We’ve been doing some listening lately. And in that listening we have heard powerful things.
As The Banquet Network is working to develop a training on disability for international missionaries, we’ve had the opportunity to listen to people with disabilities, across the world, share with us what they want missionaries to know. There is a significant theme that has continued to emerge in these interviews: people with disabilities want missionaries to care about disability, because it is in Christ that they have found purpose.
It seems that for many people with disabilities, their deep longing for purpose—a longing common to all, but perhaps heightened in those that the world so often deems inferior—was first realized when they came to know Jesus. Apart from Jesus, the message they absorbed from the world around them was that they were not able to live meaningfully. But in Christ they were equipped and empowered through His Spirit to find and live a divine purpose. And this is not only a sentimental truth: we’ve seen it to be tangibly true, again and again. People impacted by disability serving as comforters, counselors, disciplers, Bible interpreters, and on and on; filling each of these roles with unique gifts that have grown out of their experience.
Photo credit: wooozxh on Unsplash.com.
These interviews have reminded us that belief in Jesus launches all of us on a journey in which we are given a distinct and essential purpose. There is a longing in all of us to find that purpose and live it. When we beckon people to faith in Jesus, we are also inviting them into purpose and meaning. We are inviting them into the flow of that beautiful text in Ephesians 2:8-10:
”For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
We believe. And then we enter into good work that God has prepared for us.
It’s a beautiful journey. Join us in praying for international missionaries, that God would equip them to invite people with disabilities into this life of faith and purpose.
Hunter and Amberle Brown help lead an organization called The Banquet Network that is based in Baltimore, MD. The Banquet Network primarily works with church plants to inspire, equip, and resource them to reach people with disabilities who are on the margins of their communities. Hunter works full time at Goucher College and is a part-time Masters of Theology student at St. Mary’s Ecumenical Institute in Baltimore. Amberle works full-time for World Relief, an international health and development NGO, and is passionate about helping churches include and reach people with disabilities based on her own experience of becoming visually impaired and her encounters with people with disabilities in her work in developing countries.
