Where churches and workplaces alike are trying to address accessibility, this is long overdue and much needed. But recently, the accessibility of communication has come to the fore: how we present information, how much notice we give, how we make space for people who process the world differently, whether through ADHD, autism, or other forms of neurodivergence. The awareness-raising and training that has grown up around this is good and necessary, and I don’t want anything that follows to be heard as a retreat from it, quite the opposite.
I think there’s a risk in how the conversation is sometimes framed at the moment: as though the work of adjustment runs in one direction only, from a “typical” communicator toward someone whose needs must be accommodated. In practice, communication is rarely that simple. Someone can do everything the training asked of them (think carefully, structure a plan clearly, present it in good faith, allow plenty of processing time etc) and still find someone comes back to them needing it entirely reframed, reprocessed, recommunicated from scratch. That may, in some cases, genuinely be a shortfall in how the first person communicated. But it may also be something else: that the first person’s own way of thinking and communicating is shaped by a kind of mental processing that doesn’t map cleanly onto what’s being asked of them either.
Think, for instance, of someone whose thinking and communication is shaped by bipolar-spectrum experience who has to maintain a high degree of self-awareness about where they sit within their own mental cycle, and whose clearest, most confident mode of communicating can be genuinely difficult for some neurodivergent folk to follow. That colleague may already be working harder to reframe their thinking and how they communicate it for particular people as a result of neurodiversity awareness training. But when that does not suffice and a bespoke reframing and re-presenting is demanded, there is a real, (and often considerable) emotional and mental cost to that repeated reframing (and it’s worth noting that the people placing that demand on them are often not younger folk navigating a generational divide, but people the same age, who may have little sense of the weight involved in what they’re asking for).
I’m not making a case for retreating from accessibility or accommodation when it comes to neurodiversity – quite the opposite. But I do think we rarely admit, within discussions about neurodiversity, that the load can run more than one way, and that naming this honestly is part of taking the whole conversation seriously rather than undermining it. If we treat neurodivergent folk purely as a problem to be solved through one-way accommodation on the part of “neurotypicals”, we do them a disservice, because we imply the difficulty is theirs alone, rather than something shared and mutual. The better question isn’t “how do we fix the deficit,” but “how do we work well together when our different ways of processing genuinely make things harder for one another?”. We especially need to work out in dialogue how those of us who are neurotypical, but whose own processing carries its own particular oddities, can learn to do better by folk we find hard going, not because they are the problem, but because two different ways of thinking are, when put together, hard work.
There’s a helpful concept in autism research that speaks directly into this: the “double empathy problem,” first written about by Damian Milton. The idea is that the difficulty of communication between autistic and non-autistic people isn’t a one-directional deficit sitting inside the autistic person, but a breakdown in mutual understanding that can happen whenever two people with very different ways of experiencing the world try to connect: a problem for both parties. I find this a helpful frame for my own thinking about this.
“I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” — Psalm 139:14 is a marvellous anchor verse. Tim Goode, in his book Breaking, not Broken: Ableism and the Church after Constantine, writes movingly of how this verse has served as something of a daily prayer for him as a disabled person.
I think that verse matters enormously for what I’ve been pondering, because how we communicate is closely akin to how we present our very selves to one another, something self-defining. If our starting point is praising God for who we are, the focus shifts. Our vulnerability, and how we express ourselves in how we communicate, is itself part of how our lives worship God. However each of us communicates, we’re equally capable of praise, and equally made in the image of God, fearfully and wonderfully. How we process our ideas and communicate in all our diverse and imperfect ways is a means through which each of us adds a distinct voice to the eternal praises of the Church, the praises of the saints in heaven. I think the diversity of that praise brings God great joy.
We’re not called to attain some kind of perfection in our bodies, our minds, or the way we communicate in order to make us worthy in God’s sight. Yes, things that limit us or diminish us are things we can bring honestly before God in prayer, seeking healing love and peace. But we need to know how loved we are, that our personhood is a reflection of God’s very self, and how we communicate, however imperfectly, mirrors part of our very selves, mirrors the image of God in which we are made.
When we look to the risen Christ, he still bears the wounds of the cross. Even now, seated at the right hand of the Father, those wounds remain, not erased by resurrection, but taken up into glory. Those wounds testify to violence done to Christ by human sinfulness, yet these marks of disability have their place in the glory of heaven. So we have confident hope in a God who does not discard the marks of what he has suffered, and who meets us, however imperfectly we communicate or embody Christ together, without demanding we first attain some unmarked perfection. The idealized Roman images of human perfection, captured in marble sculptures, which filled their view of heaven is not a Christian image at all, far removed indeed from the disabled Christ in glory. But these are images which have polluted Christian thinking and corrupted our approach to impairment, diversity, and disability.
When we look at the disciples, they were a varied and imperfect bunch of people, and they changed the world by being faithful to their calling to follow Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are called to a similar faithfulness. So part of the answer to our communication difficulties as human beings, and particularly within the Church, is to recognise that the Holy Spirit has a particular role in communication: that we need to pray for the Spirit’s to bring us closer together across our differences, just as the Spirit did among the diverse and divided company of the early Church in Acts.
That diversity of opinion, misunderstanding, and cross-cultural miscommunication is something Paul addresses again and again in his pastoral letters. Think of his public confrontation with Peter at Antioch over Jewish and Gentile table-fellowship (Galatians 2:11–14), or the factionalism in Corinth, where believers had split into rival camps around favourite leaders shaped by different cultural loyalties (1 Corinthians 1–4). These weren’t merely doctrinal disputes; they were people talking past one another out of genuinely different ways of thinking, living and communicating – exactly the kind of difficulties I’ve been pondering here! Nothing is new under the sun.
So come, Holy Spirit. Fill the hearts of your people. Help us to hear one another, and to hear what you are saying to your Church across all our diversity. Amen.
These are imperfect and exploratory ponderings and I welcome comments, challenges, and corrections, especially from people with relevant lived experience.
Vicar of Villages 
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