WAVE for Change

John Beauchamp, Disability Enabling Adviser for the Diocese of London tells the story of WAVE, all- abilities church in North London

Today WAVE Church Muswell Hill, North London, is a vibrant community of over 50 members with and without learning disability (30+ attend regularly each month). Meetings are informal with art and drama, singing with Makaton signing and creative prayer. The talks are a key element, aiming to get to the core of an issue and present it simply. It’s not a child-like Sunday School – irrespective of intellectual age, those coming have a life-time of lived experience. The popular ending to each meeting is tea and homemade cake. One member describes WAVE Church as feeling “like being wrapped in a warm blanket. I leave knowing that God really loves me”.

It wasn’t always like that. Before WAVE, one young person with additional needs, Jess, said:  

“I felt like I was the only one with additional needs in the whole church and everything there was for people without learning disabilities. It tried to be inclusive, but the language was too complicated for me, there was too much detail – I couldn’t understand the main point”.

In 2009, there were several families with a young person with learning disabilities at St James Church, Muswell Hill. Many were in, or had gone through, mainstream education and enjoyed the church’s youth programmes but a group of mothers in the church observed that as these young people neared adulthood, they and their families felt increasingly isolated.

The mothers met to talk about these struggles. They gathered a small team of people from across different denominations, most of whom had some personal or professional connection with learning disability (as parents, friends, teachers or therapists). None of the team had experience of church leadership but they all saw a need. Based on their belief that in God’s eyes everyone is valued equally, WAVE (We’re All Valued Equally) was born.

The first WAVE Church service, something of a leap of faith, took place in 2010, attended by a small number of people from several local churches. The services were short and straightforward and, as one of the leaders says: “we learnt on the hoof, observing how people responded, talking to them about the activities they enjoyed and noting attention spans”. It was a slow burn and several months before the first new person arrived.

The original intention was for WAVE Church to be for people with learning disabilities. The approach is no longer forbut rather with – we do WAVE Church with each other. Members with learning disabilities play an active part – on the planning team, co-leading the service, taking part in drama, serving the tea.

Various Christian media have covered our story over the years. We’ve featured on BBC’s Songs of Praise. Wave’s co-founders Bernice and Celia have been honoured with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Langton award for community service. And yet it is the small transformations among the Wave Church community that mean the most. The non-verbal member who arrives confidently with a huge smile, seemingly because he recognises Wave Church as a place that’s warm and caring. The woman who humbles many of us with her prayers showing great care for others in the group and the wider world.

Media attention has helped to spread the word about WAVE – both WAVE Church and WAVE Café (a social enterprise in Muswell Hill). Four new WAVE groups have been established as a result of connections made (two in London; two further afield) and our prayer is for many more. The fact that one of our members travels across London because there is no inclusive church service in his area, shows just how great is the need. 

It’s daunting getting started and so we’ve developed WAVE in a Box, offering resources and mentoring to save others having to reinvent the wheel as they create mixed-ability worship and social initiatives in their communities.

If you’re interested in creating or supporting more genuinely inclusive social or worship places in your community, we’d love to hear your ideas and explore how we could work together. Get in touch at hello@waveforchange.org.uk

You can find out more about the WAVE story and how we started via this video on our website waveforchange.org.uk