Anglican Encounter in Brazil Spurs Changes in How Church Views Role of Women
Episcopal News Service. April 10, 1992 [92079]
They came from the far corners of the globe to the steamy 16th-century colonial capital of Brazil to tell their stories and to grapple with the barriers and frustrations women face in the church today.
After six days of prayer and worship, plenaries and workshops, and a deep and profound sense of sharing, they scattered again -- but they took with them a renewed hope and a stubborn determination to fight oppression against women wherever they found it, in church or in society.
A whole new international network may emerge from the concerns of the 600 women and a scattering of men who formed the Worldwide Anglican Encounter held in Salvador, Bahia, March 29-April 4. In fact, a caucus of Asian women is proposing that an international organization of Anglican women is needed to further the concerns expressed so passionately at the Brazil meeting.
"There was a strong sense that we started a revolution here," said a woman from Africa. "Not a violent revolution but a radical shift in how the church views the role of women."
"The light is shrinking and darkness is growing -- but there is another light that is beginning to grow in this darkness, and that light is the church," Bishop Steven Charleston of Alaska said at the opening plenary. "That light is present here today, reflected in every woman at this meeting."
Charleston predicted that, by the middle of the next century, the world would experience a destructive new era of colonialism as a handful of nations fought to protect their privileged way of life and a standard of living based on gluttony. At the same time, the world would experience a "reformation of the Christian church like the world has never seen," led by a church that reflected a broadened cultural base.
The church must "speak the word of liberating hope" and speed the revolution by recognizing, embracing, defending, and celebrating life, grounding "everything we do in the love of Jesus" and learning to "dance in the middle of darkness."
The encounter grew out of a network of Anglican women who attended the closing meeting of the United Nations Decade of Women in Nairobi in 1985. The women decided that the church was still resisting solidarity with women and would continue to do so until women became agents of change, ready to transform the church. The encounter is the Anglican response to the World Council of Churches (WCC)-sponsored Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women that began in 1988.
That decade is not doing very well, as several speakers acknowledged. Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning said that the decade has "brought about welcome changes in the visibility of women" but that it has not made much difference in the power structures of the church. He said that "many Christian men have a hard time seeing women's issues as their issues," and he suggested that the Decade of Evangelism, also endorsed throughout the Anglican Communion, "has left women's concerns out in the cold, as if they were somehow auxiliary to the 'real' work of the church, as if women's concerns were of interest only to women and not to men."
Aruna Gnadason, director of women's ministries at the WCC, said that "most churches haven't even begun yet" to participate in the decade. The WCC is alarmed enough to organize teams to visit each of the council's 346 member churches to examine their involvement and stimulate participation. She applauded Browning's leadership but reminded participants that the despair of women throughout the world is so intense some are suggesting "an international boycott of the church."
Archbishop Michael Peers of Canada's statement to the encounter expressed his concern "that this decade has not been fully supported and observed by the ecumenical family." Peers said that some progress is being made but that "there is a long journey still ahead if we are to become a truly whole and inclusive community" and that he hoped the encounter would "give a kick-start" to the decade. He added that he looked forward to the "stories of hope, discovery, and renewal" that would emerge from Bahia.
The pain-filled story of a young Korean woman who was one of 200,000 abducted from their villages to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese army during World War II was seared into the memory of participants by keynote speaker Professor Chung Hyung-Kyung of Ewa University in Korea.
The darkened auditorium was filled with the sounds of screaming and weeping women while graphic slides illustrated the story. "Soldiers attacked my body as if I were their enemy the day before their attack on American bases. I was violated by more than 60 soldiers a day," the young woman wrote.
Chung used the story as a metaphor for the continuing violence women experience today and as an introduction for her theme, "Spirituality and Sexuality." The church has never dealt well with sexual issues because of a distorted belief that only things of the spirit are good. This fear of eros, a love of life, produces a conflict that leads to persecution, especially of women and homosexuals.
Professor Carter Heyward of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, picked up the same theme when she offered the image of the "body of bloody, broken women hanging on the cross." She said that "Jesus draws us to the margins -- to the poor, the outcast, the despised" and when we take on their pain and suffering "we become one of them and make visible the body of Christ, a sacrament to be shared on behalf of life."
Before that is possible, Heyward contended, "Anglican women must give up our efforts to be nice. We can be compassionate and kind, we can be caring and, at times, gentle -- but not nice."
"If we are participants in reformation, we cannot return to our homes without renewed resolve to make no peace with oppression of women in our cultures and countries," Heyward said to loud applause.
"Women are being violated throughout the world -- and in the Anglican Communion," Heyward continued. During the Decade of Evangelism the church "has completely disregarded women's well-being and women's concerns," she said, and participants in the encounter should take their anger home and "infuse our participation in the church as angry, loving agents of reform."
Blending reflections about the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, Bishop Charleston said during a worship service led by indigenous peoples that it was "time to talk about things painful to the heart and spirit that remind us of the tragedy of colonialism and racism."
The incredible pain inflicted during the last five centuries is the result of a mistaken notion that the people of the Americas were heathen. "They didn't know they were meeting a people who had known God in their traditional ways for centuries," said Charleston, a Choctaw from Oklahoma.
"The truth of God in Christ Jesus speaks as clearly to indigenous peoples as anyone else," Charleston continued. "Jesus is an indigenous person. He is all of our people in one person, embodying all indigenous women who have stood firm for centuries for the love and dignity of their people."
Representatives of 20 tribes of indigenous peoples then brought forward and blended soil, presenting it as a gift to the indigenous peoples of Brazil. "Let the message go forth that the indigenous people of the Americas stand together," Charleston concluded.
Eliane Potiguara, coordinator of a training center for indigenous women in Brazil, told the participants that "Indian communities are so used to the church's paternalism that they do not plan their own actions or initiatives." One of the most passionate and articulate voices at the encounter, Potiguara said that Brazilian Indians had survived colonialism but that the 900 different tribes have been reduced to 180 and that there are only 300,000 Indians in Brazil today; when the conquerors arrived, there were 5 million.
Participants at the encounter were divided into 60 small groups for Bible study and reflection -- and the bonds formed there broke through barriers of language and culture.
In their evaluations of the encounter, many groups testified to the power of person-to-person dialogues and discussions. Isolation evaporated as stories were shared. "I feel as though I caught a glimpse of the future of the church," a woman from Asia observed. Another soberly admitted that she needed to be more realistic about the obstacles to full participation by women in the church and that would mean a closer examination of the role power played in making decisions.
Although many participants, especially those from North America, were somewhat intrigued by liturgy with a Latin beat, they caught on quickly and were soon dancing in the aisles with everyone else. Many expressed deep appreciation to music coordinator Simei Monteiro, a Methodist professor of liturgy from Sao Paulo. She pulled together a special song book incorporating a broad variety of songs from churches throughout the world.
"Women think more ecumenically; our vision is not just for our church but for society as well," Monteiro said in an interview. "The Anglican Church provided space in this meeting for all the richness of expressions possible -- and the music reflects this mosaic."
Evaluations also expressed appreciation for the presence of youth at the encounter -- and urged that they be included in all future church meetings.
About 60 youth participated in the encounter but also took time apart to share their own unique stories. During a special presentation at a plenary, the youth stood along the walls with signs indicating all the issues the church and society were dealing with -- and then they plucked members from the audience to form a chain of concern and compassion.
At a closing press conference, Ann Smith, director of Women in Mission and Ministry for the Episcopal Church and convener of the encounter, said that the meeting was "a beginning, an affirmation that we as Anglican women want to continue in a creative, unified, networking way."
Pointing to the many obstacles faced in planning the meeting -- including resistance by many men in power positions in the church -- Smith said that the meeting was "a historic benchmark, an incredible feat." She added, "We are saying to the patriarchy that we are the church." While resistance to the liberated role of women in the church will continue, "women -- and the men who are their allies -- will persist."
Smith predicts that there will be more conferences in the future. "We are now a worldwide network."
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