Aspie Faith and Ministry

The following is in response to some friends and cohorts asking for my reaction to: Church Stories: Embracing Faith as an Aspie (by Erin Thomas) as found on Rachel Held Evans' blog.

When I awoke this morning I had a plan:

1. Get up
2. Get ready
3. Go see Wife and Mother in Law downstairs
4. Check email and social media
5. Test and take medicine (diabetic)
6. Get to work on polishing my sermon for Sunday

I have Aspergers' syndrome, I like my plans.  I need them to keep my stress level in check some days. But this morning, like many mornings, things didn't go as planned.  As soon as I got downstairs and on my computer there were a number of people asking what I thought about this blog.  Suddenly the TV was loud, my clothes were uncomfortable (tags, I hate them sometimes) and my focus was shot.  I was off of the plan, but because I was asked for an opinion, I needed to respond. So here we go:

A little background into my own experience as an Aspie in the church.  I was in some ways lucky, I was introduced to the faith at 4 at a random baptist VBS that I went to for just one night.  I heard the closing speaker talk about having a real friend in Jesus and that's what got me.  I'm an extrovert, an EXTREME extrovert who is always seeking interactions with others, of course as an Aspie, I don't adhere to social norms well at all and take everything too too literally, so friends are not something I make at all easily.  But the idea of a friend who would never leave you hooked me.  They then dunked me and gave me a bible, telling me it was all about Jesus and this relationship.  I went home and read the whole thing over the next few days. The bible is gibberish to a 4 yr old, but I did scribble down lots of questions to ask.

I got into church after that, I needed some place where people could answer my questions.  Many Aspies tend to have obsessions, things they get stuck on and love to talk about.  I certainly do.  I love theology, quantum physics and human communication theory.  My desire to make the bible make sense is key to my faith because of this.  It should be noted that I was not diagnosed until I was an adult, I didn't know for much of my childhood what I was doing was weird, or that you weren't supposed to question certain things.  I was obsessed with making the Bible and later this whole Christianity thing make sense. This continues today, even as I am now out of Seminary and in the ministry.

Back to the blog response.

Point 1: STOP SCARING KIDS! I have a number of kids in my church on the spectrum (Autistic, Aspie, etc.), one of whom asked me "how does the devil get you?" I remember thinking about that sort of thing due to pop and Christian culture. This child thought the devil was going to grab him and pull him underground to hell when he had done too many bad things.  This sort of cheap theology is junk, and does nothing more than what Erin says in her post. It leads to people who cannot get around fear and worry and that can continue an entire lifetime.  Every time we tell a kid something, some are going to believe it completely as the one and only truth, which leads to

Point 2: The church needs to leave space for people to think and form their own viewpoints, not give a set of rules and standards.  One of my earliest struggles was between a God who is Love and a God who punishes.  I didn't get it.  I played so much by the rules that told to stay somewhere when my parents had to rush to the hospital, our neighbors had to cover me in blankets for the night because I wouldn't go in with them. "Mom told me to stay here." So the punishment never scared me as such, I just did it because I was told to.  But I didn't GET punishment, and couldn't picture a God who wanted to create also wanting to destroy.  Even those of us who tend to preach and teach a fully God is Love gospel often define what that love is to look like in no uncertain terms "Boycott this, listen to them, fight against that teaching."  For those of us who are extremely logical and for many others this is nonsensical.  We have got to work on helping people be faithful to the things they feel called to and not making so many universal statements on contextual things.

Point 3: STOP THE GAME!  This is a hard one, but win-lose Christianity is bull, and we need to get away from it.  We don't know what happens after this world, and the world here has enough games of its own without us adding one about heaven and hell on top of it all.  Yes, there is some peace in knowing of a loving God beyond death, but we are called to act here justly and to change the rules of the world's games.  To add the salvation game on top of things not only leads most Aspies to worry and stress, but I see it happening in so many NTs as well.

Point 4: The relational aspect of Christianity needs to be addressed better.  My obsession with Human Communication Theory and my extroversion  make this a hard one for me.  Relational Christianity is an issue for Aspies, myself included.  Most also are introverts, and as Erin says playing the social extroverts game and forcing ourselves to meet those social norms will basically make us all want to go hide and recover.  In some ways it's even harder as an Aspie Extrovert, I NEED that interaction and connection, but pretty much fail to find it because I'm so socially uncomfortable, and even when I start getting close, I may just melt down from the exhaustion of trying to meet social norms.  Yes, I do believe that we are relational creatures, but there is in the church a power imbalance that favors extroverts and NTs and that needs to be changed.  We need to look at ways to connect to the entire spectrum of humanity and do more to bring balance to our faith.

Point 5: We need to do more to help people understand that we're all different and that's okay.  Not only is it okay, it needs to be EMBRACED by the church.  It's not enough to say "Sammy is autistic so it's okay that he doesn't sit through the service."  But we need to find better ways to embrace our differences and do more  to allow all to be fully part of church and a shared faith.  I'm not going to remember your name, but I can probably engage with you on certain topics very well. That is okay and encouraged.  I think by turning Christianity into a social extrovert's game we've actually done a real disservice to what it means to be in relationship.  I am very capable of sharing your burden, very capable of emphasizing with you,  very capable of walking with you, allow me to do that.  How we form relationships is not one size fits all, and that is good.

Point 6: Not just for Aspies, but for most all, we need to realize that some parts of church are actually hurtful.   To ask one to be social, vulnerable, connected, loved, touched, joyful, open, and other things means potentially asking someone to not just be uncomfortable and pushed to grow, but often to open up hurts to a point where love and trust fail.  We are quick to judge.  I have worked hard to make eye contact, but it is exhausting, but because I can I'm judged as "not acting like an Aspie".  I have a youth who if they haven't found comfort in EXACTLY what's going to happen at an event will only be found under a blanket in a ball in her car.  Her mom told me once that if she did it again she'd be punished, I responded that we needed to get better about meeting her needs because it seemed if she was punished enough by being asked to come.  This needs to change.  We need to adjust and meet people, not expect others to go where it hurts.

Point 7: We need to change soon.  Too many people are hurt by the church, not because we intentionally do things to harm them, but because we are busy playing our games and think everyone should play along.  We miss how what we do can create anxiety, confusion, depression, fear, and guilt.  We need to hear the voices of those who can see where teachings have gone haywire, those like Erin who stay with the faith even when so much of it seems like it was crazy.  God did not create any of us to be distanced from God.  I found a friend in God because of my Aspie-ness, it was the logic that brought me to a loving God, one who called us to be faithful in our attempts at acting in this world.  Reading Erin, I realize how easy it would have been to have needed to find this in spite of my Aspie-ness.  That's scary my friends, we're pushing away more and more people by playing these games.  We need to change, we need to hear these voices, we need to stop the games that look a lot like those the world plays, and create something new that looks completely different where all of our complexities are truly welcome, and not just (at best) "understood".  That's our call, let's stop playing around.

Thank you Erin for sharing your journey and thoughts.  Her blog is The Underground Railroad.


Now off to test and take my meds. :)

Human Communication and Social Media

I love social media, I truly do.  As an Aspie, it has been a wonderful way to get closer to people without the difficulties I have in normal social situations.  I've met people I never would, shared great ideas, gotten closer to people who I may have just barely known otherwise.  Yet, those who know me know I go against the grain when it comes to the idea that we can form community from social media alone.

My issue has always been based on issues of how much we share with each other in these places and the types of connections we form.  We tend to gravitate towards the extremes, towards those who share views close to our own, or in some cases towards conflict with those on far poles from us.  It seems that many people just form pseudo-communities based around ideological or demographic similarities.  There's nothing wrong with these relationships, but if you read my previous blog posts you will know that I don't think these things can be the basis for community as defined from a Human Communication perspective.

Well, now I'm adding a new piece to this.  I've spent some time today reading and researching on the idea of a global/cosmic consciousness (or 6th sense).  In studying this, I begin to really see patterns that show that we "think" with some idea of each other, that we don't just react but that we connect to each other and all of creation with some commonality of thought or common desire.  A "God Spark" if you wanted to make it theological.  But studies show that the level of connection over distance is significantly weaker than that of people who are closely connected through local communities that interact physically.  Much like magnetism, the closer we are to one another, the more this global thought is shared.  These are not common opinions, but emotional responses and physical subconscious reactions.  This is not saying we can make each other think alike, rather that we share a deep emotional, maybe even spiritual connection.  It is the feeling we're being watched, it is these moments that come from a physical experience, not just one through interaction of ideas (social media's base).  Our emotions are not just reactions, but do seem linked to something bigger and greater than individual moments.

It also makes me wonder about myself as an Aspie, I really want to find some research about the subconscious activity of people with Asperger's syndrome. Some of this research tonight on human emotions and how we understand them individually and in community seems to indicate to me it is those connections that act differently in Aspies. We don't read faces well, we don't act according to social norms, is it possible that my extreme logic is something connected to being somehow disconnected from the global consciousness. Yet, studies also show that some Aspies have a higher level of premonition than normal, so this would say we're still connected but less reactive and more proactive. So I want to ask: do we move outside the collective consciousness or do we just connect differently? Regardless of this answer: How does that effect how we view and understand God? 

All of this put together makes me wonder if my response to social media is based on personal experiential evidence, or if there is something real that social media can't recreate?  I am convinced that there is something more to physical contact that even the best connections through electronics cannot recreate.  For that reason, I plead for those who feel alone to seek community in places like churches where not everyone thinks the same.  I plead for churches to be those places, places where we can walk faithfully seeking and discerning, not being indoctrinated and conformed to ideological ideals.  I hope that what we find out about our commonality as humanity, be it a global consciousness or not, is the key to what brings us together into community.  For it is that commonality, that "image of God" in all of us, that truly can change the world.