Ableism is what's behind the Sunday school teacher that tells the parent, “Please don't bring your child back.” Ableism is behind when someone in worship makes noises or moves, and they're seen as a distraction. When I had depression, I had internalized ableism through the mental health stigma. I still have depression, by the way. It's just treated. So sometimes it's better than other times. But even as a mental health professional, I avoided calling for therapy, and I was avoiding taking meds, and I was professionally working to bust the mental health stigma every day. But when I experienced it myself, I saw myself as the helper and not the person who needed help. And it was really hard for me to reach out and get the help. And let me tell you, when I went on meds, I wished I had done it several years earlier, which is something we hear a lot about mental health.

Ableism is also behind why churches fought the Americans with Disabilities Act and why churches are exempt from following the law that everyone else follows to make their space accessible. So for most people with disabilities who go to church, church is the least accessible place that they go. Sometimes ableism looks like niceness, but written with condescension. Leah Reinhard shared at our training, “People like to talk to me like I'm five years old. It undermines my autonomy, and it undermines a lot of how I think and how I interact. When you come in with that assumption that I'm less capable than I am, we're never going to see each other as equal human beings.”