On a road trip a few summers ago, our family drove through North Wales to enjoy a few days with our three children. Such outings aren’t unusual for us; our homeschooling curriculum gives us freedom to occasionally take a few days off for fun as well as education. Returning home to Liverpool, we stopped at a playground to run around a little before climbing back in the car. It was a school day, so the park was deserted except for a mother and her son. This mother was trying to have a phone conversation while her son tugged incessantly at her sleeve. This went on for five minutes or so, as they drifted toward us. Seeing that the mother was in distress, we invited the child to play a game with our children. When she finished her call, they came over.

Almost as soon as he approached, we could tell that this child was autistic. I do not say that lightly, but as parents of an autistic child ourselves, we have come to recognize the probable signs. In a striking way, this boy was like our son, exhibiting many identical mannerisms: the way he moved his hands when he was speaking, the intonations of his voice, the lack of eye contact, and, tellingly, the constant clawing at his exasperated mother. In his mother’s eyes we recognized a look mirrored by many parents of neurodiverse children: a combination of utter despair and stoic determination. Being a parent of any child is hard at times, but when your child does not fit into the prescribed societal standards of “normality,” it is almost impossible to communicate the pain to someone who hasn’t been there.

As we shared conversation, this mother told us she had taken her son out of mainstream education due to bullying. Every morning had involved a meltdown and a point-blank refusal to go. She had to leave her job, which led to increased financial pressures, and with no teaching experience or family nearby, she felt completely out of her depth trying to educate her son. On top of this, her husband had taken to alcohol partly due to the challenges of raising their son. Almost every day, she would trail around the parks, counting down the hours until bedtime offered a momentary respite. We spoke for almost half an hour; she and my wife exchanged numbers, but we never heard from her again.

Hers is not an uncommon story. As members of various social media groups for parents of neurodiverse children, we see numerous posts a day from parents (mostly mothers) who are on the point of despair. They write of children refusing school, making life difficult for siblings, rendering simple trips and social occasions almost impossible to navigate, and putting pressure on marriages. In our experience this “community” is one often marked by exhaustion, loneliness, discouragement at relatives who misunderstand or downplay the condition, deep anxiety, and high levels of family breakdown.

It should not have to be this way. Western societies are beginning a wider conversation about neurodiversity. While some autistic people challenge its association with disability, autism is described by the UK National Autistic Society as a “lifelong developmental disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world.” Serious research began in the early twentieth century when it was estimated that about one in a couple of thousand people were autistic. Some estimates today suggest approximately one in fifty. It is often said that if you meet one autistic person, you meet one autistic person; that is, that generalizing about autism can be dangerous. The UK National Autistic Society suggests, however, that certain characteristics may be more common in autistic people: social communication and interaction challenges; repetitive and restrictive behavior; and over- or under-sensitivity to light, sound, taste, or touch.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that autistic people often find life difficult in a world that does not accommodate their needs. Western society prizes self-possession and self-fulfillment. Whether we like it or not, being liked and “fitting in” go a long way toward producing what is horribly phrased “social capital.” People like people with social capital: celebrities exhibit it, advertisements promote it, workplaces and areas of social encounter value it.

Perhaps we inadvertently picture heaven as a place where everyone will be socially adept and accepted, acceptable.

If you exhibit many of the characteristics often associated with autism, chances are that society will lend you less social capital. The very term “autism” comes from the Greek autos (self) and denotes a sense of being self-contained, unable to relate to others well or pick up normative social cues. While research is developing, statistics back up the assumption that autistic people do find the world more difficult to navigate. In the United Kingdom, autistic children are more than twice as likely to be excluded from school than their peers, and more than half do not have access to a quiet space at school or someone to turn to if they need support. Lack of such options impacts parents and caregivers immeasurably.

I have often thought about that woman and her son. What does the good news of the gospel and the kingdom of God mean to them? Writer Steve Silberman asserts, “the notion that the cure for the most disabling aspects of autism will never be found in a pill, but in supportive communities, is one that parents have been coming to on their own for generations.” As a Christian parent of an autistic child, I think (or hope) that the church should be able to model this best. At times, I have seen glimpses of this – churches going out of their way to cater to the needs of neurodiverse people, perhaps providing sensory rooms if people need to step away, not making a fuss if a child melts down in the middle of a service, or providing sacrificial pastoral care and respite for families who don’t know where to turn.

But church understanding of neurodivergence is often limited, and there is sometimes a lingering sense that “difficult children” should be contained so as not to disrupt things too much. There are too many stories of families being asked to leave churches because of disruptive children, and when autism is brought up, the question of “healing” is often close to the surface.

Grant Macaskill, a scholar who helped found the Centre for Autism and Theology at Aberdeen University, says it should not surprise us if the church is not automatically a haven for autistic people and their families. In his book Autism and the Church, he writes, “The church is not a safe place just because it is the church. It is not a place where the values of God’s kingdom are straightforwardly implemented and applied to the welfare of each member. It is the place where the battle of the flesh and the Spirit occurs most violently, and it may, therefore, continue to be full of dangers for its vulnerable members.”

It might be tempting to leave it there, allowing families to roll the dice and hope to find a church that welcomes rather than shames them. Neurodiversity may seem just one more thing to worry about for beleaguered pastors, something to consider alongside other worthy causes. I am the pastor of a local church, and I understand these pressures. My perspective may be skewed by having an autistic child of my own, but as my understanding has grown, it has opened my eyes to the internal dynamics of a church. I have come to believe that many misunderstandings, squabbles, pressures, and lifelong feelings of shame and rejection are either directly or indirectly associated with neurodiversity.

Macaskill reminds us that this cuts right to the heart of the gospel: “The God of Israel, incarnate in Jesus Christ, is disdainful of the kinds of social or symbolic capital that we consider to be so important, and always has been: he draws near to those we naturally consider to be marginal or even contemptible and elects them to involvement in his work of salvation.” Such thoughts have profound implications for the church.

It’s natural to be drawn to those who are likable, who demonstrate worth by performing their social function well. Those with autism are, says Macaskill, “not always easy to like, they do not always bring much social capital, they may have little utilitarian value to the community.” This is not to say that autistic people should be placed on a pedestal of romanticized moral perfection; they can be “genuinely hurtful to those around them and genuinely selfish, in ways that are shaped by their neurotype.” In Christian language, they are capable of sin and in need of repentance like everyone else.

In his book Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ, Macaskill’s colleague and leading disability theologian Brian Brock contends that we must “wrench the idea of disability out of its etymological linkage with lack and brokenness.” Brock’s son Adam, who has autism and Down syndrome, has helped him understand that disability can expose faulty modes of human living; it is acutely linked to our perception of the world and how we relate to each other. The Western view with its narrow understanding of freedom and autonomy easily sneaks into Christian accounts of what it means to be human; perhaps we inadvertently picture heaven as a place where everyone will be socially adept, acceptable, and accepted. This belief implies that neurodiverse conditions are something from which people should be healed.

On a secular level, the belief that autistic people cannot live a full and thriving life lurks behind compassionate arguments for assisted suicide. The United Kingdom recently took a significant step toward legalizing assisted dying despite over 350 disability groups warning against such a decision. As I have written previously, evidence from countries such as the Netherlands demonstrates that “suffering” can be seen as an inherent part of being autistic, something that can automatically qualify someone to be euthanized. In some strange way, death is the secular equivalent of Christian understanding of heavenly healing: the deceased may finally “rest in peace.”

In his pushback against these assumptions, Brock outlines a more faithful Christian account of flourishing, less to do with bodily healing in the future, and more to do with the new social order that is already being established by the Holy Spirit. Reflecting on his life with Adam, Brock names the paradox for many parents of autistic children: the coexistence of frustration and enjoyment, and the gradual realization that your child exposes some of the unhealthy aspects of your own life:

Adam draws me into his time. His is a much slower time, which does not mean less full of joy or activity, but it is more spatially and conceptually limited and occupied in ways that are constantly cross-grained to expectation. It takes time to learn his ways of behaving, what he enjoys, and how to help him enjoy things.

Our homeschooling schedule often puts me in a park on a weekday afternoon; the gnawing feeling of guilt that I am not being productive has dissipated over time. My son has taught me to live less frantically – I don’t have to fill every moment with self-improving action. Relentless productivity, it turns out, is not a fruit of the Spirit. This also helps me as a pastor to reconceive what social relations might look like in the church: not a community that mimics a talk show with socially adept Hollywood A-listers, but truly a fellowship of sinners redeemed by grace, who often hurt or annoy each other, but somehow move toward forgiveness and grace, together.

But there is a danger here, perhaps best expressed by theologian Laura MacGregor. Reflecting on her experience of caring for her son with profound and visible intellectual and physical disabilities, MacGregor recounts how often she was upheld as a paragon of virtue, hand-picked by God to prophetically speak deep truths drawn from what she had learned through caregiving. Her reality, however, was very different:

My day-to-day life was chaotic and overwhelming as I struggled to provide twenty-four-hour care with little respite for Matthew, while also parenting my two typically developing children. My faith crumbled as I cared for an increasingly complex and medically vulnerable child. Despite my community’s unfailing ability to locate the Divine in my story, God felt absent.… Attempts to honestly discuss my confusion were quickly silenced with theodicies assuring God’s goodness and concern.

MacGregor draws on sociologist Arthur Frank, who suggests three types of narrative when it comes to disability: restitution (returning to full health), quest (while no “cure” is found, the protagonist engages in a journey of positive transformation), and chaos (no meaningful resolution, and therefore threatening). Despite people thrusting a quest narrative onto her life, MacGregor knows it has been closer to chaos.

Having absorbed various books and essays associated with the L’Arche movement, MacGregor notes that among others who write movingly of their encounters and experiences there, Henri J. M. Nouwen, rightly revered as a profound thinker on disability and Christian living, details stories that could be most clearly characterized as quest. MacGregor contrasts his and other thought-leaders’ accounts with those of mothers like herself; the central difference is that these writers, as incisive as they are, have not experienced the relentless demands of lifelong caregiving:

Nouwen [and others] chose to be caregivers, had opportunities to structure their caregiving responsibilities to accommodate their personal needs and abilities, and could cease caregiving when needed, or when desired. Their published narratives tell the preferred quest story because [they] had the means and power to limit the chaos often associated with chronic, complex caregiving.

These thoughts show me my own need for a redemptive narrative to shape both my and others’ experiences. In some way, this is not wrong – as Christians, we do hope for the future; without this hope the universe would be the cold, empty void envisioned by Richard Dawkins, with no one there to hear our cries in the dark. We believe differently, but can we truly believe it without dismissing others’ chaos stories as a lack of faith?

MacGregor clearly articulates that the lack of support from her faith community was one of her greatest disappointments. As a church, we need a vision of the kingdom of God so we can truly point toward God’s unrelenting care and love for all people, including autistic people and their families.

Whether we stand in the church or the secular world, our faulty assumption, according to Brock, is the failure to acknowledge that all humanity is broken to some degree, and to perceive that people with intellectual disabilities are often able to exhibit kingdom patterns more powerfully than those who are neurotypical. My son says things precisely as he sees them – there is no hidden or cryptic meaning to decipher. Life is slower for many with intellectual disabilities and their families, and this model directly challenges the constant busyness and striving of modern life.

For Brock, the future converges with the present: his son Adam and others with autism are not subjects of speculation about what life will be like in heaven, or even primarily a conduit of the Spirit’s gifts to the church, although they are that too. First and foremost, Adam is someone to be enjoyed, both by his parents and the church community:

Such a hope expresses a … Spirit-gifted strength to love with the love that does not simply tolerate others but can say with unfeigned sincerity: “I’m glad you’re here.” This hope overlaps the paler belief that what “the disabled” bring to churches and individuals is a reminder of the dependence of every human being, or a sense of satisfaction of achieving inclusivity. Such a hope moves beyond the normal-disabled dichotomy in the prayer that our eyes will be opened to them, will see with eyes made to participate in a divine vision: “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7)

In the kingdom of God, his reign is unopposed. And his kingdom’s manifestation here on earth sets us on a very different quest, not of fixing, or mending, or searching for tidy endings. No, it is harder; in the chaos of our own and others’ lives, we must learn not to do, but to be. The good news for me, for the church, for that mother and her son, for everyone, is that God does not abandon us. He comes into our chaos; he walks with us as we learn to perceive his way.