Inclusion matters

The Very Rev Dr John Chalmers reflects on the importance of welcome and inclusiveness.

WITHIN its Faith Action Programme the Church of Scotland has formed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Working Group. Its task is to help us address areas of our life where prejudice, discrimination and bias still exist.

We do try to be people who are welcoming, understanding and without prejudice, but we don’t always get it right.

We also like to think that, if there is any kind of prejudice or discrimination in our ranks, it must have crept in from outside, but history reveals a different story. The reality is that as long as human beings have been on the earth they have found ways of sticking to their own kind and excluding those who are different. Evidence of this is even found in the scriptures which underpin our Christian faith.

I wish that Leviticus chapter 21 was not in the Bible. It is a litany of discrimination which gives licence to prejudice and bars those described as “defective and disfigured” (two of the less derogatory terms used) from making an offering to God or joining the ranks of the priesthood.

So, it is a fact that the kind of thinking that leads to exclusion is present in the story of our faith.

Of course, Leviticus 21 is not the stuff of Jesus, but it is the stuff that Jesus stood up to and, it is a matter of great significance that many of the stories told about Jesus have him associating with and reaching out to the people that his society had expelled to the margins. The woman with the haemorrhage (Mark 5) who was considered unclean, the lepers (Luke 17) that others excluded and stories of the paralysed (Mark 2) and the disturbed (Luke 8) are but a few instances where Jesus breaks with the accepted norms of his time. In doing so he was signalling a new way of dealing with difference and disability and he was signalling that the nature of God’s love was unconditional.

Sadly, the stuff of some of these ancient, unevolved ideas is still around. It is the failure to see people as valuable in their own right. In essence, discrimination begins with the failure to see the image of God in every person.

Let me share a personal story. I had an older sister, her name was June and she had that rare (becoming even rarer) additional cell division associated with chromosome 21. In other words, she had that extra genetic material which describes a person as having Down’s Syndrome. June was born into a Scotland that thought she would have a short life and that it would be best spent behind the closed doors of an institution.

My parents would have none of that and June lived till she was 56 years of age and for almost all of that time she stayed within the family circle. She was born into a Scotland where she was described as “mentally handicapped” and where she had very little opportunity for development. When she died some 20 years ago she left behind a Scotland that had begun to realise that people like her had tremendous potential. The charity that my father helped to found had changed its name to Enable, because there was a realisation that with the right support folk like June could take their place integrated into the community.

“In essence, discrimination begins with the failure to see the image of God in every person.

June may have been one of the first adults with Down’s Syndrome to be admitted to communicant membership of the Church of Scotland. This was down to the openness of a minister and Kirk Session who recognised that June “belonged” in their community.

We still have some way to go before we understand the full nature of how to include those, who in the past, we have excluded, but in Jesus’ name that is what we have to do, and the Equality Diversity and Inclusion Group will help us to get there.