One Lord, One Body: Rethinking Disability in Ghana through Biblical and Theological Anthropology

Abstract

This paper focuses on what it means to be human from a biblical perspective and shows how this understanding forms part of the Church’s understanding and practices towards disability and persons with disability. Through our experience of the Ghanaian situation and scholarly works, we argue that as a Church, our understanding, attitudes, and practices towards persons with disability must change from the current exclusive and marginalizing frameworks to thoughts and behaviors that are integrative and inclusive. The paper contributes to our understanding of how the Ghanaian and African practice of communalism can deepen the biblical and theological anthropology of the church with regards to human disability. We conclude that the absence or limited participation of persons with disability in the church is a manifestation that it is the church that is rather disabled by the barriers it has constructed about disability and not persons with disability.