When we want to reach a people group with the gospel, there are many things we want to be trained in first. We learn the language and the culture. We immerse ourselves in the way of life in order to learn how we can respectfully reach out to them.

Sometimes we take the time to make friends with people from that culture and learn more from them, including the idioms and nuances of their language - you know, the things a classroom lesson won’t teach you and can leave you a little embarrassed and red faced when you say the wrong thing.

We fear using the wrong words, saying the wrong thing, being condescending and upsetting the people we are trying to reach, so we work hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.

One of the largest unreached people groups in the world are those with disabilities and additional needs. When the figures first came out from the Lausanne Movement it was 94% unreached or unconnected with the gospel. The more recent figures say that only 5-10% of disabled people will ever hear the gospel in their lifetime.

'Only 5-10% of disabled people will ever hear the gospel in their lifetime'

When you think that over 1 in 5 people in this country alone are disabled or have additional needs, these figures are shocking. It often seems we don’t afford the same level of care to this people group as we would others.

10 years ago, a survey by Scope found that 67% of British people felt uncomfortable talking to disabled people. For many of those, they were fearful of saying the wrong thing, using the wrong words or being patronising. I hear this a lot in the UK Church too. People fearful of talking to people with disabilities and additional needs, especially in an evangelistic context.

We are currently in a place where the most used form of evangelism to disabled people in this country is running up to obviously disabled people and offering healing. I could tell you many stories of this happening to me, from complete strangers - some funny, some downright rude, most theologically incorrect. All this does is show our lack of literacy around disability and tells disabled people that God only wants the fixed and the well. Healing may not be a thing in your church or mine, but we have similar ways in which we haven’t learnt the culture and language of disability.

Our faces can say a lot when we see a disabled person, especially someone we know who is new to being disabled. There’s the ‘head tilt of compassion’ and ‘the eyebrows of sympathy’ that pull downwards as the head tilts. If there is a quiet tut at the same time, then it’s Bingo!

I’m not writing this to make you feel bad. As you can see with my own comments, many disabled people have grown a sense of humour about this and we know that these responses come from a place of compassion and love. But for those new to church or a teenager grappling with a new disability, the comments can give a message of being someone to be pitied.

Why not get to know some disabled people or people with additional needs? Learn the language and the culture. Don’t be afraid of getting it wrong because this is how we learn.

I’ll start: I prefer to be known as Kay.

But I’ll end with a quote from a young person with a learning disability: 'If I could tell people one thing it would say, please come and talk to me. Don't ignore me. I'm just a person.'