Size-Accessible Church
I am guest-posting today at a new website dedicated to providing resources for fat Christians. I hope this article is helpful both for pastors and church leaders and for fat Christians who feel unseen.
As a teenager, I professed faith in Jesus at a summer camp in the mountains of Tennessee. I remember badly wanting to ask my youth pastor to baptize me right there, that week, in the pool on the college campus. Not because of any spiritual urgency, but because I was afraid that if I waited to return to church the next week that there would not be a baptismal robe large enough to fit me. My adolescent reserve won out and I waited until we returned to our church to be baptized there. The robe was snug, but did technically fit. A few years later after I was finished with my white high school graduation robe, I donated it to the church and told them to keep it in their baptismal robe supply – just in case.
There are a variety of ways that our churches can be inaccessible to people of size. Often church leadership doesn’t know to look for these areas and church parishioners don’t know they are allowed to speak up. I sat down to talk with my current pastor, Brian Wright, D. Min., about these issues. This article provides some starting points to make your congregation welcoming to people of diverse body sizes.
Wright worked as an eating disorder counselor during his undergraduate days as a psychology major, ministered as a pastor for many years, previously served on the board of the Interfaith Disability Network, and is currently in medical school to become a doctor.
In other words, he is an excellent person to talk with about the intersections of faith and bodies!
Read the rest at Fat Privilege
Buy the Book
J. Nicole Morgan 