Bridging Church and Academy: Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety’s Transformative Work in Disability and Ministry - Princeton Theological Seminary

Bridging Church and Academy: Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety’s Transformative Work in Disability and Ministry

Bridging Church and Academy: Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety’s Transformative Work in Disability and Ministry

Building bridges has been a consistent through line for the life and work of Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety ‘08MDiv. Dr. Raffety is a scholar, ethnographer, pastor, and advocate whose contributions have had a lasting impact on the academy and the Church.

Dr. Raffety is a scholar, ethnographer, pastor, and advocate whose contributions have had a lasting impact on the academy and the Church.

She has studied foster families in China, Christian congregations in the United States, and people with disabilities around the world. She currently teaches and researches at Princeton Theological Seminary and Princeton University, and has written two books, Families We Need and From Inclusion to Justice.

Raised in a Presbyterian household, Dr. Raffety is the daughter of two devoted Church servants who modeled for her how to live a committed life.

“My parents were incredible servants of the church,” Dr. Raffety recalled, “who used their innate gifts to improve the institution and enhance the lives of those they served. Being raised in the church, and seeing my parents’ servant leadership really impacted me.”

Her college roommate encouraged Dr. Raffety to apply for a scholarship offered by Princeton Theological Seminary. While ministry was not on her radar at the time, after much discernment and reflection, she decided that this might be her path.

“I met my best friends in life at PTS, including my husband,” she stressed. “Those are the people who I keep in contact with and who really supported me.”

At Princeton Seminary Dr. Raffety also encountered administrators and professors who “refused to choose” between the Church and the academy.

“Victor Aloyo and Kenda Dean stand out as two PTS leaders during my time who really showed me how to be a minister-scholar because they were both working in the academy but also actively pastoring churches. I often felt like academia and ministry wanted me to choose. Victor and Kenda gave me hope that maybe I didn’t have to.”

She added, “This is very much how I see my vocation. With Victor and Kenda you could see how one vocation informed the other,” she explained.

“I didn’t want to choose between serving the Church and serving the academy,” Dr. Raffety noted, and she has proven many times over she can do both with equal vigor. She points to those professors and mentors at the Seminary who showed her that it was possible.

It was uncharted territory, and I think having them as people I trusted and looked up to emboldened me.

After graduating from the Seminary, Dr. Raffety began her PhD studies in Anthropology at Princeton University while simultaneously learning Chinese and serving a Spanish-speaking church. This “excessive” multi-tasking during her first-year coursework turned a few heads in the university’s Anthropology Department, “but my advisor stuck up for me and told everyone, ‘This is what really feeds her.’”

She added, “That’s what God has asked of us—to give of our whole lives. So, to really live that out has been challenging.”

Advocacy from Disabled Perspectives

The roots of Dr. Raffety’s passion for disability advocacy in ministry run deep. “Looking back, I can see that I’m part of a proud disabled lineage. My grandfather had a spinal cord injury when he was younger. He walked with two canes his whole life, and was one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.” Dr. Raffety’s mother lives with multiple sclerosis, “and she was really open with us growing up about how chronic illness impacted her.”

In her youth Dr. Raffety was diagnosed with neurocardiogenic syncope, which is a temporary loss of consciousness due to a sudden decrease in blood flow to the brain. “That was something that I buried away for the longest time. I was told I would grow out of it. That never happened.”

Learning to live with this condition was made easier by all the research she has conducted. “The disabled people in my research became mirrors to see myself more clearly,” she stressed.

Her first book is about the critical role foster families play in international adoption, especially with disabled children. Dr. Raffety did extensive fieldwork in China from 2010 to 2012. “I got this amazing education on disability from a whole other culture in another language that I didn’t even know I was going to get.”

In 2014, Dr. Raffety’s daughter Lucia was born with leukodystrophy, a progressive genetic disease of the brain. She explained that the primary reason she and her husband wanted to become parents was through the example of the foster families she studied. “We had this imagination of what our family would look like that absolutely could include a disabled child.”

Bridging Church and Academy: Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety’s Transformative Work in Disability and Ministry

She added, “I think Lucia is the perfect child for us. She’s 11 now, which is amazing because we didn’t think we’d have her for more than a couple of years.” As a person who relies on words for her ministry and livelihood Dr. Raffety said, “We have learned to communicate with her in ways we never thought possible,” and her experiences raising Lucia, who is multiply disabled and nonspeaking, inspired her second book.

Dr. Raffety draws inspiration from congregations that were struggling to adequately connect with and serve disabled people, as well as disabled individuals’ ministry and leadership. “It was such an awesome experience learning these critical scholarly insights from disabled people in the pews, and in in the pulpits.”

For her second book, Dr. Raffety was not simply writing from a scholarly perspective but as a pastor, a parent, and a disabled person herself. “So, I tried to make connections between all those experiences.”

Dr. Raffety has maintained strong ties to Princeton Seminary since graduation. She has served as the Senior Researcher on the Isaiah Partnership (a study of pastors leading innovation for theological education), the Empirical Research Consultant on the Imagining Church Project (a nationwide study of thriving congregations), and the Associate Research Scholar for the Institute for Youth Ministry.

From 2020-2023, she served as a Research Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, where she built and studied a Minecraft video game for disabled Christians and conducted a study on worship access for Christians living with Long COVID and chronic illness.

“One of the reasons that I chose PTS is because it’s a Seminary that has a lot of elements that you would find in a divinity school,” she observed.

It’s a more intellectual exploration of scripture and history. I wanted that top-notch education. Yet, since their inception, they have also been really oriented toward serving the church.

She added, “I get to do some of the coolest work these days at PTS. Grant work is so exciting. It literally proposes new projects and tries to be attentive to the scholarly puzzles and problems we need to understand, and how they connect to the practical problems for people in the pews and the pulpits.”

Dr. Raffety believes her life’s work came into sharper focus at Princeton Seminary. “It allowed me so much flexibility. All those experiences together—taking classes across the street at the University, while I was doing my MDiv coursework, pastoring a Spanish speaking church, which served as my field education—gave me such a robust experiential and classroom education.”

“I call the work that I do—human subjects and ethnographic research—‘deep hanging out.’ I get to spend my time listening to all of these people whose stories and experiences are the reason why Seminary exists.”