Revd Irene Lawrence reflects on how her lifelong experience of hearing loss has come together with her faith and calling to create a vision for future ministry in retirement.
Last year, September 2023, I entered St Mellitus College to undertake a blended “Caleb Stream” course/journey of discernment towards ordained ministry in the locality in which I have been serving in various leadership roles for most of my life. Last week, I was fortunate enough to be ordained Deacon with others from the Caleb Stream 2023/24 cohort. It was an interesting, yet challenging pathway, perhaps more so as I am hearing impaired.
From age 11, I was acknowledged as having some hearing loss but not significant enough for hearing aids. It wasn’t until I started teacher training that I was told by a deaf awareness trainer that I was a lip-reader. This was a surprise to me, but I had subconsciously been compensating in this way in situations where there was a lot of background noise. Deaf awareness is a valuable thing in being able to utilise simple strategies for myself, such as always sitting with the window or light behind me so that I didn’t have to look into the light (which is fairly impossible for a lip-reader). Sitting around round tables is much easier to communicate with everyone, sitting at the front to ensure I don’t miss anything in lectures and not being afraid to ask if unsure.
For many years I worked with children with additional needs, disabilities, mostly also neurodivergent and had five families who were deaf. I was determined to feed back to those parents as equally as I did with hearing parents and so eventually began to attend sign-language (BSL) classes, which I did for eight years, but all came to a halt when Covid hit.
I am one of four in our church who sign on two Sundays of the month, which keeps me in some practice. However, my desire is to continue to utilise my signing both inside and outside the church. Romans 10 says “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?” and so this is my motivation, now and in the future – to be able to share the love of Christ with others who need this communicated in their preferred way, whether BSL or simplified for learning disabilities. I hope, therefore, that I will be able to do this within my ministry as I move forward in my curacy.
I have felt God’s call on my life from a young age, but I don’t feel “hearing from God” was impacted by my hearing loss. My experience in “calling” was more to do with understanding the many ways in which God can communicate with and through us. More likely the world view can be a deterrent or contribute to lack of confidence, but God has always been the opposite – positively empowering me to overcome obstacles of inaccessibility to a place of relying on the Holy Spirit to motivate and teach me, as it says in Isaiah 57: “build up, build up, prepare the road! Remove the obstacles out of the way of my people”, and that is what I hope to do with God’s help.
This article first appeared in Disability Ministry News. Subscribe to the quarterly newsletter here.
