Born with a speech impairment and born into the church, I spent the first thirty years of my life wondering how to make sense of my impairment in the context of being a follower of Christ. 

As a child and a teenager, I thought God was going to heal me by miraculously making my speech and coordination ‘normal” so I could serve God. 

When this didn’t happen, I wondered how I could serve God. My speech seemed a barrier to any form of ministry.

As a person committed to Christ, I continued to be fully involved in church particularly youth ministry and social justice concerns. Although growing in faith, I continued to wrestle with understanding where my impairment/disability fitted within the framework of Christianity.

 Many of the “helpful” explanations such as, "You are a special gift to the church", or, "God has given you an impairment to help other people to learn about compassion", made me cringe. These explanations seemed to be at odds with a theology of social justice.

My speech was a barrier to getting paid employment. Professionals encouraged me to seek work where I wouldn’t need to talk, and certainly I could not have a career where I needed to communicate with people. This proved very difficult.

I felt confused and mixed-up inside because my desire was to work with people – like most other people I knew. Meanwhile my time was spent honing life skills, including communication skills, through youth ministry and university.

I was involved in leadership positions where I learnt to communicate effectively with a wide range of people. Many a time people affirmed my skills – and added that my speech was always a problem. 

Doing Education for Ministry (EFM) in the early 1990s, I came across the story of Moses having a speech impairment, and it dawned on me that maybe God could use me with my speech impairment after all. 

I often refer to this as a third conversion experience in terms of Christian faith. No longer did I see that impairment as a barrier to Christian ministry.

Reading “The Disabled God: towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability,” by Nancy Eiesland felt like a home coming. Finally here was some theological writing that helped me to understand my experience of impairment within a Christian framework. About that time, I attended  a conference on Religion, Health, Spirituality and Disability in Australia.

This conference took the dialogue between spirituality and disability seriously. There, I had a major realisation that this dialogue goes to the core  of understanding the human condition, because we are all mortal, none of us live for ever. Our bodies are fragile and break down easily.  

This is the reality, and the church as a faith institution should be about helping us all to navigate our lives as human, spiritual beings in bodies that are fragile. Disability should not be on the margins of church, rather in the centre, because the conversation between spirituality and disability is about what it is to be human. 

Over the next few years as I explored disability and faith, not only did my faith deepen, but there were many opportunities to be in ministry both within the church and beyond. I started by working with others on a disability policy “Holy, Wholly Accessible” for the Diocese of Wellington, then establishing the Disability, Spirituality and Faith Network and attending international meetings through the World Council of Churches. My current role is as one of two Disability Ministry Educators in the Anglican Church. 

Far from being a barrier to ministry, speech impairment has enabled deeper faith and a vocation beyond what was thought possible.

Surely this is resurrection.  

The Reverend Vicki Terrell serves as one of the two Disability Ministry Educators for the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia.