The archbishop of Canterbury has said he has not prayed for his daughter Ellie Welby in relation to her disability because it is part of her and “she is precious”.
However, he prays on a daily basis for another daughter, Katherine Welby-Roberts, who has depression and anxiety.
Justin Welby and two of his five children were speaking to the BBC’s Ouch podcast, which focuses on disability.
Welby said the Church of England needed to do more to embrace disability and mental health. He will host a conference at Lambeth Palace, south-east London, this month on disability and inclusion.
Many of the C of E’s 9,000 buildings are inaccessible to disabled people, but heritage protection overrides accessibility law. Welby said: “I find it absolutely extraordinary that disability access comes second to heritage. I really find that bizarre. Well, that’s one way of saying ‘we don’t care about you’, isn’t it?”
Ellie Welby, who has dyspraxia, a condition causing difficulty in coordination and movement, told the podcast: “The church I go to now, I sit at the back because I don’t really feel comfortable. They’re very friendly in my church, but sometimes I can feel a bit out of place there.
“I have struggled a lot. People have looked at me and basically – I know the look now – it’s literally like, ‘you’re not disabled, why are you sitting there?’ Or ‘why can’t you do this?’ I’ve been discriminated against quite a few times because they don’t understand it.”
She also said her condition made her sometimes question her faith. “I have felt a bit like, well, if God heals, why am I still dyspraxic? Why do I still find it really difficult to do things? But at the same time it doesn’t change the way I trust God.”
The archbishop said he had not prayed for his daughter in relation to her condition: “I haven’t talked to Ellie about this [but] we had this discussion once around the [family] table when Ellie wasn’t there, because someone had asked me the question.”
He asked the family what they thought about praying for his daughter. He told her: “Your younger sister said, ‘if God changed Ellie she wouldn’t be Ellie, and we love Ellie.’ So there’s that thing that Ellie’s Ellie, she’s precious.”
However, Welby-Roberts’s mental health problems were not something that had always been part of her. She said the church did not always know how to respond to her depression and anxiety.
“If your first response is, ‘can I pray for your healing?’ then you’re not listening,” she said. “Because actually, a) you don’t need to say to someone you’re praying for their healing for God to be able to work, God’s bigger than that. And b) it really shuts down the conversation. I now actually only let a very few people pray for my healing, because I’ve had so many really awful experiences.”
She added: “I’m not addicted to negative thinking, I’m depressed and anxious medically. It’s a chemical thing going on with me, it’s not an addiction. And that was really unhelpful. I felt very unsettled by that. They’re trying to be helpful, but they’re not listening.”
Welby has also experienced bouts of depression and has struggled with forgiveness in relation to the death of his first child, Johanna, in a car crash in 1983.
He told the podcast that he needed to compile a list of “awkward questions” to ask God “when I meet him”.
