Consecuencias

For a few participants, the spiritual cultures or styles of worship of particular

denominations of churches had a negative impact on their impairment-related needs. Churches vary in their standardisation of expression, which ranges from formal liturgy to informal worship. Charismatic churches, for example, are characterised by expressive and spontaneous worship cultures. However, McGuire argues that, even in denominations where spontaneity is emphasised, institutions often encourage regularised forms of spontaneity in worship and discourage those that depart from these parameters (1997:97). Churches with charismatic and informal worship often created particular access implications for participants.

For Lucy (individual interview), expressive charismatic worship practices were challenging because of social difficulties and anxiety related to Asperger Syndrome:

I went to a few [churches] that scared me. They kept standing up and dancing and things….We were stood there singing a song, and at one point I found that all my row had gone and they'd gone to the back where they just all started dancing together. So I didn't go [there] again.

Lucy deliberately avoided those churches which worshipped in spontaneous and informal ways in which she could not easily participate. Andrew (focus group 2) also misfit in charismatic churches’ spiritual structures, where they encouraged informal, unstructured spoken prayer:

Well my church, charismatic church, they quite like it when people—anyone in the congregation just stands up and prays. And it seems very positive— you know, that’s what the New Testament Church did. Anyone could get up and pray. It wasn’t just done from the front. So, it seemed very positive in my church I suppose. But as a deaf person…it wasn’t accessible to me at all. Although audiocentric and thus exclusionary, there were specific theological reasons for this spiritual norm of spontaneity in worship. Andrew contextualised his church’s spiritual culture as New Testament church-inspired, locating it in the milieu of the charismatic and Restorationist churches with which he was familiar. However, despite this theological rationale, the informality of congregational prayer, rather than prayer led from the front with a microphone, was inaccessible to Andrew. He found it difficult to see what could be done to assist with this, as the practice was so central to the cultures of the charismatic churches that he had attended.

In contrast, some participants found particular church styles and traditions more supportive of their access needs and impairment effects. For many, liturgical churches were a better fit for their needs, particularly those with high ritual content, such as Anglo-Catholic churches. For some, familiarity with liturgical order gave them a framework within which they felt safe. George (individual Skype text-based interview) was drawn to “high” Anglican liturgical church ritual specifically because its predictable familiarity was more accessible for her as a person with an autistic spectrum condition:

[G]enerally I like the services, we have our own musical settings and once I learned those…I could say the whole service from memory really…so it's very comfortable and comforting for me to have that routine and familiarity.

Mims (individual interview) found the familiarity of liturgy similarly comforting and reassuring, in the context of her mental health impairments. A church that she

occasionally attends instead of her home church had a non-liturgical structure, which could lead to access problems:

They often don’t follow a liturgy. I find a liturgy really helpful. Even if I am not going to church, I quite often read the services of the day. I often find it quite hard to pray on my own so following a formal service and also knowing many people around the world are saying similar things at the same time is really powerful to me.

Andrew, too, was more comfortable in liturgical churches where there was a clear structure or a service book which he could follow even when he could not hear the words. However, many of the churches he had attended were moving away from such structure. For Charlotte (focus group 2), too, churches’ shift from liturgical to informal styles of worship was concerning in terms of its potential impact on some disabled people, since she had known many who found liturgy helpful. Liturgical and sacramental church environments could be beneficial for those whose

impairments meant they preferred structure, predictability, and lower sensory input in church, which included all of the participants diagnosed with autistic spectrum conditions. However, the move of many churches towards more unstructured informality in their worship cultures, as part of church modernisation, negatively impacted a number of participants, while others were concerned about the potential effects on some disabled people.

However, it was not simply the case that liturgical churches were positive for disabled people’s inclusion and charismatic churches were negative. Many of the stories discussed above, including Brianna’s story of exclusion from her cathedral’s high altar, show how the inflexibility of “high” liturgical church cultures can also marginalise disabled people. Participants had a range of differing stories of

marginalisation through worship style and institutional culture, in both charismatic and liturgical churches, but many had in common experiences where the rigid

spiritual structures and cultures of those churches were given priority over the access needs of disabled congregants.