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Many Ways to Pray: Consenting to Shared Space as Worship

Rebecca F. Spurrier

Rebecca F. Spurrier serves as associate dean for worship life and assistant professor
of worship at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and is the author of
The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship.

Multiplicity and creativity in sacred space are made possible by those whose own bodyminds open up new possibilities both for human ritual and for God’s revelation through the expanding practices of worship leadership. 

My grandmother Ruth’s favorite word was “togetherness.” When she said it aloud, it was never just a word but rather a monument to the effort she put into gathering her family, flung across the world for a time, into a single space. These celebrations involved sitting for hours on couches, recliners, and the stone ledge of the hearth, with some of us cross-legged on the shag carpet of her living room floor. We listened to Scripture and family stories and remembered our relatedness to one another through slideshows. The in-laws spread a word of welcome and warning to newcomers to the family; it was important to find a comfortable seat. For when my grandmother succeeded in gathering us in, she meant to keep us together for as long as she could.

As one who directs chapel at a Christian seminary, I spend much of my time, like my grandmother, contemplating the conditions for shared space. I focus not on biological family but instead on those whose practices of worship vary widely, shaped by a breadth of contexts and traditions. I seek practices that can hold us together for a time, through written and extemporaneous prayers, in choreographed ritual and informal testimony, through silent affirmation and vocalized participation, sitting and standing, eyes open and closed in prayer, hands raised and stimming, sitting in a seat with others and sheltered in a corner drawing, gathered in across the multiplicity of traditions we identify as Christian worship. Like my grandmother, I trust that the Holy One is intent on holding us together through the varied lived experiences with which we inhabit this space. I also seek intentional collaboration with the Spirit of God in the unfolding of generous and accessible sacred space and time.

As a non-disabled liturgical theologian who centers disability in my understandings of Christian worship, I have come to believe that worshiping together requires those who pray to consent to the differences of our own bodies and the bodies of those with whom we pray. In consenting to the differences of others, I learn from siblings with disabilities who emphasize God as the creator of disability—a God who works out divine purposes in and through disability both because of God’s great love for people with disabilities and through divine pleasure in the variation in creation that God has made and continues to fashion and shape. Thus, to consent to human bodies in worship is also to assent to or agree with the God who has made each one in the divine image, deepening respect for each creaturely form and transforming practices of alienation in worship into a desire for those whom God has always cherished.

For most of my life, I considered gathering for worship itself to be an act of consent to shared space with others; because my body was in a certain place and time, I had agreed to be there and to participate in whatever happened with those who had gathered alongside me. But informed by greater awareness of ableism,1 among other forms of oppression in Christian congregations, I now assume otherwise. While Christians often emphasize the gift of an assembly of diverse humans, worshipers’ preferences and expectations both unintentionally and explicitly suppress the diversity and humanity of those with whom they pray. 

Disability theologian Nancy Eiesland describes this strange tension, observing that “the members of the church represent an essential diversity, interrelated by necessity and often hating the very differences that make us indispensable to one another.”2 Thus, in different ways than my ancestors, I consider the potential violence of Christian worship with greater awareness of that which alienates worshipers from one another even and especially when our bodies inhabit the same room. In a quest for more just worship spaces, I offer three sets of practices that inform my understandings of some conditions for consensual worship space: (1) worship as creative, multimodal, and expansive; (2) worship as explicitly invitational; and (3) worship as collaborative through addressing and transforming conflict. To explain these practices, I share insights from the ecumenical chapel spaces in which I lead worship alongside insights I have learned from disabled Christians and the disability community over the past twenty years. I also highlight wisdom drawn from interviews with disabled Christians in support of a collaborative worship project that is producing a forthcoming worship resource, Disability Wisdom in Worship and Prayer.3 

Consensual Worship through Creative, Flexible, and Multimodal Spaces

Where there is consent to the bodies that God has created, God reveals Godself through creative, flexible shared spaces for worship and through expansive names for God and understandings of the human person. In interviews with disabled Christians, worshipers testified to many different ways that they found connection with God and others through prayer in communal worship. As one person described: 

I really like various positions of prayer and so I’ve tried, you know, like the typical way in my pew is like sit, head down, pray. Right? Like fold your hands, close your eyes. There you go. You’re praying. I often pray with my eyes open because it’s too complicated for me to like close my eyes and relax and think and—like that’s—I can’t do all of those things. So people have thought that it’s weird when I’m praying with my eyes open. I used to be self-conscious of that. I’m not anymore. Or I’m less so. I also like to pray prostrate, like lying on the floor. 

While one worshiper emphasizes freedom in posture and gesture, another situates access to others as a primary concern as she emphasizes the freedom to bring her body to the same spaces as others:

I remember being able to sit on the row that I wanted to sit on in my wheelchair and just being more surrounded and not off in a corner. To be able to worship and hear people singing all around me and not way back in the back, and I have to watch everybody else. So more like being in the community. . . . Yeah. And then they have a pause for a greeting moment, I feel like I can actually participate because somebody is going to be right behind me, right beside me, right in front of me.

In this narrative, consenting to a diversity of needs in shared space requires making space for each one to intimately connect with the bodies of others. Simultaneously, shared space also requires making distance in worship possible so that those for whom social proximity produces anxiety or distraction may also worship. One of my students helped me understand the need to have a stim corner, a place set apart from rows of seats or pews, with fidgets for those who might need them in our worship. Based on her experience as a pastor of a congregation that centered neurodivergent participants, she found that it wasn’t enough just to have a stim corner; it was also important for pastors and other leaders to inhabit these spaces from time to time so that these sites for worship also became part of what the whole community valued and considered part of its sacred movement and activity. 

While some congregations frame multiple options as an accommodation to the preferred practices of a congregation, the disabled and neurodivergent worshipers from whom I continue to learn connect this multiplicity to the creativity of God and to freedom in relationship with God and others. Such multiplicity reflects the God who is known and named in many ways through Scripture and experience and through a freedom that God encourages and makes possible in worship. As another interview partner said,

The use of our bodies. The use of the instruments. You know. We’re to praise with everything. So if you’ve just got to wave your hand, wave your hand. Being in an environment where you’re free and people aren’t looking at you sidewise, like what are you doing? That is not, you know, that’s not proper decorum. And I’m always reminded of, well, David danced his clothes off. So, I mean I’m not trying to dance my clothes off but I’m going to get as close as I can, you know, to that experience. . . . When it comes to worship people should be able to be free to worship God however God tells them to worship.

Such freedom is further encouraged by the presence of disabled clergy and leaders. In other words, multiplicity and creativity in sacred space are made possible by those whose own bodyminds open up new possibilities both for human ritual and for God’s revelation through the expanding practices of worship leadership. One interview partner, for example, shared about changes that took place when she was serving communion because she could not hold communion elements. A TV tray in front of her supported the elements; her voice communicated that she was the one offering them to each one. Congregants had to learn that they were not “serving themselves” but that she was serving them through the use of her voice rather than through a physical gesture. Her own body broke open and multiplied one congregation’s communion practice into other sacred possibilities. Such creativity unfolds when disabled leaders are not only present in worship spaces but also presumed competent and encouraged to reshape those spaces and practices as faithful stewards of tradition rather than perceived as those who disrupt or interrupt sacred traditions.

Consensual Worship through the Generosity of Invitation

Summoning such diverse practices of gathering the bodies of worshipers into a common space, I continue to learn new aesthetics for worship that involve more explicit opportunities for each one to say yes or no to the rituals unfolding among us and to perceive the many ways to participate. Let me explain how I’ve changed. When I fell in love with the study of liturgy as an adult, it was the poetry of it that captured me. This poetry required an economy of language, relying as much on gesture and symbol as on spoken words to support a community. As I perceived it, announcements and detailed introductions to services were laborious and took time away from the real worship of the people. 

But in more recent years, as one who often gives an expansive welcome with detailed information about ways to participate in worship, I emphasize the generosity and beauty of ample instructions as a theology of consensual encounter with God. Such a welcome might gather in the one who needs to know they are welcome to sit, stand, or move about the room as the Spirit leads and the one who needs the option of a stim corner. Such instructions do not assume that each one can follow through a single form of communication but rather layer spoken words next to written ones on top of gestures in ways that some may feel redundant but that provide vital access for others. These explicit choreographies of worship make it plain that no one who gathers is an exception to a rule nor do they require a few of us to improvise our own ways into the liturgy because our access needs were not anticipated. Rather, consensual worship creates real options for each person present to say yes to any given practice. Thus, if in worship we say, “Stand if you are able,” participants in worship have only been given an exception to a preferred practice rather than a real choice to participate in worship; the community has made an exception but not acknowledged and invited the participation of those who may sit. Encouraging those who gather “to sit or stand as the Spirit leads” offers more than one explicitly valued form of participation. If I am asked to close my eyes and bow my head, but I need to keep my eyes open in order to see my interpreter or read the lips of the one who is praying, then I have not been offered a way of worship that takes into account my body in connection with the bodies of worshipers around me. Inviting worshipers to “assume a comfortable posture of prayer, praying with eyes open or closed” affirms that keeping one’s eyes open communicates as much reverence as closing them. Encouraging a community to share signs of peace in ways that respect differences in comfort with being touched may also involve articulating options verbally or through the use of name tags: bowing, hugging, shaking hands, or asking your neighbor the ways they prefer to be greeted. Practicing consensual rather than coercive worship requires that leaders anticipate the range of ways that each one who gathers accesses common worship and continue to modify our invitations to participate as we learn more about practices and access needs of those with whom we worship.

The Institute on Theology and Disability names this multiplicity as a complex phenomenon, an emphasis that is reflected in their annual meeting guidelines. Those gathered for their annual conference are urged to remember that 

any presentation may include people with apparent or non-apparent disabilities who require access/support in areas such as: vision/seeing, audio/hearing, kinesthetics/moving, expressive communication and/or processing/understanding information presented. There are diverse levels of access/support needs, which means while two people might each identify as visually impaired, they may individually find different supports to be helpful or necessary.4

Such explicit naming of differences helps to imagine communication in worship as a complex and dynamic process, continually responsive to those who are present and anticipating those who might desire to join both in person and in online modalities.

Honoring the creativity of God’s Spirit across multiple spaces in the same sanctuary also asks those who worship to honor the real embodied presence of those gathered across space and time, finding new ways to identify and welcome online worshipers to the creation of shared spaces. Livestream and recorded access to worship has helped some to imagine this multiplicity and freedom, anticipating alternate practices for those joining online and for those who are gathered in person while still honoring each one’s participation. Recognizing that those who worship do so through a range of mediated forms of access—such as glasses, PowerPoint slides, electric lights, microphones, and musical instruments—frames the use of livestream and recording technologies as one modality of technological access among many. While screens may be a form that makes it harder for some to feel connected to other worshipers, others are vitally connected to spaces that would otherwise be inaccessible. Disability communities often emphasize real connections made with those accessing worship through online mediums as an equally meaningful form of communion rather than as a lesser or nonideal form.

The poetry of the liturgy includes instructions that chart diverse options and choreographies for participants. These might take place at the start of a service but also punctuate our bulletins and slides. Such maps for participation might also be woven throughout a service: a reminder before passing the peace to seek consent in practices of touch or an invitation for live streamers to also participate during a time of greeting or testimony. My conversations with disabled Christians have emphasized the significance of clear and ample instructions for participation by recounting times when options were opaque or only one option was given. As one research partner explained, 

There are so many times where I love communion so much, but there are so many times where it is a really anxious experience for me. Pre-pandemic the community I was worshiping with most recently does communion by intinction every Sunday. And it’s kind of a dimly lit sanctuary, and I don’t super love standing in lines when I’m not sure if I can see the person in front of me. And so I would prefer to go up with someone, to have someone walk with me to get communion. In this particular setting I was usually going to church by myself. So it was always a fun game called “who am I going to find to ask to go up and get communion with me.” There is just never a real communal sense of how to get that need met.

Composing clear instructions for multimodal participation, I reorient my approach to liturgical invitation by prioritizing worship not simply from the time when a community gathers but also through the “holy logistics” that make a gathering possible before the service begins. When disability activists remind me that “access is love,”5 they also animate the planning, coordination, and logistics for services as acts of love: the careful choreographies of invitation that create and sustain the possibility of shared space. Disability communities also regularly remind me that in such practices of sacred preparation, access is not simply a checklist of options nor a practice of perfectionism but rather an act of offering to God and a trust in the gathered ones to improvise and adapt when explicit options or preparations have not been made.

Interdependence through Conflict and Collaboration in Worship

When I broach a theology and practice of consent in worship with others, I find that attention to human need appears to some as a distraction from an explicit focus on God, particularly as the adjudication of a range of human needs in worship often feels impossible. Multiplying options in a space ostensibly amplifies the freedom of some worshipers while also decreasing a feeling of connection to one’s neighbor for others. If my neighbor is standing while I am sitting or fidgeting while I am silent, or drawing while I am speaking, might that not remove me from the ones with whom I breathe and move in unison and also divert from the one to whom I pray? Yet attending to the witness of Christians who gather in spaces where they do not assume the privilege of a liturgy that has been shaped by and for bodies like theirs has revealed the social artistries and Spirit-led discernment that becomes possible when some of us relinquish our preferences so that others might become co-creators of worship spaces.6 For if Christian worship invites those who worship together to imagine and rehearse the future that God desires for God’s people, a future that imagines the flourishing of all creation, then new choreographies can also help worshipers practice this manifold and sometimes disorienting approach to God’s presence in fresh ways.

Of course, anticipating a multiplicity of bodies and relationships in worship may also feel constrained by the limits of a particular space and time: how can a single space be quiet and noisily exuberant, multisensory and low-sensory? Yet even here those of us who haven’t been practicing such modalities can learn from those of us who have: for disability centering communities have long fostered the navigation of multiple access needs not by assuming that all needs can be met perfectly or uniformly but that they all be considered worthy of time, attention, negotiation, and collaboration. Rather than assuming a utopian gathering where bodies fit together perfectly with others, disability communities demonstrate the co-creation of shared spaces as a collaborative work that anticipates tensions that emerge from divergent access needs. For example, in the Institute on Theology and Disability’s annual meeting guidelines, invitations to multiply forms of participation in a shared space also anticipate that some of our needs may conflict with the needs of others: 

Please attend to the needs of your body in this space. Move, lie down, sit, fidget, stim, switch seats, vocalize, rock, leave, use the toilet (wash your hands), get water/coffee/food, etc. In short, respond to yourself as needed without fear that you are being disruptive. If you find that you need to move to a different location within the room to avoid conflict with another participant (such as one needing to stim vocally and another needing quiet in order to focus), please feel free to do so quietly. We are a diverse community and everyone’s needs matter, so we will covenant to work together to establish a room in which everyone is welcome.7

God’s promise to be with those of us who have experienced oppression and alienation in worship means that attending to such experiences can itself be an encounter with the presence of God. 

In addition, anticipating and making explicit such tensions and conflicts summons those who worship to distribute the resources of a worship space more equitably so as to recognize that each one has a humanity worth offering to God. Negotiating differences in access to communal worship may also help congregations prioritize the access of some over the preferences of others and reorient budgets to reflect those priorities. Recognizing structural inequities can help to center those of us whose access needs are often ignored, disbelieved, or minimized. But to reorient worship in this way invariably requires hard conversations and a desire to be transformed by those with whom we pray. In this way, worship spaces become not only shared spaces of consent to the differences of those who gather but also resistance to forces of ableism that honor some of us and denigrate others. Sacred spaces are understood in relationship to times and places outside of worship spaces and to experiences of oppression that some members experience not only in congregations but also in schools, grocery stores, doctors’ offices, on public transportation, and in public parks. What might it mean to practice our sacred spaces as sanctuary from ableism rather than as complicit in practices where some bodies continue to matter more than others? Can those who worship together imagine and extend the abundance of God with one another?8

Conclusion

Before or after the stories, the Scripture, the prayers, and the slideshow, there was always a meal at my grandmother’s house. The meal had abundant options for food and drink, articulated by the women of the family in detail before the start of the meal. We circled around various tables, with different ways of accessing our common relatedness yet still gathered in the togetherness of the moment. Sometimes when I summon students, staff, and faculty for a communion rehearsal, I invoke the preparations and instructions for such a family feast, urging our worship leaders not to see the logistics of the meal as a burden or a checklist to get through as quickly as possible, but as a love song to a family gathered and to our knowledge of the many ways our extended kin need and desire access to this common prayer and meal. In this context, we seek to honor those who experience God’s presence by coming forward to drink from a common cup or from an individual plastic cup as well as all who stay seated to partake in the meal. We recognize those who participate in this meal through a blessing instead of eating, and those worshiping from their homes and offices, who have gathered their own elements. In all these ways, we who serve communion become co-creators with God’s Spirit present in and across our varied forms of participation, inviting us to map anew the shape and feeling of the sacred spaces in which we worship through the unity and diversity of our practices. We trust the God who has succeeded in gathering us to keep us together for a while by making provisions for each one to be nourished, and we partner with the Spirit of the risen Christ, the disabled God, to make it so.

Notes

  1. By ableism I indicate the systematic preference for non-disabled bodies that results in structures and systems that benefit some of us over others.
  2. Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 109.
  3. We anticipate this worship book will be available in the summer/fall of 2025. Those interested in receiving updates about publication should contact the author.
  4. “Accessible Presentation Guidelines,” Institute on Theology and Disability, Boston College, June 2024.
  5. See for example this entry in The Disability Visibility Project, https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2019/02/01/access-is-love/.
  6. I offer an extended meditation on these social artistries and collaborations in “Unfolding Space: Human Difference in Common Worship,” Call to Worship 51, no. 3 (2018).
  7. “Accessible Presentation Guidelines,” Institute on Theology and Disability, Boston College, June 2024.
  8. I offer an example of this within a specific congregation in “Disabling Eschatology: Time for the Table of Our Common Pleasure,” Liturgy 31, no. 3 (2016).
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