Autism & Church: I’ve Been Waiting For This
In the last two days Lynne Soraya who writes Asperger’s Diary on Psychology Today, has brought up the question about autism and the church. Her question was regarding if the church has been accepting of autism, helpful, what are people’s experiences etc… For us this has been a mixed bag. At the church before this one, it was a very negative experience, though they never directly made it difficult for us. The situation was more in terms as autism being something that God could heal and was caused by my sin, David’s sin, or a demonic being keeping Daniel trapped inside his own body. None of those seemed logical to David and myself and after a period of time we found their theology to be more harmful to us than helpful.
Despite the theological problems the other main issue derived from the lack of acceptance and wanting to understand our family.
In our current church they have been very accepting and helpful in many areas, however there is still the lack of understanding and what feels like lack of interest to understand. This could totally be wrong in my thinking, I really do not know but it has the feel that in order for us to be involved we must change everything in our life to participate. We are just unable to do that. We want to be active participants in our church but some days we cannot leave our house. We are unable to communicate what we need because we do not know how. It is not because we are prideful, which we have been told by church leaders in the past, we honestly do not know what to say.
When someone says “If you need anything just let me know” I do not know how to respond to that, other than “thank you”.
With some people I am able to be quite clear in that we do not any help that they could offer, not in a rude way, it is a practical way. There is just nothing that they can do besides pray for us. At least from all of the scenarios I have gone through in my head. The issues that we have going to church are many, there is the social, the sensory, and the thinking issues that we have, each of us in our family. David and I both tend to pick apart the sermons and find all of the things we see as inconsistencies. We do not want to do this but it just happens. We have resorted to bringing things to work on, or I will take the scriptures from the bulletin and do my own study. We do this and try not to be openly rude about what we are doing. Actually, I see other people sleeping, playing games on their phones or listening to music so really we are not being that rude. Even though we try not to listen, we can’t help it and end up having a discussion on the way home, so I guess we are not being that rude to our pastor. He is a great guy and really tries to help people.
Let me focus.
Back to the Lynne Soraya topic, she put up several sites regarding Autism and Church and I was feeling so much hope about it. Though the resources are from a Christian point of view, I feel that the information is good for any belief system or social group. It would just need to be adjusted accordingly.The information is practical especially from this one Welcoming those with Austim and Asperger’s Syndrome in our Churches and Communities which is a guideline that has an Asperger’s and high functioning autism point of view as well which can be a voice for those who are unable to communicate. She put up several other resources that I thought were good, there were some moments and phrases that I had a problem with reading and some of the videos, but ultimately they are trying to do a good thing here and be inclusive and that is what my heart desires for communities whatever faith/belief or no faith for that matter.
I am sure whatever the things I had a problem with were semantics and my interpretation of what they said, that is why I am not even talking about it. 
Personally, I would like anyone’s input with this. I have been searching for almost three years trying to find information about autism and the church, autism and spirituality, if others have found it difficult to be in church for any reason and if so how do you cope? Do you even go to church or a place of worship and if you do not have a spiritual belief what do you do to socialize?
Here are the videos and some articles.
Making Sense of Autism: Part 1
Making Sense of Autism: Part 2
Is Your Church Open to Autism?
Bullying, Hypocrisy, and Church: An Asperger’s Perspective on Religion
Dealing with Autism, Lesson by Lesson, In a Quest for First Communion
Other articles that I got a lot out of.
The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain
