BY: Dr. Keith Dow | April 17, 2025
I never anticipated researching disability while traveling with an injury. Yet, as fate (or God) would have it, on November 15th, I got tangled up with someone in front of the net during a hockey game. I ended up spraining my MCL and pinching my meniscus in my right knee – a bona fide Canadian Injury™. Later that month, I embarked on a journey across Ontario to interview 11 Christian adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) for my cross-training fellowship research project.
To put Ontario’s size into perspective, it’s larger than any European country except Russia. While I didn’t travel up North, it was still a lot of driving!
Even with a brace on my knee, I struggled to haul my Bristol board and art supplies into a church building in Wainfleet that lacked automatic doors. I battled my way up flights of stairs in Hamilton, waiting for assistance to open the doors. Caught in a snowstorm in Orillia, I cautiously avoided icy patches as I tried to clean off my vehicle.
There’s no need to call me a hero, even if my story is indisputably heroic. 😊 Seriously, though, my minor impairment was more uncomfortable and annoying than truly disabling. It gave me a better understanding of the countless barriers people with mobility disabilities face in accessing church buildings and community spaces every day. It also served as a fitting metaphor for the monumental challenges many folks with IDD encounter before they can contribute to theological or psychological research.
It’s for this reason that my research project focuses on a couple of areas. a.) How might we reduce barriers to psychological and theological research for people with IDD and b.) How do people with IDD conceive of and think about God and themselves? Both questions required me to engage a range of creative approaches to maximize accessibility and get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Photovoice is one approach that has been shown to work well for many people. Before we met, participants took photos that reminded them of God, often with the help of a support person or family member.
Some photovoice journal entries were short and scrawled in participants’ own handwriting, while others were written collaboratively with a support person. I provided printable Word files and electronic PDFs, but one participant called me, apologizing profusely: “I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work for me. Is there any chance I could send a voice message?” I was happy to reassure them that hearing this kind of feedback was precisely what I needed to learn how to conduct research effectively and pass on those lessons to others. Modern technology makes transcribing voice messages easy and free, and with just a couple of edits, they faithfully captured not only this person’s words but also the way they communicated.
In person, a creative, arts-based approach helped mitigate some of the challenges of overly theoretical or academic survey-based research, while semi-structured interview questions helped me assess participants’ understanding of the topics.
Despite surveyors’ best intentions, how many of us have struggled to understand and answer a question when all we’re given are a few words on a page?
Now imagine complexifying this with minds that take everything literally upon first impression or with those who comprehend concepts best at a second- or third-grade reading level. During our initial information sessions, I asked participants if they knew what “theology” meant. Eight out of eleven were unsure, even if some had heard the word before. That’s fair—after all, theologians are likely to give as many different answers as there are theologians!
I gave participants the option to remain anonymous or to be named collaborators on this project. Whether contributing art or theological insights, it’s important that people have the option to be recognized for the gifts they share. Every one of the 11 participants chose to be named collaborators, and rightfully so.
On February 2nd, all of our work came together. Many participants attended the Art & Vespers service at Martin Luther University College (Waterloo, ON) to kick off the Images of God exhibition, which runs until April 30, 2025. It was a moving service held in a beautiful chapel, with large poster representations of each participant’s collages displayed around the room. Beneath each collage were photos they had taken that reminded them of God, along with their insights, either from their journals or our conversations.
You can read more about the project and process in a Martin Luther University College write-up or about the Art & Vespers Service in a Karis article. This work was also featured in Canada’s premier Christian magazine, Faith Today.
In the coming months, I’ll be putting together a more thorough journal article highlighting the results for a special issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theology. I'm also looking forward to sharing more about this work at an upcoming mental health summit (May 20-22), a Canadian disability and ministry conference (May 24), the Institute of Theology and Disability (June 16-18), and the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (June 23-25). Wherever possible, I’ll aim to include my collaborators, several of whom eagerly await another speaking opportunity.
The fields of theology and psychology aren’t going to change overnight to better receive the contributions of people with IDD. In fact, the field of IDD itself has taken decades to move in this direction and still has much work to do. However, I’m confident that the contributions of the people I worked with speak for themselves. Any field that continues to marginalize or perpetuate barriers to people with IDD suffers as a result. Conversely, I hope this small project helps inspire churches, researchers, and communities to embrace the vital presence and contributions of people with disabilities in new and transformative ways.
