What About Non-Verbal Autism?

We used to have a kid called Isaiah at church. He was non-verbal autistic – he couldn’t speak. He could walk, sometimes without assistance. He came along with his parents, and when he was happy he would make a moaning sound, and occasionally he would have fits and need people to help him. We tried to make him welcome the best we could. I even baptised him, but that’s a story for another day. He doesn’t come any more because he moved into a full-time residential home some distance away, and his parents moved to the other side of town, though we still see them sometimes.

I grew up in a strongly Protestant church with a strong emphasis on the ministry of all believers. We have all been given gifts, and we should use them for building up the church. 

And I still think that’s right. 1 Corinthians 12:7 says “To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.”, and Romans 12:4-6 is even more blatant.

Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function,  so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us.

So what gifts does Isaiah have? What did he bring to the life of the church?

Most people who talk about spiritual gifts and who even have inventories for discovering your gift don’t go near this question. (Note on gift inventories – all of the lists of gifts in the New Testament are different. There is no gift that is in all of them and there is no list with all the gifts. So logically they are all incomplete, and therefore they are an invitation to think of other gifts too, like techie skills. That’s important.)

Sometimes you find people who come up with the idea that non-verbal autistic folk are a gift to the rest of us because they remind us that we all need God, and that none of us deserve him. All we can really bring to God is our need. And that might be true, but it’s also kind of patronising.

I think this is a better answer:

The Bible is still miles ahead of our thinking. It says that we are a body. Some parts of the body you can understand in isolation – like the lungs. Other parts of the body that doesn’t work. You can’t understand the function of the spleen or the tonsils by seeing what they do in isolation – you see what benefit members of the body bring to the whole by seeing how the body works better with them there than without them there.

And I think that churches which make space to include the non-verbal autistic, and folk like them, are far more loving, patient and gentle places than those that don’t. In other words, they display more of the fruit of the Spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Galatians 5:22-23

Non-verbal autistic people often seem to have the gift of growing the fruit of the Spirit in communities of which they are a part. And that’s an awesome gift to have.

There’s a wonderful example here.