Over the last few years I have increasingly found it difficult to sing certain pieces of worship music or hymns, but there are some hymns which are almost too familiar to question, they are almost part of the furniture of Christian worship.
Amazing Grace is one of them. It is sung at funerals, memorial services and ordinary Sunday worship. Its tune carries emotion before most of us have stopped to think about the words.
And perhaps that is why it matters that we do stop and think about them.
Following a conversation earlier this evening I found myself reflecting on why hymns such as Amazing Grace can be difficult for disabled and LGBT+ Christians. I am also aware that my own ADHD may be part of why I cannot easily leave questions like this alone. I find myself returning to the gap between what the church says it believes and what its language sometimes communicates to those on the margins..
That does not mean every criticism I make is automatically right. Nor does it mean that a beloved hymn should simply be discarded. But I do think the church needs to be willing to ask what its worship sounds like to people whose bodies, identities or relationships have repeatedly been treated as problems.
This is a piece of writing I had originally begun last year but never managed to complete and I know there is a lot more that can and should be said, but maybe this will help start a much needed conversation.
“Was blind, but now I see”
The opening verse of Amazing Grace is so familiar that it is easy to sing without noticing how much it assumes:
Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,That saved a wretch like me!I once was lost, but now am found,Was blind, but now I see.
John Newton was using biblical language. Being lost and found recalls Luke 15; blindness and sight echo biblical language of recognition and revelation. Although many disabled people also find this language to be problematic where it occurs in scripture.
For many people, the meaning seems obvious: I did not understand, but now, by grace, I do.
But blindness is not only a metaphor. It is also a reality for many people.
For a blind or visually impaired Christian, the line may sound very different. In the hymn, blindness sits alongside being lost and wretched. Blindness represents the condition from which grace rescues us; sight represents restoration and wholeness.
That may not be what the congregation intends to say about blind people. But it is difficult to avoid the implication that blindness belongs on the wrong side of salvation.
Travis W. Jones, writing on ableism in Methodist hymnody, argues that this is precisely the difficulty with Amazing Grace: blindness is treated as a symbol of spiritual deficiency. He suggests that language such as “was bound, but now I’m free” would retain the movement from captivity into liberation without making a disabled body the image of failure.
There is something here which connects directly with my own experience. I am not blind, and I would not claim that my experience is the same as that of someone who is blind or severely sight impaired. But I am very short-sighted. Without my glasses, I can barely see clearly enough to navigate the world around me.
What is interesting is to me as a historian of technology is that we rarely think of glasses as assistive technology. They are too ordinary. Like clothing, or a pen and paper, they have become part of the unnoticed technology through which we live our lives. I do not normally look at my glasses; I look through them. They become visible mainly when I cannot find them, when they break, or when I take them off and discover again how much I depend on them.
That matters because my short-sightedness has not disappeared. What has largely disappeared is the disabling effect of it, because an effective aid is readily available and socially unremarkable. In another time, or in a society where I could not obtain glasses, the same impairment would shape my life very differently.
Perhaps this offers a different way of thinking about grace. Grace need not be imagined as the removal of difference, dependence or impairment. Perhaps grace is more like the gift which enables us to encounter the world more fully: not turning us into somebody else, but making participation, recognition and belonging possible.
That does not remove the problem with using blindness as a metaphor for spiritual failure. Blind people should not have to hear their lives described as the condition from which salvation rescues us. But it does challenge the assumption behind that metaphor: that wholeness means no longer needing support, and that salvation means becoming closer to an imagined version of normality.
But the issue is larger than one line. Disabled people have often encountered churches which treat us as objects of pity, prayer or inspiration, rather than simply as members of the body of Christ. Disability is too easily imagined as something the presence of God ought to remove.
Nancy Eiesland’s The Disabled God offers a different image: the risen Christ still bears his wounds. Resurrection does not erase the marks of his body. That challenges a church which too easily assumes that redemption means becoming less disabled, less wounded or more apparently “normal”.
“That saved a wretch like me”
For many LGBT+ Christians, the difficulty may lie in a different phrase:
That saved a wretch like me.
The problem is not that LGBT+ Christians have no need of grace, forgiveness or transformation. None of us loves perfectly.
But there is a difference between saying, “I need grace because I am human and sometimes fail to love,” and being told, “You need grace because you are gay, trans, bisexual or queer.”
Many LGBT+ Christians have encountered sin not as a shared Christian confession, but as a judgement attached particularly to them: to their sexuality, their gender identity, their relationships or their honesty about who they are.
In that context, singing “saved a wretch like me” may not feel like receiving grace. It may feel like being asked to repeat the judgement already made against them.
Jarel Robinson-Brown reflects on this in Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace. His concern is not with abandoning grace, but with the way churches have made grace conditional upon people accepting shame about themselves.
Dawne Moon and Theresa Tobin describe this as sacramental shame: shame made to feel like evidence of faithfulness. LGBT+ people may be expected to remain ashamed of themselves or their relationships in order to demonstrate that they are taking God seriously.
Why ADHD has made me question this more
This is where my own ADHD becomes part of the question.
ADHD does not give me a special ability to decide which doctrines are true or false. It does not mean that every objection I raise is correct. But it may help to explain why I increasingly struggle to ignore contradictions.
I find it hard to accept a church saying that everyone is welcome while its words and practices continue to imply that some people are problems to be cured, corrected or kept quietly at the edge. I find it difficult simply to say, “that is our tradition,” when the tradition seems to wound people.
This is not only about hymns. It is also about church teaching more broadly. When a doctrine or practice appears to produce shame, exclusion or silence among already marginalised people, we need to ask whether the problem really lies with those people, or with the way the church has understood God.
The Methodist Church’s recent report on Healing Ministry and Neurodiversity seems significant here. It acknowledges the harm caused when neurodivergent people are treated as needing cure, calls the Church to consider repentance for past exclusion, and suggests that the transformation required may often be the transformation of the church and society rather than the neurodivergent person.
This seems to connect directly with the questions raised by disabled and LGBT+ Christians. The issue is not whether grace transforms lives. It is what, or whom, we assume needs changing.
Grace that does not ask people to disappear
I enjoy singing and playing Amazing Grace, even as I struggle with the lyrics I still find it highly emotive. I will very likely continue to choose it when leading services. But perhaps I need to look again at the lyrics and challenge myself and others to think about what it is we are singing and how that may impact others, and just maybe consider what other words could be used.
Loving a hymn does not mean refusing to question it. Nor does belonging to the church mean accepting every inherited teaching without asking what it does to people.
Perhaps the question is not whether grace is amazing. Perhaps the question is whether the church has sometimes presented grace in ways which require disabled, LGBT+ and neurodivergent people to imagine ourselves as the problem.
Grace should not ask people to disappear before they can belong.
Perhaps grace becomes truly amazing when it frees the church from its need to make some people the symbols of brokenness, and teaches us instead to recognise the damage caused by our own assumptions, our own language and our own unwillingness to listen.
Some “light” reading
- Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Overview
- Travis W. Jones, Ableism in United Methodist Hymnody. Open-access PDF
- Naomi Lawson Jacobs and Emily Richardson, At the Gates: Disability, Justice and the Churches. Publisher information
- Jarel Robinson-Brown, Black, Gay, British, Christian, Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace. Overview
- Dawne Moon and Theresa W. Tobin, “Sunsets and Solidarity: Overcoming Sacramental Shame in Conservative Christian Churches to Forge a Queer Vision of Love and Justice.” Open-access PDF
- Methodist Conference 2025, Healing Ministry and Neurodiversity: Response to Notice of Motion 2022/201. Official report
Leave a Reply