Holy Ground: Sacred Stories of Disabilities

✨ The Gospel Project presents ✨
Holy Ground: Disabled Voices, Sacred Stories
📅 Saturday, February 28, 2026

As part of The Gospel Project, Holy Ground: Disabled Voices, Sacred Stories invites us into an evening shaped by disabled lives, stories, and spiritual insight. This gathering centers voices too often excluded or sidelined in faith spaces, lifting them up as sacred witnesses whose stories deepen and transform how we understand God, community, and ourselves.

🍽️ We begin with a shared meal at 5:30pm, followed by the worship gathering at 7:00pm. As always with The Gospel Project, the table comes first. Community is formed through food, conversation, and presence before we move into music, storytelling, scripture, and prayer.

🎶📖 We are honored to welcome the return of the Peppermint Ridge Choir, whose music reflects joy, dignity, and deep community, embodying what it looks like when belonging is practiced and every voice is invited to participate fully. The evening will also feature Rev. Erin Beardemphl, whose pastoral and theological work alongside the Peppermint Ridge community invites the Church to listen more carefully to disabled experience as a source of spiritual truth and theological insight.

💃🎭 We are also honored to welcome Straight Up Abilities, an inclusive performing arts organization where artists of all abilities learn, create, and perform together. Through dance, theater, and expressive movement, their work centers access, dignity, and joy, reminding us that creativity is a shared language and that the Spirit moves most freely when every body is invited into the dance.

🎤 Our keynote speaker, joining us from St. Louis, is Rev. Barbara “Bobbie” Blunt, an itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Pastor of Buren Chapel A.M.E. Church in Herculaneum, Missouri. A seasoned pastor, chaplain, and community healer, her ministry bridges pulpit, hospital, and street-level outreach, grounded in embodied care, justice, and the sacred worth of every person.

🎵 We are also honored to welcome Marleena Barber, a vocalist, cabaret artist, educator, and disability advocate whose work is shaped by lived experience. Her artistry offers audiences a powerful encounter with creativity, presence, and the sacred textures of disabled life.

🌱 Joining the lineup is Helena Donato-Sapp, a young artist, poet, and disability justice advocate whose work centers intersectionality, embodiment, and belonging. Through her creative voice and public witness, Helena challenges ableism and invites communities to listen more deeply to disabled wisdom.

🕯️ Through music, testimony, scripture, and theatrical storytelling, the night explores how God is revealed through bodies and minds that move through the world differently. Rather than asking how disability can be cured or overcome, this gathering asks what disabled life reveals about God, belonging, and grace.

🤍 This evening affirms a simple truth: every embodied life speaks of God. Difference becomes a teacher without being demanded. Access becomes a spiritual practice rather than an afterthought. Community becomes the place where all are seen, heard, and welcomed at the table.

♿ This gathering is planned with accessibility and multiple ways of participation in mind. ASL interpreters and childcare will be available.

👉 RSVP for the FREE event here:
https://forms.gle/frZT2ccTW1Hv6gZY7

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