Pastor, if you notice someone knitting during your sermon, don’t be offended. It’s not (necessarily) because your sermon is boring, it might be their way of practicing attention to your sermon.

In my recent research, I’ve been listening to people with ADHD talk about their spirituality and spiritual practices. I’ve heard people with ADHD say that they could, in lectures and sermons, spend a lot of their mental energy on ensuring that it looks like they are paying attention. But that leaves them with little mental energy to spend on actually paying attention. Many people with ADHD say that in those kinds of spaces they need to do something else with their mind and body—perhaps something creative with their hands—in order to ground themselves and attend to what we are saying: knitting, colouring, painting, fidgeting, even playing a mindless game on their phone. But the narratives of shame are so strong, both internally and enacted by us in community. The disapproving glance, the snide comment, and the direct rebuke all make church spaces exclusionary. They communicate directly and indirectly to people of all kinds of diversity that you don’t really belong here as you are.

I started down this research track because of an uncomfortable gift of critical feedback: I had been teaching some content in a spiritual formation class in an overly neurotypical way. Once my eyes were opened to that, I went looking for resources, and found almost nothing to help me help my neurodivergent students.

To this point I have completed an initial round of research interviewing students with ADHD in that spiritual formation course. You can read more about that in this open-access article: Whitaker, Maja I. (2025) “I felt like I was being pushed into a box I have escaped”: ADHD and the Rule of Life in Education for Spiritual Formation.  Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry 45. Available online here.

The response to that early research was quite something. As I shared snippets in church and academic contexts I often had people share with me about their own struggles and their stories of shame. People were often coming to terms with a late diagnosis of ADHD and wondering whether that explained, as one man put it, why he had “always felt like a failure at faith.”

People are not normally that interested in your academic research. And so, here I am doing some more.

I am now looking to hear from a wider range of Christians with ADHD regarding their experience of Christian spiritual practices. The first step in this research is a survey, which can remain anonymous. From this, a smaller group of participants will be invited to participate in an interview.

You likely fit the criteria for participating in this research if:

• you have been diagnosed with ADHD,
• you have been a Christian for 3+ years,
• you have experience with spiritual practices (such as prayer, engaging with the Bible etc.), and
• you are over the age of 18

If this is you, you can complete the survey via this link: https://forms.gle/uJkVCSSEMUiTn1JK6. It will be open until 20th July 2025.

If this sounds like someone you know, feel free to invite them to participate. For more information, you can email me at mwhitaker@laidlaw.ac.nz.