My brother is an archivist. Specifically, he is a digital archivist, meaning that he spends his days editing and organizing the meta-data on digital files (things like the tags, what its titled, file formats, etc) to ensure that they are preserved long-term and can be accessed. His work is less focused on the items in the archive, and more the digital architecture and database system of the archive itself. He loves it. He went to grad school for this job, he goes to conferences to talk about digital archives, this is his career. 

And I can’t imagine doing it for a single day without starting to pluck out my own eyebrows. 

Truly, what a nightmare. I was thinking about my brother the other day when I was doing some reading on neurodiversity, and how the study of it has helped us understand that there is a lot more difference in how brains function than was originally thought. The earliest models of psychology used a specific demographic and neurotype as the normative base and considered everything other than that a deviation, something to be addressed and fixed. 

As we have continued to expand our understanding of how brains work, it has become more and more clear that human brains are vastly varied, and that it seems to be on purpose. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that traits that we would now associate with diagnoses such as ADHD and autism have been present in a segment of the population long before there was a diagnostic term for them, and the presence of these traits in some segments of the population was beneficial. Just like a society needs someone willing to eat the berry for the first time and needs someone who waits to see if it kills the first guy before she takes a bite, societies benefit from having people with different neurotypes. 

In our churches, this is true too. We need people who know the history of our institution like the back of their hand, people who track things like attendance and giving carefully. We need scholars who spend their lives understanding a single Greek word, and nursery workers who willingly give up worship to cuddle a stranger’s baby. We need youth pastors who love chaos, and contemplatives who crave silence. Do you know that public speaking is the most common fear among Americans? So when you walk up to that pulpit, week after week, there is a significant portion of the people in the pews who look up at you and think “I would rather pluck out my own eyebrows.” 

So what is the faithful response? How do we most faithfully lead a community of people whose brains, whose needs, whose understandings of God and self, are so radically different from one another? 

First, I think we claim our own perspective, and are humble about its limits. There is no version of preaching or teaching that is applicable for every single person. So we can own that anything we offer is incomplete, only an echo or a fragment of God’s grace, and invite the Holy Spirit to work regardless. We let people tell us what they heard, what they need, and we don’t hold too tightly to expectations of how we think we should be understood. 

Second, we offer people space to create their own meaning. Occasional self-directed opportunities, like prayer stations, creative art responses, and non-prescriptive sacred time, can give people an opportunity to engage in their own way. Some may blow through all the stations in five minutes, some may spend an hour contemplating a single prayer or icon – both are doing it “correctly.” 

Third, we listen deeply. While we may not ever be able to create a space that perfectly fits the needs of everyone, but, by listening to those who are most marginalized, who have the hardest time functioning in our places of worship, and making adjustments, we can ensure that we are serving vulnerable people in our midst well. We can also trust that any accommodations made for vulnerable people ultimately serve a lot more than just them. A quiet room for those with sensory needs may also be a haven for a mom with a nursing baby, or a person who is immunocompromised and wants to be in the sacred building and also safe. The fidget toys (developed for people with ADHD) in my kids’ church activity bags have, more than once, kept me from reaching for my phone when a sermon was getting a little too long.

The diversity in human brains is not a flaw, it’s a critical feature, it’s part of how we build the Kingdom of God we are called to. After all, my brother’s databases? They are for a consortium that includes Morehouse College, and one of the largest collections of Martin Luther King Jr’s sermons. The faithful scanning and tagging and preserving of some archivist before him are the only reason we still have those sermons (Heaven knows I couldn’t have kept a piece of paper for 60 years). He and his databases are part of the story, and so are we all.