The Rev’d Dr Dan Warnke serves as Chaplain of Westminster School and is a member of the Diocese of London’s Disability Working Group. The following is an adaptation of a reflection originally shared at the group’s spring meeting, exploring how the lived experience of disability offers a vital theological perspective that challenges prevailing institutional assumptions about autonomy, independence, and human flourishing.
When we gather as a disability working group, we do not come as observers of an issue. We are not analysing disability from a safe theoretical distance. Our own bodies—our neurological pathways, energy levels, pain, adaptations, and limits—are already part of the conversation, and that matters; not only socially but theologically, too. One of the most persistent assumptions shaping modern Western life is the ideal of autonomy: the self-sufficient, rational, independent individual. It is an attractive idea, but ultimately a fiction. The legal theorist Maxine Eichner powerfully exposes this by examining the arc of a human life.1 As many of us know first-hand, some people will never live fully independent lives due to physical or neurological impairment. Yet across the course of life, all of us will, at some point, experience illness or incapacity and be dependent on care. Autonomy, if it exists at all, is partial and temporary—made possible only through others. Dependency is therefore not the exception, but the rule.
If that is true socially, it is even more so theologically. We are creatures, created and sustained in our very being by the will of God. As such, we are dependent upon God and, in turn, one another. So, the idea of the self-sufficient human being has always sat uneasily with Christian anthropology. And yet, contemporary ecclesial structures often mirror the same liberal illusion that autonomy is a telos (the ideal we aim for). In the Church of England, we quietly assume that a healthy parish is autonomous, financially viable, numerically growing, and self-sustaining. As such, dependency—whether organisational, financial, or pastoral—is implicitly encoded as a mode of ‘weakness’ or ‘failure’ (though no one will ever say this as such). Accordingly, struggling churches are frequently rationalised, merged, closed, or absorbed to form a ‘viable’ benefice. But what if that very instinct reflects a theological distortion or aberration? What if we have allowed the cultural myth of autonomy to shape not just our social imagination and public policy but ecclesiology itself?
This is perhaps where the lived experience gathered in the Disability Working Group becomes more than simply an accommodation; it becomes prophetic, because disability does not allow the illusion of autonomy to survive contact with the real world. It exposes its fragility. It reveals that care is not marginal but constitutive. That interdependence is not sentimental but structural. And this is where Dietrich Bonhoeffer might become something of our guide. Bonhoeffer’s theology was not abstract speculation; it was forged amid estrangement, marginalisation, and the violent distortions of State power. He understood that when the church uncritically absorbs the assumptions of its surrounding culture, it loses its truthfulness. For Bonhoeffer, the church was a visible community under Christ, bound not by self-sufficiency but by bearing one another’s burdens. He wrote from prison about ‘costly grace’ and ‘life together’, not as ideals, but as realities tested by suffering and marginalisation.2 And because the precarity of life shaped his theology, it still speaks to contexts where vulnerability is not theoretical but real.
The encouragement, then, is this: our experience, and the experience of all disabled and neurodivergent people, is not peripheral to the church’s self-understanding. It is the interpretative lens we look through, a hermeneutic, a way of witnessing. It casts light on distortions that the wider society and church may not notice. If dependency is inescapable across the course of our life, as Eichner suggests, and if the church is the body of the crucified Christ—wounded, dependent, limited, yet sustained by grace, then dependency cannot be the deficit we have become accustomed to. Rather, it becomes a site of divine encounter. Reimagining the church through this hermeneutic of disability does not lower our expectations. It clarifies them. The church is not a network of efficient, independent units competing for viability. It is a communion of communities, sustained by mutual care. Not growth-driven, but grace-dependent. So, when we speak from our lived experience—of limitation, care needs, frustration, endurance, joy—we are not stepping outside theology, we are helping the church to recover a deeper sense of its grounding in Christ. And that recovery is no small contribution, but the essential work of theology.
Notes
1 Maxine Eichner, “The Supportive State: Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 87–88.
2 Dietrich BonhoeSer, Life Together, trans. SCM Press Ltd, 5th ed. (London: SCM, 1954), 24–25; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, Anniversary ed. (London: SCM Press, 2015), 3.