THE Archbishops’ Council has awarded £2.4 million to fund a series of initiatives designed to extend the participation of deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent people in church life.
Projects include vocation and leadership events, church guidance on signage and accessibility, mental-health chaplains, and deaf ministry.
The funding, announced on Thursday, is an element of the £1.2 billion in distributions for the Church’s ministry announced by the Church Commissioners in 2022 for the present triennium, 2023 to 2025 (News, 13 May 2022). This represented a 30-per-cent increase from the £930 million apportioned for the previous triennium.
This latest award can be distributed in grants over the subsequent three years, managed by the Church’s Disability and Deaf Ministry Task Groups.
One of the pilot schemes set to receive a grant is for the creation of more café-style spaces in churches across seven dioceses, in partnership with mental-health professionals and the charity Renew Wellbeing.
The Bishop of Bedford, the Rt Revd Richard Atkinson, who chairs the Committee for the Ministry of and amongst Deaf and Disabled People, described this as a “straightforward, easy idea” to enhance mental health, and said that it already had a positive track record, in his diocese and elsewhere.
Speaking on Tuesday, he also highlighted plans to support the work of volunteers, including in deaf ministry, which he said had “declined substantially” over the past decade, in addition to plans to enlarge the Church’s network of disability advisers.
Another 20 grants of as much as £50,0000 can be distributed to projects within the Northern Province, that are making physical changes to buildings to enhance access. In the identical pilot scheme, smaller accessibility projects will receive an additional 100 grants of as much as £5000.
The Archbishop of Canterbury said on Thursday that the funding was “overdue”. “Everyone must have the chance to participate within the lifetime of the Church. Without the insights and the gifts of disabled, Deaf, and neurodivergent people we’re immeasurably poorer in our life together in Christ.”
Bishop Atkinson agreed that the “modest” award for this work was “long overdue”. He said: “At the current time, we aren’t fully inclusive, and lots of disabled people find that they encounter barriers to full belonging and participation.
“This funding will help the Church advance the journey towards equality and justice for Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people and release many as yet unrecognised gifts that can enrich the church we’re and the church we have gotten.”
Prebendary John Beauchamp, who’s the London Diocesan Disability Ministry Enabler, and a member of the Disability Task Group, said: “As a blind one that has fulfilled 30 years of ordained ministry, I’m encouraged by this funding and the signs of cultural shift that it indicates.”
