach proved to be difficult, as they need more time to process questions.

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Dana conducted the workshop in an interactive style, so at the end of this anecdote, she was curious what the workshop’s attendees had to say about either her story or their experience with neurodivergence in the church. One person said, “I just wish someone had asked those questions when my son was growing up.” Another simply wondered if the amount of information coming at us daily has affected everyone’s ability to process that information.

Dana revealed what she has written about in “The Blue Room,” her Substack page: that the work she did for the book and continues to do emerged as a result of her children’s challenges. She called their experiences “living in a world that is not set up in a way that their minds are built to process.”

She then told a story that she read in Johann Hari’s book, “Lost Connections.” There was a man in Cambodia who worked happily in his rice paddies until the day that an old land mine detonated, causing him to lose a leg. The man fell into a deep depression. 

Western medicine is oriented to pharmacological treatments first, so if this had happened in America, an antidepressant would likely have been prescribed. But in Cambodia, doctors asked the man, “What do you think about dairy farming?” After switching to that vocation, the man’s depression lifted a few months later.

Levels of belonging

Dana then spoke of Amy Julia Becker, who writes about faith, disability and culture. Her daughter, Penny, has Down Syndrome. Becker has noted “four levels of belonging”

• Exclusion: you are not welcome here
• Tolerance: we really don’t care if you’re here or not
• Inclusion: we are glad to have you here but you’re going to do it the way we do it
• Belonging: we are not who we are without you

In Dana’s story about the discernment process, she noted a response she received to an email asking about accommodating the neurodivergent folks in the church. She then asked the workshop’s attendees where they thought the response fit among the four levels of belonging. The consensus was somewhere between tolerance and inclusion.

In the course of that discussion, one person wondered why the preferred answer was the “tip of the brain” answer. Dana agreed, saying, “What assumption do we make by framing it that way? Perhaps it is the most honest or unfiltered, but it could also be the least considered answer.”

That reflection led one participant to say, “Belonging has to start with intention.” Knowing that promoting increased inclusion of neurodivergent folks might seem like a mountain to be climbed, Dana shared an approach she often recommends in her coaching and consulting work: “What is the 1% shift we can make to get started?”

Broadening the circle of participation

Thinking again about the discernment process, Dana asked a simple question: “What are some other things we can do” to broaden the circle of participation? One suggestion was to structure the space to provide a variety of response styles, such as a table for journaling. 

Dana followed up that suggestion with a more targeted one: “Are there people in our congregations who have some kind of difference, but who also have the ability to thrive in the community despite the misalignment? What can we learn from them?”

Ultimately, the posture of learning instead of assuming you already know is one that will serve the church best as it strives for “better than normal.” To illustrate that necessary shift, Dana showed a video of “The Man Enough Podcast.” In it, one of the hosts asked a question of the guest, Alok Vaid-Menon, a nonbinary artist and activist who seeks to de-gender fashion.

The question sounded innocent enough: “How can I stand up for you?” Their answer was striking in its frankness: “I have an irrevocable sense of who I am because the gender binary was imposed on us by European colonizers … I don’t think the majority are ready to heal because they have suppressed their own femininity … the question should be ‘Can you help me?’”

Liberating church life

Dana followed up that clip by saying, “The process of seeing someone for who they are is liberating for all. The point of getting to belonging (for the church in particular) is acknowledging that when we welcome those with other ways of learning and doing, we set ourselves free also.”

Of course, the road to “setting ourselves free” is not necessarily a smooth one. Rather, it involves particular choices. Churches and their leaders should choose:

• curiosity over certainty
• courage over comfort
• presence over productivity 
• authenticity over artifice
• beauty over blandness
• community over competition

The workshop closed with a viewing of the short animated film Float, a poignant reminder of how becoming “better than normal” can lead the church to become a place of joyful welcome, accommodation, and hospitality.