Neurodivergence, such as Autism and ADHD, is increasingly identified and understood in our society. Almost everyone has experience of neurodivergence either in themselves or in close friends or family.
How do we think about neurodivergence as Christians? What particular challenges and opportunities does being neurodivergent bring with it, especially in responding to the gospel and living as a Christian? How can we love all people in our families and churches?
In this first episode of a special three-part series on neurodivergence and the Christian life, we explore and assess what neurodivergence is—the experience, questions and issues of neurodivergent people, as well as the experience, questions and issues of parents, friends and ministers of neurodivergent people. We also look briefly at medical, clinical and social perspectives on neurodivergence. Finally, we raise questions that we will attempt to answer in more depth in Parts 2 and 3 of this series.
(Please note: Part 2 will be published in a fortnight’s time, while part 3 will be published in a month’s time.)
If this episode raises questions you would like addressed in future episodes we invite you to write to us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of this important conversation.
Links referred to:
- Kate Morris’s Substack: “An Extraordinary Normal”
- ADHD Foundation
- Next CCL event: The smartphone disciple (Mon 27 Oct)
- Support the work of the Centre
Runtime: 59:14 min.
Transcript
Please note: This transcript has been checked against the audio and lightly edited, but still may contain errors. If quoting, please compare with the original audio.
Introduction
[00:00:00] Tony Payne: Hello, I’m Tony Payne and welcome to the Centre for Christian Living Podcast. Great to have you with us again, and especially today great to have you with us, because today is a rather special episode. It’s the first episode in a three-part series of podcasts.
[00:00:15] Now, this is something we’ve been wanting to do for some time—that is, not just to interview interesting and knowledgeable people about aspects of the Christian life. That’s what most of our podcast episodes are, and I know that you enjoy them. But we’ve been thinking for a while that it will be worth pausing and digging in more detail into a particular subject or issue, considering what the Bible has to say about it, and reflecting on what that means for our Christian life and experience. In other words, to do in a little more depth what our task is here—our mission is here at the Centre for Christian Living—and that is to bring biblical ethics to everyday issues.
[00:00:52] And the issue that we’ve decided to dig more deeply into, and the next few podcast episodes will explore, is “Neurodivergence and the Christian life”.
[Music]
Why neurodivergence and the Christian life?
[00:01:17] Tony Payne: This is Part 1 of a three-part series from the Centre for Christian Living on “Neurodivergence and the Christian life”. And you may be wondering why we decided to focus on neurodivergence as a topic—as the first topic to explore in more detail like this in a series of podcasts. Like many good ideas, it kind of happened by accident. The subject had been put forward and suggested by people in the feedback we receive at our regular CCL events occasionally, and my assistant here at CCL, Karen Beilharz, had also suggested it was perhaps a worthwhile topic. But as we began to research it, and especially to talk with neurodivergent people and to begin to prepare for an event—a workshop—on this topic, it became obvious just how important a topic it was for many, many people.
[00:02:06] Laura: I think that I haven’t heard many conversations about being a Christian and being autistic, and how that interacts and how that coexists, and what it, yeah, what it’s like to live as an autistic Christian. I think that’s tricky and something that should be spoken about more and that would be helpful to talk about and think about.
[00:02:28] And something else that’s difficult is that that a lot of people don’t understand what it’s like, and I have to explain myself and advocate for myself constantly. And there are people who genuinely want to know more, but they don’t know—they don’t know yet, and there is also an element to which they won’t fully understand it. And it can be really hard to put into words a lot of the things that I go through.
[00:02:55] Tony Payne: That was the voice of Laura, a young woman with autism who’s also been diagnosed with the combined form of ADHD. And she’s one of many people we have spoken to over the past several months, and who expressed very similar sentiments—that neurodivergence, in all its different forms, affects many, many people and is a reality of life for many people—for themselves in their own lives and in the lives of their families, and is a subject that is misunderstood and just not talked about by people generally, let alone by Christians.
[00:03:27] That interview with Laura was conducted by one of our student team members here at the Centre for Christian Living. At Moore College, all the students are divided up into different service teams who do different things around the College. And there’s one team that works with the Centre for Christian Living—around a dozen students. And one of the tasks I set for our team in this last several months was to go out and speak with people—speak with people in their churches, in their families, in their communities—to talk about the experience of neurodivergence and what it means for the Christian life, for Christian faith, and for life in Christian churches. And you’ll be hearing quite a number of clips from those interviews over the course of these episodes.
[00:04:05] Laura’s take on why it’s important that we discuss neurodivergence and bring it to the surface and think about what it means for Christian living and for church life was reflected also in the attendance at our Centre for Christian Living event on this topic. We put on a biblical workshop on “Neurodivergence and the Christian Life” in May, and we were really quite stunned at how many people registered for that event. It very quickly filled up, and in fact, the waiting list was so long of people wanting to come to the event, that we decided to run a repeat event a month later in June, and that also filled up almost immediately.
[00:04:42] Obviously this is a question that people care deeply about, as Laura reflected and as many of the people we spoke to also expressed.
A five-stage model
[00:04:49] Tony Payne: But before we get to hearing more of those voices and hearing about the experience and the issues connected with neurodivergence, it’s worth framing how we’re going to approach the whole question and how we’re going to approach these three episodes.
[00:05:02] The model that we’re going to follow or the set of steps we’re going to work through is really how we do ethics here at Moore College, in a sense. It’s the framework and process of moral thinking that we go through all the time, that we teach in our moral theology classes, and that we often come back to at the Centre for Christian Living.
[00:05:18] And it advances in five stages: as you come to any situation or circumstance, and you want to think biblically and morally about what I should do in this circumstance, there are five stages you go through of thinking.
1. Assess
[00:05:32] Tony Payne: The first is to kind of assess and think about and understand the situation—to interrogate it, to be curious about what’s going on, to observe, to understand what this particular issue or situational circumstance really is.
2. Reflect
[00:05:47] Tony Payne: But that first assessment—that first take on what’s going on—is a kind of provisional one, because we want to think also what the Bible says about these kinds of situations. And so, the second stage is to reflect biblically and theologically about the question—to see how the Bible writers themselves think about these kinds of issues and what biblical truths and theological ideas they bring to bear to understand this kind of situation or circumstance. So there’s an assessment kind of analyse/apprehend kind of stage. There’s a reflection stage.
3. Deliberation
[00:06:21] Tony Payne: And then there’s a deliberation stage, where you come back to the circumstance with a fresh set of biblical eyes and start to rethink and consider what needs to be done or could be done in this circumstance—what ends or intentions are appropriate, what we really want to achieve or see happen in this particular context. So there’s a deliberative step where we rethink and understand and consider the options within the circumstance and situation we’re in.
4. Resolve
[00:06:48] Tony Payne: And then there’s a fourth stage of thinking, where we actually resolve on what we are going to do—where we start to choose some practical steps that are going to lead towards the end that we think is the best end or the good end that we want to pursue. There’s a choosing and resolving and deciding phase, where we settle on what actually is to be done.
5. Act
[00:07:06] Tony Payne: And then finally, of course, I guess you can say there’s an actual doing phase. There’s an acting phase, where we put into practice and actually perform the things that we’ve decided to do.
[00:07:15] Now, those five phases, it’s a little difficult to put together an acronym to kind of capture them all. I’ve tried several over the last few months, and the one that I’m going to run with here in these episodes is A-R-D-R-A. ARDRA. A-R-D-R-A: that we assess, we reflect, we deliberate, we resolve and then we act. A-R-D-R-A. ARDRA.
Assessing
[00:07:42] Tony Payne: And in this first episode of this series, we’re going to focus on that first phase of the process: assessing, apprehending, being curious, understanding neurodivergence and the experience and questions and issues of neurodivergent people, and the parents and friends and ministers of neurodivergent people as well.
[00:08:01] So let’s start with our first phase: to assess, to understand and apprehend. To listen.
[Music]
What do we mean by “neurodivergence”?
[00:08:16] Tony Payne: Well, the first stage of our thinking is to assess, to understand. And the first thing to understand is what we mean by the term “neurodivergence” or neurodiversity, as it’s sometimes called. It’s a term that was first coined, so it is thought by Judy Singer, an Australian researcher, writing in the 1990s, who was focused on autism, and in particular, on the way that autistic people were often alienated or mistreated, and that the medical lens for understanding autism was not sufficient in itself. What if we thought of autism as simply difference—a divergence from the majority—and not fundamentally a disability or a disorder? What if we thought about autism, in other words, as being like any other minority group, whether that’s a racial minority or some other identity-based minority, and rethought the nature of autism through that lens?
[00:09:12] Now, Singer’s frame for thinking about all of this was quite explicitly a political one. She wanted to see activism and change on a political and social level. And that emphasis and activism has certainly continued in different ways in our culture.
[00:09:27] But as language always does, the term “neurodivergence” or neurodiversity has shifted and changed over the past couple of decades. It’s grown to include not just autism, but conditions like ADHD in its different forms, and dyslexia, and dysgraphia, and other similar conditions.
[00:09:47] It’s also broadened from being a political term of activism and identity to becoming a more general way of talking about autism and related conditions in a less charged way—in a way that emphasises that people with autism and ADHD are not just people with deficits or disorders, but are people with different brains—brains that are wired differently, that work differently, that have different strengths, as well as different weaknesses, than the typical or majority brain.
Language and terminology
[00:10:17] Tony Payne: Now, the language of neurodivergence and neurodiversity has been evolving and continues to evolve quite rapidly. And that’s something that I will ask your grace and kindness about upfront. Over the course of these next few episodes, we’ll interview a range of different people who use different sorts of language to describe themselves and their experience, or the experience of their families. And perhaps we just can be kind to one another and cut each other a little bit of slack in this regard, because the language does keep changing and different people prefer different kinds of ways of talking about these issues. Some people, for example, prefer a more person-oriented language: they prefer to say, “I have autism”, or “I’m a person with autism” that emphasises their personhood, rather than the condition. Other people prefer a more identity-oriented way of speaking—that is, “I’m autistic”—because it describes a fairly fundamental aspect of who I am.
[00:11:13] In fact, even the language of autism has shifted and changed in recent years. There was a time not so long ago when the preferred way of speaking about autism was “Autism Spectrum Disorder, Levels 1-3”. That was and still remains the medical way of speaking about autism. But some autistic people don’t like the idea of including the word “disorder” in a description of them as the fundamental thing about them, and so don’t like the language of “Autism Spectrum Disorder”. And of course, there are older terms, such as “Asperger’s Syndrome”, which has now been included within that Autism Spectrum Disorder designation. And so the language here, as it is in nearly every aspect of our lives, is fluid and keeps changing.
[00:11:57] In this series, we’ll use the fairly common term “neurodivergence” as the way to talk about the circumstance and situation we’re discussing. It’s a broad term. It includes a range of different people, and that’s one of its strengths. But that can also be one of its weaknesses. As we discovered, the more that we researched this subject and the more we talked with neurodivergent people, their experience can be vastly different. There’s quite an obvious and very significant difference between, say, a university professor with ADHD who has learned to manage and work around their weaknesses and make the best of their strengths, and a teenage boy, perhaps, with ASD Level 3, who cannot speak and needs almost constant supervision and support.
[00:12:41] It’s easy to jump to conclusions and to make sweeping general statements about what neurodivergent people do or what the neurodivergent brain is like, and so on. In fact, I asked Kate Morris about this.
Is the term “neurodivergence” too broad to be useful?
[00:12:53] Tony Payne: Kate was one of the people we spoke with quite a lot in the lead-up to this podcast and to the event that we had in May. Kate has done a lot of research into neurodivergence. She has some neurodiverse kids herself and writes a Substack called “An Extraordinary Normal” about this whole subject. And I asked Kate whether the term “neurodivergence” was almost too broad to be useful.
[00:13:15] Kate Morris: I wonder if the problem is with the term or with people. Because I think as people, what we want is to quickly box people in—to be able to have a stereotype that means we can understand them. We know how to fix them. We know how to approach them. We know what to do. But actually, that’s not love, is it? Yes, I think the term can be too broad. But I think it can be perhaps a helpful step in the right direction if we use it well.
[00:13:40] And so, if someone says they’re neurodivergent, that’s not the end of the story. That’s the beginning of a conversation, and I think that’s really helpful to understand. This is why the whole community needs to be working on growing and understanding, because as we do, we can grow in understanding of questions we might ask or things to be curious about. We hopefully will grow to be better at listening as well, as people share their experiences. And we need to believe that people might experience things that we don’t see, because someone might not experience challenges in some environments and experience enormous challenges in other environments. They might not need support in some cases and need enormous support in other cases. They might be someone who copes with certain situations if things are just right, and then in other situations, it’s very complicated for them.
[00:14:27] And so, this is why we need to have these conversations and ask people where they sit, what they’re like, and have them ask us as well. We need to be a community working together—all of us working to understand each other better.
Listening to experiences
[00:14:40] Tony Payne: Kate emphasises something really important here, I think: the need in every situation—but especially in this one—to listen, to be curious, not to assume that we know what’s going on for people, but to ask them.
[00:14:56] And this is what we did in preparation for our event in May and for this podcast: we went out and spoke to a whole range of different people—neurodivergent people, parents and friends of neurodivergent people—and simply asked them to tell us about their experience, and particularly, how that experience intersected with the Christian faith and with their life in church. And we found in almost every case, just how much the person appreciated being asked and being able to speak for themselves.
[00:15:24] And in this first episode of our series, we’re going to spend a fair bit of time listening to those voices—listening to the experience and the questions of neurodivergent people and the parents of neurodivergent kids.
[00:15:38] And we’re going to listen to those experiences under five loose headings or foci. We are going to, first of all, hear from some neurodivergent people talking about just what their experience of life is like. Then we’re going to switch the focus more to parents—parents of neurodivergent kids and what their experience of life is like and what their questions are. Then we’re going to focus especially on church life and on Christian faith, and on the questions that neurodivergence raises for those questions and those issues in particular. Fourthly, we’re going to spend a little bit of time hearing from some people in Christian ministry who minister the gospel full-time and about the effect of neurodivergence on that sphere. And then finally, we are going to zoom out a little bit from individual voices and think more broadly about neurodivergence from a medical and also from a social viewpoint. And hopefully by looking at those five lenses or foci on this question, we’ll start to assess and understand and get a sense of what the issues really are.
1. Being neurodivergent
[00:16:41] Tony Payne: But first, let’s start with what it’s like to be neurodivergent, to have autism, to have ADHD. We asked people to tell us what they’d like other people to know about their experience.
[00:16:54] Here’s Alex, for example. Alex is a young woman with Asperger’s Syndrome or what is now called ASD: Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1. She also has OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and ADHD, and she suffers with anxiety. This complex of different issues is quite common for people who are neurodivergent, and she speaks about what it’s like to read what people say about autism or about ADHD, and then feel like it sort of describes her life, but not.
[00:17:25] Alex: I wouldn’t say completely wrong. But it’s very much from the perspective of someone who’s not autistic looking at someone who is autistic. So it’s like reading an uncanny list of traits that I have. And I’m like, “Oh, that is definitely me somehow, but from the perspective of viewing those things in, like, the most negative way possible.” Like, people would say things like, “Autistic people lack empathy”, and, like, that really, really hurt, because I’m, like, oh, I feel things so deeply.
[00:17:54] Yeah. So just knowing that the way that it’s written about, yeah, the experience from the inside is quite different. I have such a strong desire to connect with people. But I just have this barrier where I’m not completely oblivious—like, I know so many social rules analytically or theoretically. But I’m in situations all the time when my brain is so overloaded that I can’t actually process it in the moment.
[00:18:20] Yeah, you can look really oblivious, but be very, very aware of how different you are—how much you’re not fitting in. Like, you can feel that on a really deep level.
[00:18:30] Tony Payne: Quite a number of people said very similar things to us, as Alex just did, about how neurotypical people just often don’t realise what’s going on for neurodivergent people in the moment—in the circumstances that they’re in. Like Hannah, for example.
[00:18:44] Hannah: So I went my whole childhood thinking that I was just that one weird person that no one could ever get along with. Like, it’s very normal for people to have their occasional, like, social slip-up, or to not be interested in the same things that other kids their age are into. But for me, it was at the degree of it felt like I had to be an actor every single day, and I could never break character, or it meant that people would get in trouble or something like that.
[00:19:18] As I got older, I learned about neurodivergence, and for me, it meant being able to put a name to my experiences.
[00:19:27] Tony Payne: Neurodivergent people often mentioned this experience to us—especially those with autism, but others as well—of trying to conform to the expectations of everyday conversation and the kind of relational interaction that neurotypical people find easy, and how exhausting this is. Neurodivergent people often refer to this as “masking”—as doing their best to consciously act the part—and how tiring and difficult this can be over time. Peter is an older man who was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome back when, that’s what it was called, and he put it like this.
[00:20:01] Peter: I had forgotten to mask to do that. So I have to keep reminding myself, “I’ve got to mask. I’ve got to mask.” So when somebody says something, I have to think, “Now, how will I reply to this so they won’t be offended?” Whereas, if I’m doing it with someone else who’s got Asperger’s or autism, they won’t be offended. In fact, they’ll be happy, because I’ve told them exactly what has to happen.
[00:20:22] So that’s probably my biggest problem: is that I have to mask. And that causes anxiety and stress. It’s emotionally exhausting. I get sensory overload and sometimes meltdowns. It’s an unfortunate part of autism—especially Asperger’s—that you get meltdowns, and that’s where you lose complete emotional control.
[00:20:42] Tony Payne: It’s certainly true that the neurodivergent people we spoke to really wanted neurotypical people to understand that life can be very hard for them, and that there are things that they find difficult and that they struggle to do that the majority of us don’t find difficult.
[00:20:57] But it’s not all negative. In fact, one of the striking features of not only recent thinking and research about neurodivergence, but our conversations with a whole range of people is the recognition that people whose brains are wired just a bit differently—that are divergent from most brains—not only have some difficulties as a result, but also some real strengths.
[00:21:18] Here’s Peter and Hannah again on this subject.
[00:21:22] Peter: What we want to do is have other Christians to recognise that we are made slightly different, even though they can’t physically see it. That mentally inside us, we are different. Our brains are wired differently. And even though we have weaknesses in how we communicate and how we act towards people, we also have enormous strengths. We can do their maths homework with them, no trouble. We can solve all their electronics and electrical problems just like that. And so, try and embrace us not only for our weaknesses, but also for our strengths.
[00:21:55] And I think that’s something that Christians should do. And as somebody with Asperger and as a Christian, it’s something I ask other Christians to do, and it’s something that I do on a regular basis.
[00:22:08] Hannah: I think the fact that this interview is happening to begin with already demonstrates to me that we as a body of Christ are taking huge steps in allowing people such as myself to be a part of the church community. I mean, it would be really easy for people to say, “Oh, neurodivergent people don’t exist. They’re just exaggerating. They’re just drama people.” Or to just treat them with indifference. But the fact that we’re doing this is certainly showing me that we are acknowledging that and we are saying we can do better, and we are taking proactive steps in correcting that.
[00:22:48] Tony Payne: This, of course, raises a really interesting biblical and theological question: how should we think about neurodivergent brains? Historically, this has largely been done through the lens of the Fall—through all that’s dysfunctional and disordered about our human life, and this being one example. But is that the best or only way to think about neurodivergence? Or is neurodivergence just part of our created difference, like eye colour or hair colour, or left-handedness? Or is it more complex than that again? We’ll have to come back to that question, and we’ll do that in Part 2 of this series.
2. Neurodivergence in parenting
[00:23:26] Tony Payne: But we’re still in the assessing and understanding and apprehending phase of our investigation, and we’re going to move on now to a second focus: to what neurodivergence means for parenting.
[00:23:37] Calum was one of the number of parents we spoke to who were trying to figure out what it means to parent and raise neurodivergent kids.
[00:23:45] Calum: So our whole family life has been reshaped around the neurodivergence of our boys—both in great ways and in ways that my wife and I find really, really challenging. We can start in the home. Our home is—we’ve given it up to three young active boys. We’ve installed swings from the ceiling. We’ve installed crash pads around the house. We’ve got an indoor gym, an outdoor gym, an indoor trampoline, an outdoor trampoline. It’s really built into all our lives.
[00:24:13] With my boys, I basically had to relearn how to interact with children. So many of the things I knew as a teacher just were not the right way to interact or discipline my children. And so, it’s been a complete rewiring of my expectations as a parent and what I thought would be the case.
[00:24:28] I think as well as some of the things that are challenges, there are some things that are absolute joys. My eldest son’s intelligence is just off the charts. I consider myself to be quite an intelligent person—did quite well at school. But when he was eight, he was already surpassing me in some areas, and I just can’t wait to see how God’s going to use him and his incredible brain. And even my middle child, who’s just starting school a year in, just the kindness and rawness that he shows is just so great. I want to make sure that as I think about their neurodivergence, I just don’t think about the challenges it brings to me, but look at the joys that it brings and that they bring into the world as God’s made them.
[00:25:04] Tony Payne: That sense that Calum conveys so well of being incredibly stretched and challenged and exhausted, while at the same time, delighted and blessed by his neurodivergent children, this was a repeated theme of the parents we spoke to. One parent at one of our workshop events said that her adult daughter, who’s autistic and has ADHD, once told her that as she was growing up, it felt like every other person had a playbook or a rule book of how you were meant to interact with the world and with each other, but that she didn’t have it and nobody had shown it to her. And this was not only hard for her daughter, but hard for her as a parent. And it made going to church hard as well, which is a subject we’ll come to in just a few moments.
[00:25:48] But here’s Kate Morris again talking about what it’s like to have a child going through what’s called a meltdown.
[00:25:56] Kate Morris: It is complicated, because with children who are neurodivergent, a lot of them will experience complications and triggers and difficulties—particularly outside the home, but also in the home—that will mean that they have a pressure build-up that can be quite complicated. So I think one of the most challenging aspects of parenting a neurodivergent child is if they experience meltdowns or shutdowns.
[00:26:21] Particularly meltdowns can be complex. So meltdowns, unfortunately, we use that term interchangeably with tantrums, and it’s not a tantrum. A tantrum is where a child wants a cookie and you can end the tantrum by giving them a cookie. They want something. If they don’t get it, then they will kick and scream.
[00:26:37] A meltdown is quite different, actually. We understand now that a meltdown is a brain explosion. It’s closer to a dam break. It’s closer to a nuclear meltdown or something like that. It’s something where the pressure has built to the point that they can no longer hold it in.
[00:26:53] So a lot of parents will notice these meltdowns happen in the car as they’re heading home from something where the child has held it in, or when they get home. And it’s really hard, because this is the moment where a family would love to just relax together. But for some people, relaxing means releasing a lot of tension and build-up.
[00:27:11] And it’s complicated, because for some of these children, they will say things or do things or act in ways that we don’t want our children to be doing or saying. They can be harmful to others. They can end up impacting the home. They can destroy things or damage things, or say things that hurt people’s feelings. And so, naturally as parents, this isn’t how we want our children to behave.
[00:27:33] And yet the complication comes when you understand what’s going on in the brain—that it has had this buildup of pressure over the day. I’ve heard from neurodivergent people that in those moments, they simply can’t stop. And research has shown this too. They simply can’t just stop. Once the meltdown has begun, it’s too late. And so, as a parent understanding that, once the meltdown has started, it’s also too late for us to simply say, “Stop!”
[00:27:58] Tony Payne: We’ll hear more from Kate as our series goes on about how to think about and deal with those kinds of parenting challenges.
[00:28:05] But one thing that nearly every parent we spoke to said, and many neurodivergent people said as well, was that church was hard with neurodivergence—hard for neurodivergent people in various ways, hard for parents and for their kids. It’s something we should move on and talk about—about church experience and the Christian life and neurodivergence.
[00:28:27] Here’s Calum again.
[00:28:29] Calum: I think being the parent of neurodivergent children, there are a lot of things that are inaccessible to us as a family. I mentioned earlier church is inaccessible for us. We’ve made steps to try and create a sensory sensitive kids club-type thing at our church, which the church has been really open to and receptive to. But unfortunately, it’s just not something that my wife and I have had a headspace to actively do. And it’s something that’s really hard for churches to resource, because churches don’t often have resources to have spare people around.
[00:28:58] And we’ve been involved in a soccer program called Football for All, which we started attending with our boys middle of last year, and we’re really thankful for that program. But on reflection, it’s the most welcomed I’ve felt as the parent of neurodivergent children, which made me a bit sad, because I feel like that should be church, but it’s just not.
[00:29:21] Tony Payne: That’s a hard testimony to hear. But this is the reality for many neurodivergent people and children and parents. Church, at one level, is wonderful and an enormous support and encouragement. But at another level, it can be really hard. Just because it is a large gathering sometimes with lots of people and lots of noise, just in sensory terms, it’s often a real battle for neurodivergent people. Church can be just overwhelming.
[00:29:47] Here’s Amanda talking about what church and faith is like for her son.
[00:29:51] Amanda: Well, just like for the neurodivergent person, being a parent of one is exhausting. You have to be five minutes ahead of them, two days ahead of them, a week ahead of them. Trying to find all those little points where you would need to put out a spot fire and try and get there before the fire even starts. And that’s sort of both everywhere. That’s not just in church.
[00:30:15] In church, and I’m hadn’t mentioned before, the biggest thing for us is my son very much understands the message of God and he will focus on that. But it’s the after church. It’s the mad, crazy games that have no rules that are happening in the garden while people are having a cup of tea and things like that. He wouldn’t cope in youth. We did try youth group, but it just wasn’t for him, because again, it’s noisy and crazy and the rules are not there, and it’s not black and white and it’s grey.
[00:30:46] So I can only speak for my son, but he gets the knowledge. And when you talk to him about his faith—he’s only 12, but he’s actually got quite a strong faith, and he knows how to apply it. But it’s all the other things. And he sees the other kids understanding this game, which, to him, looks like has no rules. It’s just people running around. And that makes it hard, then, for him to make the connections.
[00:31:09] Tony Payne: There’s no doubt the church can be a really challenging sensory and relational space for neurodivergent people, and we need to come back in the later stages of our thought process and consider what we might do about this and how churches can be more sensitive and welcoming to neurodivergent parents and kids and people.
[00:31:28] But there are other questions and issues related to neurodivergence and the Christian faith. At one of our workshops, one of the parents, whose name was Kurtis, raised some of these questions in relation to his kids and raising his kids in the faith.
[00:31:42] Kurtis: Yeah, some of the questions I’ve been thinking about for my kids is, one of them is just how to help them understand themselves. So it came up before: how much of their experience with autism is—should I help them understand is the image of God expressed differently versus grieve the brokenness of the world in every hu—you know, that kind of thing? And then some of that helping them understand godliness when it’s hard. There’s a comment before, like, what I want to do and what my brain allows me to do. How does someone with self-control and ADHD. How do those two things fit together? For my kid, like, that’s—
[00:32:14] Tony Payne: Not very well usually.
[00:32:15] Kurtis: Um, yeah, yeah. And then trying to think how to—I think of my son with autism who perceives the world super differently. How do I, as someone who doesn’t get it and doesn’t see the world in his eyes—how do I teach him the gospel and the Bible in a way that will connect and engage him, and not just be all my assumptions about what’s meaningful?
3. Adult diagnosis
[00:32:39] Tony Payne: These are really thoughtful questions that Kurtis is raising about his kids. But they’re also the questions that many neurodivergent adults have about their own experience—as people and especially as Christian believers. We spoke to a number of people in their forties and fifties who were only just now being diagnosed as neurodivergent—most often with ADHD—and for many of them, it was a strange experience. Many of them spoke of being enormously relieved at finally understanding themselves and being aware of why they act the way they do.
[00:33:11] But they also spoke of grief at not knowing this sooner. Richard speaks about this, and in particular about looking back on his younger Christian experience.
[00:33:21] Richard: I was in my mid-fifties when I realised I have ADHD. When I was at school and university, assignments and essays were always late. My tax returns were always late. I was always late. I lose things with remarkable ease. I just put things down and can’t find them again a few moments later. I forget commitments I have made. I forget the things that build friendships. My desk is always untidy. My house is always untidy. I attract clutter, and it’s embarrassing, and I hate letting people inside my house.
[00:34:00] I’m bad at time management: I can’t estimate how long a task will take to complete, and I get distracted, which makes things take even longer. I can be indecisive yet impulsive. I can focus like a laser on one task and be crippled by distractions on the next.
[00:34:20] The quiet time is held as a high value in evangelical circles—the structured morning habit of Bible reading and prayer. I have tried. So often I’ve tried. I start again with commitment, and just a week later, I realise I haven’t lasted three days. Building and sustaining habits is hard. If I expect to fail again, I just don’t want to try again. In the Christian life, the disciplines like quiet times, the reading of books, the being outgoing and welcoming and doing evangelism can feel like works of salvation or maybe like works of social acceptance.
[00:35:01] In my early twenties, I desperately wanted to be the kind of Christian that I felt was most respected. But I couldn’t do it. And that failure is just one of many I’ve carried with me. Now I understand ADHD better, I understand myself better, and that allows me to forgive myself for times when I have just done what ADHD does.
[00:35:24] Tony Payne: This is a really significant question to think about theologically: that is, how should neurodivergent people or parents of neurodivergent kids think about the Christian life? How do their weaknesses and their strengths relate to faith in Christ and to growth in Christian living? We’ll come back to those issues in the Bible and in practice over the next couple of episodes.
4. Neurodivergence and Christian ministry
[00:35:46] Tony Payne: But there’s one other aspect of neurodivergence and its intersection with Christianity that’s worth exploring and that is what it’s like to be involved in Christian ministry and to be neurodivergent. We spoke to a couple of people about this who are involved in different kinds of Christian ministry and have recently become aware of their neurodivergence.
[00:36:06] Here’s David talking about coming to terms with his own experience in light of his son’s diagnosis and thinking about what it means for him as a gospel minister.
[00:36:16] David: So I really started thinking hard about it when our son was diagnosed, and that was immediately before COVID, like, maybe the year or so before COVID. And we got the big report you get back from a psychologist who’s done the testing. And as I read, I remember distinctly just sitting in bed, reading this report, just going, “Huh. Huh.” And just turning to my wife and just going, “This is me. This is me growing up.” And then actually realising that I don’t—actually, then having those questions like, “Oh, am I autistic?” And kind of just going, “Well, that kind of makes sense, wouldn’t it?” Because you’re on this journey of discovery where your child is going through these things. And so then reflecting back.
[00:36:58] And so, as you got tested, there’s a 12-point scale. There’s—apparently, there’s different scales they use, but one of them is a 12-point scale. If you score seven or above, you’re officially on the spectrum. And I scored a six. Which is really interesting. So kind of a failure, but in a weird way.
[00:37:11] What was really interesting was saying to the psychologist then, “So when I was my son’s age …”, and the psychologist went, “Oh yeah, totally.” And I said, “So what gives now?” And she just went, “Well, clearly you’ve learned to deal with some of it.”
[00:37:24] So when you asked the question, “How does it affect my life?”, there’s almost the before my diagnosis/not diagnosis, and now that I really kind of am aware, what I now look back and reflect upon previously, when I think if they had certain scales I probably would have been diagnosed, is that I just classically was never able to properly reach people. And I found myself just now looking back, behaving in ways in social settings that not everybody clearly was. I can remember being quite young and being 12 or 13 years old, or maybe even a bit younger, and just actually saying to my parents, “I don’t have any friends. I just don’t have any friends.”
[00:38:04] Which, can I just say, is it just a real delight that my children do, including the one who is diagnosed as autistic. Oh, almost a relief as a parent actually—that your kids are making friends and so on. Although I’m sure he’s navigating friendships in a different way to the other two.
[00:38:18] What it does for me now, which is really, really helpful is, it actually helps me as I think through my job as a pastor, which, of all people, is kind of a bit, you go, “What’s someone like me doing, trying to look after people when one of the very natures of this thing is that sometimes you’re not very good with people?”
[00:38:37] Well, I think one of the great things is you can actually learn to be good with people in different ways. So what I find myself is doing different ways to get to the same result in terms of the way that I understand people and what I do with them.
[00:38:46] I think I’ve become much more acutely aware of when I’m behaving in ways that aren’t—this is the great thing about any diagnosis, isn’t it? You can see what’s going on. I behave in ways that are not helpful, and I’m far quicker now, I think, just to stop and pause myself.
[00:38:59] The other thing I’ve done is I’ve given my team permission to say to me, “Hey David, you’re doing that thing again.” And that’s actually a profoundly helpful thing when you have people that you trust and you have a common goal. And they long for us to succeed together, and they long for you to succeed. And actually acknowledging the truth of this particular peculiarity that you have, but giving them permission to speak into that. And speaking to it sometimes in the challenge way, which says, “Actually, David, come on. That’s not there.” So that’s really helpful.
[00:39:29] I think the flip side is that with the way that my brain is wired, I mean the curious thing, isn’t it, about the autism thing—and again, I recognise I’m not officially, but there it is—is that a lot of it is about oversensitivity to things, which actually means that you have these kind of super highways in your brain, which makes you very, very able in other ways. And I think the flip side of the coin is I’m actually very able to see things and make connections and think things through in a way that I think is very helpful for the ministry and helpful for the team that I’m in. It’s a particularly unique perspective and gifts that this brings to the team, and we get to use it together in a certain way.
[00:40:07] Tony Payne: Here’s another perspective from Joel. Joel was recently working in full-time parish ministry—mainly in the youth and kids area—and has now transitioned into a different kind of ministry.
[00:40:18] Joel: I’m ADHD, possibly autistic. I’m still working with my psychiatrist to get that diagnosis. I’m also the father of three neurodiverse kids—two who are autistic and ADHD, and one who is untested yet, but we are very sure he is ADHD.
[00:40:34] Tony Payne: How long have you yourself known that you were ADHD?
[00:40:38] Joel: About two or three years.
[00:40:39] Tony Payne: Right. What was it like finding that out? What was that experience like?
[00:40:43] Joel: It made sense of 40 years of life before that. I could start seeing reasons behind things that I thought were just unanswerable. I started seeing patterns and connections that I’d never noticed before. And it started to make sense of who I was and why I am the way I am.
[00:41:05] Tony Payne: In what sort of areas? What sort of things made sense to you?
[00:41:08] Joel: Yeah, so there’d be so many things that I would just think that I was strange or unusual, because I would notice things that other people didn’t, or I would approach things in a different way. And they were different to the way people around me were noticing and acting. So I just thought I was strange until I realised, no, my brain is built different. My brain is doing things differently. It’s not wrong or weird; it’s just different to everyone around me.
[00:41:37] Tony Payne: I also asked Joel how this difference—how this new divergence—affected his work as a minister.
[00:41:43] Joel: Until Christmas last year, I was working full-time in parish ministry and had been for most of my adult life. But it was becoming clear to myself, to my family, to my work team that I was burning out—that trying to wrestle with my ADHD, wrestle with my kids’ neurodiversity and trying to put all those pieces together—I just didn’t have the energy left to do the things in ministry that I weren’t naturally gifted at—weren’t easy for me. And there’s a lot of things in ministry that aren’t easy, and you just got to push in and get them done, or find a way to get them done. And I didn’t have that energy, because I was really busy processing what I needed and what my boys needed.
[00:42:28] So at the end of last year, I stepped down from my ministry position to explore other ministry opportunities that weren’t parish work, because I just couldn’t manage it anymore.
[00:42:39] Tony Payne: What are your reflections as an ADHD person, but as someone who’s therefore kind of thought into this area quite a lot, I guess, both personally and what it means for me in ministry—how do you think neurodivergence and full-time ministry kind of fit together? And what are the challenges or possibilities there?
[00:42:56] Joel: So when we’re talking ministry, are we talking parish ministry? Are we talking serving Jesus in all kinds of spheres? Because I think they’re different answers.
[00:43:03] Tony Payne: Exactly. Well, why don’t you give me an answer for each? Because I think they are different answers, so I’m interested in answers to both.
[00:43:07] Joel: Yeah. For example, I haven’t left Christian ministry; I’ve left full-time parish ministry. But I’m still serving Jesus very directly in new employment.
[00:43:16] For parish ministry, I think one of the challenges is that we’re still using almost the same ministry model for what a minister looks like that we were using a hundred years ago. Sure, we’ve updated for technology, we’ve brought in new systems. But a lot of is still, there’s the guy, and I’m using that as a general neutral term, who covers everything and is covering all the bases and making sure everything is working.
[00:43:41] I was a children’s and youth minister, so if it had—involved somebody under 18, I had to be all over it. So my gifts were in one area, but they weren’t in every area, and I was finding myself having to pull myself together and get things done in an area that weren’t my strengths, and that was draining. So for someone with ADHD who uses up a lot of energy quickly, and doing things that aren’t in the skillset, aren’t naturally a fit, can be even more draining than for a neurotypical person.
[00:44:13] Parish ministry can be really hard. Unless you’re on a really big team where the workload is spread, not based on areas, but based on abilities, you’re going to struggle. And that was my experience. I was at a small church. There’s only a small handful of us on the team. And we just had to do everything.
[00:44:30] Tony Payne: There’s certainly an issue here for us to consider. How do different forms of neurodivergence affect people in Christian ministry? Do certain forms of neurodivergence make certain kinds of Christian ministry just too difficult—both for the minister themselves and for the team they’re working in, and for the congregation? That’s another tricky question we’ll need to come back to in due course.
5. Medical, clinical and social perspectives on neurodivergence
[00:44:53] Tony Payne: Well, so far we’ve heard quite a lot of stories and experiences. But part of seeking to understand or assess a particular issue—to come to terms with it—is to zoom out a little and look at things from broader perspectives.
[00:45:06] Let’s look at neurodivergence from the medical and clinical perspective, and also from the kind of broader social angle. This is our fifth and final area of focus in seeking to assess or understand this issue.
[00:45:20] There’s been an explosion of medical and scientific research and growth in knowledge about different aspects of neurodivergence over the past two or three decades. It’s now thought, for example, that ADHD is linked to a genetic brain development where certain neurotransmitters—dopamine and noradrenaline, for example—are not being picked up or absorbed efficiently or sufficiently in the brain. And this affects the ability of someone to regulate their attention and their motivation—their ability to focus, to get things done, to stay on task, or, in some cases, the ability to see beyond the task that’s currently being done to the other important things that are remaining to be done.
[00:46:01] Now ADHD, medically speaking, is now regarded as having three kinds: a hyperactive kind, which is more common in boys; an inattentive version, which is more common in girls; and a version that is a mixture of both. But these differences in the way the neurodivergent brain functions or is “wired”, as we put it, not only leads to some difficulties that neurodivergent people experience, but also leads to particular abilities—particular powers that neurodivergent people often excel at.
[00:46:32] We spoke with Lindy Hadges about this. Lindy has worked clinically in this area for some time, and is chair of the ADHD Foundation Australia.
[00:46:41] Lindy Hadges: There’s also some amazing positives. There’s some incredible strengths that, you know, if you’ve got a workplace with 30 people and three are neurodivergent, then they will just think differently. They will think outside of the box in a very lateral, unique way that your neurotypical people are just never going to be able to do. So they’re big thinkers. They’re lateral thinkers. They’re different thinkers.
[00:47:04] They’re usually incredibly creative. I don’t think I’ve ever met an ADHD or ASD person that doesn’t have some sort of unique creativity that I almost—uh, I hope that this isn’t patronising to the community, but it’s like their bionic superpower. It’s something really special they bring to the table that a neurotypical person just can’t do in the same way.
[00:47:26] And as well as that—in my mind, these are like the three big superpowers of the neurodiverse brain—is that, particularly ADHD people, they’re incredibly intuitive. They work on that right side of their brain. They’re very in their body and connected to what’s going on. And they can feel and intuit things that a neurotypical brain, again, just can’t do in the same way.
[00:47:47] Tony Payne: What about the prevalence of neurodivergence in our population? Well, it’s hard to get precise numbers, but something like 7 to 8 per cent of the population have been diagnosed with some form of ADHD, and that number has been rising rapidly in recent years.
[00:48:04] The other most commonly talked about form of neurodivergence—that’s autism—has a much lower incidence: only around 1.5 per cent of the population. But that number has also been growing significantly as awareness spreads and as new diagnosis guidelines take effect.
[00:48:21] In terms of the causes of autism and what’s going on in an autistic person’s brain, medically and scientifically speaking, this is even less well understood at the moment than ADHD, apart from the fact that, like ADHD, it tends to run in families. Here’s Lindy again.
[00:48:38] Lindy Hadges: So with ASD, they believe that some of the current theories are about how the left and right hemisphere are communicating with each other, and that causes social deficits in the ASD brain. Also, we know that dysregulation, which sits in the prefrontal cortex, again, is a huge issue if you live with autism. And so in that sense, we start to see some overlapping.
[00:49:03] Certainly recently in the last few years, I’m seeing more and more of the AuADHD diagnosis, which is those people that are living with ASD and ADHD together, which is just a whole another issue on its own. And so, we know that people who have ASD, that they might traditionally struggle with inflexibility, or are very black and white thinking, kind of dog—what we might see is dogmatic thinking, where they might get into lecture modes. It’s hard to transition: if they’re going down a particular pathway, it’s hard to change their mind.
[00:49:39] There’s a particular bunch of research out on the condition—I don’t know what the obsession is with three letter acronyms, but it seems to be there’s something called “PDA”, which is Pathological Demand Avoidance, which both people with ADHD and ASD will struggle with from time to time. But it has different outworkings with both conditions.
[00:50:00] But essentially, it’s a protective defence mechanism that if I’m going down a pathway and you come in and try to interject and move me off on a different pathway, my walls go up and I’m like, “No, I’m rock solid. I will not be moved from this.” Which you can see, yay: it’s got some great advantages to it, but it can have some disadvantages to it as well.
[00:50:19] Tony Payne: Well, it reminds me of the creative process of many truly great writers and authors that I’ve read about. Being a writer, I always am reading about writers. And for many great authors, there’s this—it can end up being quite antisocial and dysfunctional for their families. But this incredible ability to focus. And to keep your mind in a channel and in a world that you are creating, for example, in a novel or a research project you’re doing and an idea you are pursuing in a way that a neurotypical brain, if I can put it that way, will find it very difficult to do.
[00:50:50] And so, you find that many people who’ve created truly extraordinary things, either scientifically or creatively, had that degree of walls up focus, “You are not diverting me from this under any costs. Doesn’t matter who you are; I’m just keeping on going.”
[00:51:03] Lindy Hadges: Yes, exactly. And that has a name and that’s called hyperfocus. And just going back to the ASD group of people, the ability to analyse information that—the incredible strength of the analytical mind of the ASDs just will show up in the scientific community, in the mathematics community, in high level management, in big companies, you know. They just have such an ability to be able to titrate down to the absolute core of what’s going on, and analyse it and see it and report it back. And again, I think, not in a way that a neurotypical brain. So there’s definitely, you know, there’s disadvantages and there’s advantages to having both.
[00:51:44] Tony Payne: The medical or clinical lens on neurodivergence is important. After all, clinical assessment and diagnosis from psychologists and psychiatrists is how conditions like ADHD or ASD are identified.
[00:51:58] But one of the challenges of being neurodivergent and thinking about this as a reality and as a subject is that the medical lens is not the only lens. Here’s Kate Morris again, talking about the different models through which and in which neurodivergence has been understood over the past many decades.
[00:52:17] Kate Morris: There are different approaches to neurodivergence and, in fact, to disability. And those models have changed and grown over time. None of them have completely disappeared, but we’ve built on them and they exist in different ways.
[00:52:29] So there’s the model of the charity model, where we see difference and we say, “Oh, that’s broken. Let’s, together, as those who don’t experience that difference, let’s raise support. We’ll hand that support to them and we’ll work to fix them.” And this isn’t done in communication with these people or to find out if that’s the support they need and so on. That might be the sort of model where we say, “Let’s raise money to support people who are autistic so that they can you know, stop being so autistic.
[00:52:59] There’s a medical model, which says, “You’ve got a problem. We’ve identified that problem, and we’re going to fix that problem or find a cure to that problem.” Also, this model doesn’t approach the person with that difference to find out exactly what is going on or what their perspective is.
[00:53:15] Tony Payne: Is it entirely a problem, for example, or does it also have positive aspects? As you were saying before.
[00:53:19] Kate Morris: Yeah, and that’s a really—that’s a really important downside of the pure medical model—that a person might be stimming, for example, which is when someone flaps, they spin, they do something with their body that perhaps a neurotypical person doesn’t need to do to very cleverly calm themselves down. It’s wonderful. They’re moving through space in order to calm themselves down.
[00:53:41] But a medical professional might look at that and say, “Oh, that is bad. Let’s find a way to help them sit on their hands so that they’re not doing that. Let’s find a cure” without realising that actually, that already is the cure for something that they’re coping with.
[00:53:53] Then there’s the social model that says, “Well, let’s ask and find out what people are experiencing.” Are they experiencing a disability, or is this just a difference that they’re quite happy to navigate? Is this something that they have an opinion on what support they’d like to have? And so, approaching in that sense.
[00:54:09] So that might be asking an autistic person how they’re finding the lights in a room, or if the volume is up too loud—that sort of thing. Is there a way that we can make this environment less difficult for you? And allowing them to say, “For me, I’d quite like bright lights. This is great for me, but yeah, the volume is too loud.” That sort of thing.
[00:54:27] Then there’s the human rights model, which approaches it from the point of view that every human has a right to be able to operate in this world without pain and difficulty. And so, because it’s a right, we’re going to build it into our policies and practice and procedures in order to ensure that a person is going to be cared for and supported in a way that they need.
[00:54:48] And so, there are downsides to all of these things, and I think the main thing that we’re missing across all of them is God, and the loving support and Christian community that we see in the Bible where what we actually need is a world that approaches everyone in the 1 Corinthians 12 sense of us humans being created by God. Christians are one in the body of Christ with all of our differences, and we are called to love and serve each other in this interdependent relationship where, together, we’re dependent on Christ for salvation, on God, for grace, on the Holy Spirit for renewal, maturity, and together working to glorify God.
[00:55:31] Tony Payne: As Kate says, there is a truth in all these models or lenses for understanding neurodivergence. But none of them really are adequate on their own. And the missing perspective is the one that Kate points to: the perspective of seeing God as the creator of all of us; the perspective of the Fall and of sin and of brokenness, of redemption and renewal in Christ, of a new community of people who relate differently in Christ, of a new creation in Christ.
[00:56:01] But that, of course, takes us to the second stage or phase of our exploration of this subject—to a biblical and theological reflection on the issues connected with neurodivergence. And that will be the subject of our next episode.
Conclusion
[00:56:15] But let’s conclude just by briefly recapping where we are. We’ve been in the first phase of our exploration—of assessing, of seeking to understand and listen and interrogate this whole question. We’ve looked at the experience of neurodivergent people themselves and heard their voices. We’ve done likewise with the experience of parents of neurodivergent kids. We’ve thought about some of the issues that arise about church and about the Christian faith and Christian living in light of neurodivergence and about neurodivergence in Christian ministry. And finally, we zoomed out a little bit and looked at neurodivergence from a medical and clinical and social perspective.
[00:56:52] Now, of course, all of these could have been done in much greater depth and detail. But I hope we’ve looked at the issue sufficiently and sought to assess and understand the issue sufficiently to be able to now go to the Bible and see what it says about the important subject of neurodivergence.
[00:57:08] If you have questions arising from this episode or from any of the episodes that we put out in this short series, we’d love you to get in touch. Please send us a voice memo or an email to ccl AT moore edu au. That’s ccl AT moore edu au. And we’ll deal with as many of the questions and issues you raise as we can in future edition of this podcast.
[00:57:34] In the meantime, thanks for being with us on this special edition of the CCL Podcast. I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
[Music]
[00:57:56] Tony Payne: Well, thanks for joining us on this episode of the Centre for Christian Living Podcast from Moore College. For a whole lot more from the Centre for Christian Living, just head over to the CCL website: that’s ccl.moore.edu.au—where you’ll find a stack of resources, including every past podcast episode all the way back to 2017, videos from our live events and articles that we’ve published through the Centre.
[00:58:21] And while you’re there on the website, we also have an opportunity for you to make a tax deductible donation to support the ongoing work of the Centre here at Moore College.
[00:58:30] We’d also love you to subscribe to the podcast and to leave a review so that people can discover our podcast and our other resources. And we always love and benefit from receiving your feedback and questions. Please get in touch: you can email us at ccl AT moore edu au.
[00:58:50] Many thanks to Karen Beilharz from the Communications Team here at Moore College for all her work in transcribing and editing and producing this podcast; to James West for the music; and to you, dear listeners, for joining us each week. Thank you for listening.
[00:59:05] I’m Tony Payne. ‘Bye for now.
[Music]
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay (generated using AI).
