"Where did you find him?": God and ASL (Part 1)

Amid all the searching and learning we've done since we discovered Ellis was deaf, the biggest issue for us, the elephant in the room, always was what to do about church.

Anyone who knows us well knows that we take church very seriously. J and my own experiences growing up in the church were typical of what we call "covenant children". We believe that our children are Christians, and ought to be treated as such, until they prove otherwise. That means that children are taught at a very young age to participate in every aspect of public and private worship.

But what about Ellis? We are used to seeing young children sitting in the pews with their families at church. We know they don't understand a lot of what is going on, but we expect they will absorb what they can, and as they grow older they'll continue to grow in their understanding. But Ellis doesn't absorb a Hearing worship service the same was as Hearing children do. Most obviously, he doesn't hear the words we're singing and reciting. And he doesn't hear the sermon.

The most obvious solution is to find an interpreter to translate the content of the service. If Ellis can't understand everything that's fine. Neither can hearing children. And that's not the point, anyway.

Fortunately, our session was very receptive to the idea of hiring an interpreter. But they had to work through a lot of issues, first. Like whether or not the interpreter themselves needed to be a Christian, and if so then what kind? (The issue of who leads worship is a huge discussion in Evangelical Christian circles). And then there were practical issues, like where the interpreter would stand so that they would be accessible to everyone, but not distracting to anyone.

And then there was the actual search. We asked everyone we knew whether they knew any interpreters, or any good sources for interpreters. We contacted agencies, we scoured the web, and we followed endless friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend rabbit trails. Still, we just couldn't find anyone who fit the session's criteria. The problem was that any interpreter that was themselves a Christian wanted to be in their own church on Sunday! Duh.

So we kind of gave up, to tell the truth. We found a wonderful woman who was able to meet with us once a week to help us work out the difficult stuff-- like the Nicene Creed, so we could interpret those ourselves, in the pew. She also worked through the Children's Catechism, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostle's Creed with us. Awesome. It gave us a measure of confidence we lacked before. But still. That's not enough.

The issues are much broader than mere communication. The issues here are cultural, too. But I'm going to save that for the next part of this post, soon to follow.