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.

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