We Bid You Welcome
We bid you welcome, who enter this hall as a homecoming,
Who have found here room for your spirit.
Who find in this people a family.
Whoever you are, whatever you are,
Wherever you are in your journey.
We bid you welcome.
—Richard S. Gilbert (Singing The Living Tradition, Reading 442)
Our hymnal speaks these moving words. Yet how our congregations are able to bid people welcome depends on many things—in part, on how and when our individual churches were built. Almost all of our Unitarian Universalist churches were constructed before the Americans with Disabilities Act, before there was consciousness about making churches physically accessible to everybody—whether that person walked or wheeled in. In fact, our older churches were inaccessible by design:
"Ralph Adams Cram, renowned ecclesiastical architect and critic of American church design, identified the elevation of sacred space as central to the practice of faith. According to Cram, places of worship... were to be spiritual oases, set apart from their pedestrian environment through substantial, soaring walls and monumental stairs approaching impressive entrances well above the street.
"Unfortunately, our legacy is daunting stairs, heavy doors, and soaring walls. Much as our hearts may want to welcome everyone to enter our halls 'as a homecoming' the reality is that we are sometimes confronted with architectural designs that make hospitality a difficult undertaking, to say the least."
The quote above is from a 54-page online publication Accessible Faith (PDF): A Technical Guide for Accessibility in Houses of Worship. In the Environment section, we will be making frequent reference to this booklet, well worth downloading if you are planning or hoping to make physical changes in your congregational environment.
There is a saying in the Disability Community "Nothing about us without us." For any accessibility planning, we encourage you to contact your local Independent Living Center. Independent Living Centers are non-residential, non-profit, consumer-controlled, community-based organizations providing services and advocacy by and for people with disabilities. They have expert staff, and can help you with your assessment and discussion of changes.
Remember, everyone whether they live with a disability or not, is unique. Therefore, it is impossible to make universal decisions about what accommodations will be completely welcoming to everyone. As with all reciprocal relationships, it is always important and appropriate to ask the people being welcomed what will work for them.
The accessibility audits in this section were created with many thanks to the United Methodist Church, who permitted us to freely use material from their comprehensive accessibility manual, Accessibility Audit for Churches, 2nd edition, edited by the Rev. Kathy N. Reeves.
For more information contact access @ uua.org.
Last updated on Wednesday, May 30, 2007.
