The first 30 years of my life were filled with moments where things were just slightly off. Something was not quite right, but I could never figure out what it was. As a teen and an adult, I functioned well enough—I was bright in school—but completing tasks was often chaotic, no matter how organised I had intended to be. I was the last-minute procrastinator on assessments and projects. But I turned in creative, high-quality work so you’d never guess that anything was up.
I was always either late, or only just on time for meetings. I was nearly always tense. I forgot to eat, never realising I was hungry until I would become faint. You might think I was lazy from how often I was on my phone. Yet I was also never able to stop my mind from doing a thousand things at once.
I spoke impulsively: from childhood, I could keep up a conversation with adults, but I’d frequently put my foot in my mouth. I would lose friends, because I didn’t realise you had to check on them regularly. I often worried that I didn’t bring that much to my friendships—that my friends tolerated me, but not much more than that; that I was one misstep away from mistake. For a long time, I thought it was anxiety, but it never seemed to ease for long.
Then one day, someone said the right thing at the right time, and I realised that all of those things may have had the same cause. In late 2022, I was finally diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).1 The process of diagnosis over that year was a huge thing to have going on in the background: I have had hard moments, moments that have been helpful, and moments that have pushed me to think harder about how the gospel speaks into all this. On one hand, there hasn’t been a lot of change; it’s just identifying something that was always there. On the other hand, however, I’ve undergone a paradigm shift. Diagnosis has affected how I think about myself, the pursuit of godliness, expectations, and growing into the image of Christ. While I am still thinking through a lot of things, the purpose of this article is to explore a few thoughts concerning ADHD and godliness, and ADHD and cultural expectations in ministry—particularly of women—and I hope they might help with some discussion.
About ADHD
Before I continue, it’s worth clarifying a few things about the condition itself. “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” as a title doesn’t describe the condition terribly well. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that someone with ADHD has less autonomy over what they are going to pay attention to.
ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder: the brain develops differently than the “typical” pattern.2 Sections that connect one way in a neurotypical brain connect differently in a neurodivergent one, resulting in different ways of thinking, behaving, perceiving and interacting with the world.
It’s not all bad; someone with ADHD might have the sort of curiosity, creativity, and tenacity that allows them to pioneer an entirely new way of doing something. They’ll chase down a question until they get answers. They’ll find a lot of things in the world interesting. They can process information at a rate and speed that boggles the mind. A disposition for pattern recognition paired with an interest in problem-solving and the ability to operate in a high-stakes environment is an invaluable strength in a crisis. However, the lack of autonomy over what you’re going to pay attention to can become a problem in different ways. For example, I will be fully aware that I need to write that complex email and be unable to start. I will be fully aware that I need to be awake early tomorrow, but unable to stop deep-cleaning the tiles with a toothbrush. Or maybe I haven’t stopped to think about the early morning beyond acknowledging it as an abstract concept that exists; the only thing that exists right now is my nemesis (the mould in the shower) and I will not stop until it is vanquished.
Types
There are three main “presentations”—symptom groups—of ADHD: hyperactivity, inattentive, and a combination of the two. It is a spectrum disorder, so different people experience different symptoms of the disorder to different degrees.3 The hyperactive type is the most obvious—for example, the fidgeter or the one who never stopped talking. The inattentive type “zones out” a lot: they were the kid who was told that they could do better if they “just applied themselves more in class”. The combination type exhibits both behaviours.
This third type is what I have. While I was never a candidate for restless leg syndrome, the hyperactivity is present in the form of a never-ending deluge of thoughts. The inattentiveness is tangibly observable in the form of 78 browser tabs open on my phone, reminders of things I have almost finished.
Dopamine
Everyone’s brains need a particular hormone to help us make decisions, carry out tasks and keep our emotions in check. It’s a neurotransmitter called dopamine. It does a lot of other things too, and prolonged stress or a lack of sleep will make your brain use more of it. It’s why when you are sleep-deprived or grieving, it’s hard to make decisions, come up with options, carry out complex tasks or keep your emotions in check. Stress burns up this decision-making fuel and makes general function harder until that particular experience eases.
One of the traits of an ADHD brain is a deficiency in dopamine.4 Remember how well you paid attention to what you were doing during a season of sleep deprivation? Imagine that as an everyday experience. There isn’t always enough fuel in an ADHD brain for making decisions, carrying out tasks or keeping your emotions in check. Furthermore, the difficulty with choosing what you’ll focus on can make it difficult to use this fuel “responsibly” (that is, exclusively on “important” things). The result is impulsive behaviour and decision paralysis, unfinished tasks, last-minute everything (no matter how hard you plan), and intense emotional responses to things.
Diagnosis
Diagnosis is game-changing because it shifts the focus away from blindly trying to correct behaviours and symptoms that stem from ADHD. A diagnosis provides clarity, strategies for self-management, and a reason for one’s chaotic moments that isn’t a failure of moral character. Because the condition exists on a developmental level, it’s not exactly something you can fix.
Getting diagnosed involved a lot more grief than I first anticipated. On the one hand, it was vindicating: a lot of things suddenly made sense. But on the other hand, I had to reprocess years of social faux pas, when I had realised too late that something was off but never knew what. It’s weird to reflect on those moments and see them clearly, and yet no one knew or said anything about it. It’s a bit like getting home, only to realise that something’s been stuck in your teeth for the whole day. Had nobody noticed? What if they did and didn’t want to make a scene? It’s hard to know which option is worse.
ADHD and godliness
Amid all this, it’s important to remember the big things. God intended this body for me, with all its awkwardness and creativity. I found wrestling with diagnosis and its implications hard: It was a long journey, and I didn’t want to talk much about it until I had the proof of a clinical diagnosis. Even once I had that diagnosis, there was still the question of what “box” others might put me in if I told them.
But it’s also made me think harder about some of the ways we talk about godliness and implement our faith, while at the same time remembering that God intended for our bodies to have limits. I’ve had some presuppositions challenged and I’ve realised that some areas are more complex than we think.
Therapeutic language and personal responsibility
One of the things I’ve spent more time thinking about is how Christians interact with therapeutic language. Therapeutic language describes the practice of speaking about a condition in primarily medical terms. We’ve become more familiar with therapeutic language in general in recent years, particularly in areas of mental health, and there are aspects of it that are helpful and unhelpful. Adding therapeutic nuance to the way Christians think about addiction, for example, means that instead of treating addiction as the result of “weak” character (that is, the addict who relapses needs to just try harder, or that their weakness of character is something unchangeable), we see that it’s a more complex issue that needs nuance and empathy.
However, therapeutic language becomes unhelpful for Christians when it is given too much authority. Viewing issues through an entirely therapeutic lens can mean we either excuse personal responsibility, or we ignore the reality of sin and the work of Christ in the life of the believer.
Godliness, the work of the Spirit, self-control and our will
With this in mind, I want to point out something about how Christians sometimes think about self-control and the will. When we make self-discipline and the pursuit of godliness primarily about our own ability to carry it out, we forget that apart from the work of the Spirit in us, we aren’t capable of choosing godliness. If we make the pursuit of godliness about us doing things, rather than something for which we must ask for God’s help, we’re going to run into issues, because my brain doesn’t always have the ability to “do”.
As mentioned earlier, an ADHD brain is deficient in dopamine, the decision-making fuel. This has a direct impact on my ability to begin, continue and complete tasks. It impacts how well I can control my emotions. It makes everyday things that aren’t interesting difficult. It makes it harder to keep impulsive words or behaviours in check.
If we connect the pursuit of godliness to our ability to carry out tasks, we can diminish the importance of the work of the Spirit in our lives as Christians. This in turn adds guilt onto the shoulders of people who find exercising the ability to “do” difficult. There may be an objective reason why “doing” is difficult, but instead, their inability to “do” is treated as a failing of moral character, and the solution presented is to just try harder. My diagnosis explained a lot of things and helped me understand a lot of the shame I’ve carried for a long time about not being able to “do”. It’s only now that I’ve been able to let that go and rest in the truth that Jesus takes away all our shame (Rom 10:11).
Of course, the immediate pushback to this argument is that no-one would ever agree with it if it was put in those terms. Of course we need the work of the Spirit in us in the pursuit of godliness! Of course we need the work of the Spirit in us to exercise godly self-control! But does the way we offhandedly talk about day-to-day life encourage dependence on God, or do we expect the ability to “do” to stem from our age, education and social conditioning? What we don’t say forms just as much of a picture as what we do say when it comes to this matter. Does my exhortation for my people to participate in a daily “quiet time” presume that if you find this activity hard, it’s because you either don’t care about it enough or you’re not trying hard enough? If I am only suggesting one way of doing this thing, I am telling you that there’s only one way to pursue it.
Condemnation and godliness
However, I don’t want to conclude that the solution is to excise all personal responsibility to pursue Christian self-discipline. Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:23). The Christian makes their thoughts obedient to Christ (2 Cor 10:5) and entrusts themselves to him. But as we teach on the atonement, repentance and the self-discipline of the godly life, let’s not neglect the resurrection, the work of the Spirit and new life in Jesus. The resurrection reminds me that Jesus’ death was sufficient in paying for my sins (1 Cor 15:12-17). The work of the Spirit reminds me that I am a new creation in Christ (Gal 5:16-25; 2 Cor 5:16-17): I am not unloved by him as I continue to wrestle with my flesh. The new life in Christ reminds me that even when I acutely experience this weakness, this is not all of who I am, nor is this a dismissible part of my existence. As Romans 8:1-2 reminds us,
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life as set you free from the law of sin and death.
If you’ve never had the experience of being stuck on your bedroom floor for hours, paralysed, as you internally beg and scream at yourself to begin the next task, you might be able to fool yourself into thinking that you don’t need to pray and ask for God’s help to just stand up. I cannot fool myself into thinking that I could be self-sufficient in the pursuit of godliness. I have come to see more clearly that I will never not need the help of the Holy Spirit to do the hard things. Of course I will need to ask God for help; I am too aware of my weakness to tell myself otherwise.
ADHD and cultural expectations in ministry
Along with godliness, one of the other areas I’ve had to think through has to do with cultural expectations in ministry. I recognise that cultural expectations aren’t inherently bad. Ministry workers are expected to leverage them to speak the gospel, and the Apostle Paul speaks of doing just that in 1 Corinthians 9:20-22—becoming like those under the law, becoming like those without the law and becoming like the weak in order to win them for Christ. The challenging thing is that our cultural expectations can inform our ministry expectations and create difficulties if you have a hard time meeting those expectations.
Cultural expectations of women in ministry
The cultural expectations we have of women is that they are good at reading social cues and keeping other people (and themselves) organised. It’s why women are often the ones organising social events, engineering the environment, organising meetings, taking on the majority of running households, keeping the family calendar, reminding the rest of the household about commitments or chores, and maintaining the mental load in a household.
It’s hard to find a positive example of this in pop culture, but consider negative examples: how often does the plot actively point out that the absence of these characteristics is a problem for the female character? The character of Robin Buckley from Stranger Things introduces herself to the main characters with an apology for missing social cues: “I don’t really have a filter for a strong grasp of social cues. If I say something that upsets you, just know that I know it’s a flaw. Believe me, my mother reminds me daily.”5 The female character often has other qualities that will make her important to the plot—like her cleverness, especially in a pinch—but her arc is about overcoming this problem, or her status relegates her to a supporting character whose arc is completed when the main character finishes learning the important thing from her. Consider Mulan from the 1998 Disney film for the first example, and Summer from 500 Days of Summer for the second.
The expectation of high social skills and high organisation in women particularly is a historical-cultural phenomenon, a gift of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the “homemaker” role in the family unit. When cultural expectations play the chief role in informing ministry expectations, we expect the women in our ministry spaces to be paragons of these virtues, able to carry the mental load of multiple ministry structures from the vision down to the finest details, as well as being flexible to the sudden changing needs within the staff team.
Furthermore, women in ministry are expected to be incredibly good at navigating social situations. How else does the female ministry worker handle both the children’s ministry and women’s ministry? She can intercept a pastoral crisis a mile away, run the kid’s ministry program, and visit the new mum with God’s word and a pasta bake. Her every step is deliberate, people come to her, she can read and leverage any room, and she never speaks impulsively.
I’m not saying that any of these things are wrong, or that we don’t expect men to also be capable in these things. I’m saying that these things are common expectations of women in ministry. But consider for a moment the dual narratives of “If you love Jesus, you should consider ministry” and “Every example we show you of someone in ministry looks like this”. What happens when you don’t measure up to that example, even when you try to? When our cultural expectations shape our ministry expectations, the dealbreakers in ministry can shift from loving God or loving others, to adherence to a predetermined social role.
ADHD and women in ministry
A brain with ADHD is wired differently to “normal” expectations, and this can make reading social cues or abiding by them difficult. Women with ADHD can have a hard time conforming to cultural expectations, particularly with regard to responding to those social cues or managing social structures. Replying to someone’s story with another about how you experienced the same thing might be intended as a means of showing empathy, but instead it can come off as making the conversation about you again.
Furthermore, someone with ADHD is more likely to need external help to stay organised, rather than being able to create organisation for others. There may not be enough dopamine—enough decision-making, emotionally stabilising fuel—to run both the work life and the home life successfully, even if the pace and changing nature of a highly responsive, problem-solving job is enticing and exciting. They will be the one who needs reminders for bills, meetings and even when to start getting ready to leave the house. Rather than being a tempering force in a household or a workplace, instead, they will bring ideas and innovation to the table.6
All this is less of a problem for men than it is for women, because we have different cultural expectations and standards for men and women. For men in ministry, people place higher expectations on the content of their teaching; for women, people place higher expectations on their skills in social awareness and pastoral sensitivity.
I didn’t learn this until recently. My history of misreading the room and speaking impulsively and of being unable to “get it together”, and my collection of unusual interests had left me unable to work out if I was bad at being a woman in ministry, or just bad at being a woman in general. Those cultural expectations weighed in on who I was and whether I was fit for the job. I wish I’d understood this earlier.
Variety in the body of Christ
I want to point out that as Christians, our theology of the body of Christ has room for variety:
Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. (1 Cor 12:15-18)
We love our church family, so we celebrate the different ways we contribute and we support each other in our weaknesses. Christ has given us each other so that together, we glorify him and care for each other.
I think that as we invite women into ministry, we would want to both show the rich variety of ways that they can contribute to the growth of the body of Christ, and also communicate that it’s a variety of women who do that. If we platform a narrow vision of women in ministry, the women who don’t meet that description or those skills will not consider whether ministry is a plausible option for them. This happens unintentionally and is exacerbated by women having fewer ministry role models when compared with men. I would like us to consider whether this is happening in our churches, and whether it can be addressed in a helpful way.
Understanding how I’ve been made has been helpful for shaping ministry expectations others can have of me, and expectations I set for myself. Acknowledging my limits has helped me make wise decisions about how I will serve the body. But I also feel it’s important for us Christians more broadly to notice where our ministry expectations are being informed by our cultural expectations, because Christ speaks to both.
Thinking more Christianly about neurodiversity
I don’t intend for theology and neurodivergency7 to be what people know about me first. It’s not all of who I am. At the same time, if you tried to create me without my particular turns of phrase, my abiding love of chickens or my sense of humour, I think you’d have someone else. I cannot imagine my life without them. While on this journey, I’ve had opportunities to help my brothers and sisters in Christ think a bit more about how Jesus speaks into and shapes our thinking on this topic. I wrote this because I had a hard time finding Christian writing on neurodiversity in adults, and I’m interested in thinking through the questions all this has raised in other areas.8
But I also know there’s a comfort in knowing that there are other Christians out there like me. In the time between the first draft of this article and today, I’ve had so many conversations with other faithful men and women who shared their story or wanted to ask about mine. Vulnerability is risky, but I am thankful for what God taught me through the year of my diagnosis. It’s been fascinating to return to some basic assumptions, and to realise that perhaps things are more complex than we thought.
How we pursue godliness and self-control needs to account for the limits of our physical bodies. This doesn’t diminish the importance of the goal, but it ought to remind us of our utter dependence on God’s grace. Furthermore, if we believe that the diversity of the body of Christ is good, then we should lean into that and be willing to get creative when it comes to forming our ministry expectations and possibilities, rather than measure how well our leaders meet cultural expectations.
I know I still have a lot to learn, come to terms with and process around this topic. I know there’s still more to go before I will see it all clearly, holding my Saviour’s hand as I understand how to trust him in my “weakness”. But I know that we live in obedience and faithfulness to the one who loved us first, and we work with the bodies and brains that he in his goodness and providence has given us. What the Lord said to Paul applies just as much to us:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Cor 12:9)
Brooke Hazelgrove has completed her fourth year at Moore College.
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Bible quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society, www.ibs.org. All rights reserved worldwide.
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Endnotes
1 It’s a “late diagnosis” because ADHD is ideally identified and diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence. Also, women are typically diagnosed with ADHD later than men, and scholarship on the disorder has changed significantly in recent years as more things are understood about it (“Bias About ADHD Leaves Many Women with a Late Diagnosis,” Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD), 2 March 2022, https://chadd.org/adhd-weekly/bias-about-adhd-leaves-many-women-with-a-late-diagnosis/).
2 “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),” Brain Foundation, last updated 28 November 2023: https://brainfoundation.org.au/disorders/adhd/.
3 Ibid.
4 K Blum et al., “Attention-Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder and Reward Deficiency Syndrome,” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment (2008 4[5]): 893, https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S2627.
5 Caitlin Schneiderhan (writer) and Shawn Levy (director), “Chapter Three: The Monster and the Superhero”, Stranger Things (27 May 2022), Netflix, Season 4 episode 3.
6 ADDitude, “Regret and Resolve: How Women with ADHD Can Transform the Challenges of a Late Diagnosis” with Kathleen Nadeau, 15 March 2022: https://www.additudemag.com/webinar/women-with-adhd-post-diagnosis-challenges-solutions/
7 “Neurodivergency” as a term covers multiple neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and others.
8 For example, I’ve wondered how disability and the resurrection body fit together. I suspect that searching for an answer to “How shall we be raised?” will inform our thinking about disability in general and how we celebrate the diversity of the body of Christ while longing for resurrected bodies.
