Four accessibilities

 At an earlier point in my life I was a Methodist minister.

My first pastorate was a kind of hit-the-ground-running situation while I was still training. At that time I was the free-church chaplain for our hospice, and involved in a prison chaplaincy run by another Methodist minister in our Circuit, and I was a Local Preacher (a prerequisite for training for presbyteral ministry in the Methodist Church). I had a particular interest in inclusive church, and what that might mean. At that time I was also writing books and raising a family — my five children were aged between five and twelve.

During this time, the Methodist Church had a motion brought to Conference (its national governing body) that all people who were 'actively' homosexual, and all people who spoke up for them, should be debarred from lay or ordained office and church membership. Looking back, I think it was good that happened, because it was such an extreme position that it acted as the catalyst for change in the Methodist Church. The President of Conference that year (Revd Brian Beck) prevented antagonism escalating into schism by adroitly channelling it into being a pastoral issue (rather than a matter of governance) and so set the frame for slow and consultative exploration of that whole area of morality and social structure. 

But it didn't look like a good thing at the time. I panicked because. if it had gone through, I — an ordinand and Local Preacher — would have found myself no longer even a church member. I am personally heterosexual, but I certainly wanted to speak up for homosexual brothers and sisters.

I should make clear that I am dismayed by what that area of inclusion has now morphed into — trans life experience morphing into first a tribal identity and then an agenda and then an ideology with downward seepage into the lives of young children, both in terms of conceptual influence and on to puberty blockers and then surgery. It starts even with pre-schoolers and I am not comfortable with any of that. But back in the timeframe I'm talking about, what I wanted to support (still do) was full inclusion on the same basis as heterosexual Christians for homosexuals who were happy to make the same commitment to permanent, stable, faithful, sacramental partnerships. 

So battle royal broke out in our church — it was on the Evangelical end of the spectrum, and the inclusion of homosexual members was unthinkable to many of our people. About a third of the membership left, and the minister found it all too much and moved on, leaving a church membership torn apart and now with no leader. So the Methodist Church let me add being its minister to my list of things to do.

Into the painful gap left by the very able departing members — nearly all our musicians, and several had been church leaders of one kind or another — stepped a posse of profoundly disabled people who attended that church. As I was given the leadership, I was free to preach and teach and promote an emphasis on inclusive church. We looked at ways to make our church family-friendly and disability-friendly, with ramps and a disabled toilet and a hearing loop, and armchairs for those who couldn't sit on a regular pew, and a big area with toys and books and beanbags for kiddies.

The church grew, in a variety of ways I won't go into or it would make this post go on for ever, along the lines of a set of principles I had in mind, that I thought of as the four accessibilities:

• Accessibility of the building
• Accessibility of the worship
• Financial accessibility
• Social accessibility

What that meant was as follows:

Accessibility of the building is familiar to us now (not so much then). We looked at what we could do to make it a welcoming space for people with various disabilities (eg wheelchair-dependent, or hearing impaired), and for children, and people with cognitive disorders (some of our people could only crawl and couldn't sit up straight) — we did what we could to make it a place that felt welcoming and friendly to everyone. Bottom line: people won't come if they can't get in.

Accessibility of the worship meant presenting high-quality theology in a form that all ages and abilities could relate to. Many of our members with disabilities were brought to church by care home staff, who brought sweets to eat and magazines to read, to keep themselves occupied while the church service went on. My goal as preacher Sunday by Sunday was to get to the place where the care workers forgot to not listen, and put down their magazines and stopped eating. We also involved a whole raft of theatre people and musicians from our town who had no church affiliation. They came to help out with the music; they stayed because they felt at home.  We placed a strong emphasis on the music ministry, because in the stories of the Old Testament, at important times like parting the Red Sea or going into battle, the band always went in first. And we placed a strong emphasis on repetition; we stuck to a relatively small repertoire of songs, we would take our time (weeks or months) over developing a spiritual teaching, and we always had a sung form of the Lords Prayer (tradition words not the new form) to embed it by familiarity. We did other things too, like a strong emphasis on story. And I had a belief that if people don't enjoy it they won't come back; so we had a good time.

Financial accessibility meant that both rich and poor could come to church on an equal basis. There were no fundraisers to catch you out or embarrass you. Whoever you were, you could just come. Twice a year we put on a community project of some kind — a pantomime or a  tea dance with strawberries-and-cream teas or the performance (all hands on deck) of a kind of oratorio type thing, with dance as well as songs and readings etc, which I and my children's father had written. We had faith teas (potluck suppers). Everything was free. I believe in the grace/gift economy. We were able to pay our bills. The membership grew. No one was ashamed or embarrassed or left out because they couldn't afford to join in.

Social accessibility meant that we kept everything simple so no one felt left out. Nothing was fancy or pretentious. We had all sorts in that church, from intellectuals and professional people right down to street drinkers still clutching their cans of beer (removed at the door on the way in). In those days I always used to preach in bare feet, and that, too, meant what we did wasn't elegant and out of reach.

It was an exciting and joyous stretch of ministry. I have happy memories of it. We had a wide spectrum of music — everything from Parry's I was glad to old choruses from Youth Praise. I specially remember the Sunday we sang the Hallelujah chorus from Handel's Messiah. Our choir was a motley bunch of old ladies, not very good, but we were augmented by a crowd of music theatre performers who had sort of made it their church. It was splendid. It was glorious. And as the last Hallelujah rang out, I caught the eye of one of the old ladies in the choir, just bowled over by being part of something so triumphant and magnificent. And then in the silence at the end of it, one of our learning disabled men said loudly, "Well, ain't that nice!" It certainly  was.

All so long ago now, but I will never forget it, and I still believe in those four accessibilities.