On Being Church - bibliography included

Asian Women's Voices and Visions

In the late 1970s and early 1980s a new wave of women's consciousness swept across Asia. The momentum that led to the dawn of liberation has at last broken into daylight. Years of suffering and pain which entangled women in the web of oppression began to break loose. Countless stories and analyses of the actual lived experiences of women in families, social, economic, political and religious institutions -- including the church -- have become testimonies and documents of faith. For more than two decades women in the church fought, against all odds, to break the "culture of silence" in order to regain their self-esteem, self-respect, dignity and value as beings created in the image of God.

Women's voices: beginning with IGI and AWRC

In Asia, this new fire of consciousness inspired and brought together a small community of women, initiated and" pioneered by the late Sun Ai Lee-Park, a Korean poet, feminist theologian, pastor, and member of the WCC's Faith and Order commission. Starting as a small group of ecumenical women based in Singapore, this community met for Bible study and reflection from their own perspective, as women shared their stories and faith in response to God's call. It was a humble, yet bold and significant, beginning. Believing that they were women who "have been given the gift of sharing their dreams and visions, their thoughts and theories, their hopes and fears, their frustrations and joys" they took a big leap forward: a theological journal, In God's Image (IGI), was born with its maiden issue in December 1982.

The journal introduced its purpose, that of creating "a forum through which Asian women can share their theological thinking',, with the hope that it "will be a growing medium of communication between theologically oriented women in Asia". It was also aimed at encouraging Asian women to articulate their theological thought in the context of contextual theology.

Virginia Fabella, a Filipino feminist theologian and longstanding member of the IGI editorial advisory committee, has reminisced about the IGI and its community.(1) She recalled the first advisory committee which met to review the work of IGI in 1987, five years after its inception. The committee affirmed that, thus far, the journal had indeed served its purpose of being "an Asian Christian women's effort to provide a forum for expressing our reality, our struggles, our faith reflections and aspirations for change". Hope Antone, the current publications secretary of the Asian Women's Resource Centre, editing both AWRC's Womenet and In God's Image, echoes that the intended journal has to date continued to "focus on four areas: women's reality, struggle, vision and theology".(2) Through this journal women's voices have been expressed in poetry, stories, analytical essays, liturgies and visual art forms. Antone adds: "In God's Image then became a symbol of Asian women making their voices heard and their stories shared as they affirmed their having been created in the very image of God."

This faith community of women increased in number, and soon a much bigger community came into being with the formation of the AWRC in November 1987. The IGI was embraced fully into its constitution, and since has been the voice of AWRC for women doing contextual theology. The IGI-AWRC community has since grown and developed new ways of "being church" by locating ourselves within the socio-cultural and religious realities in which women live.

Responding to God's call to being church in the contemporary situation

God's call to women goes back to the beginning of time. Believing and responding to God's call to discipleship and ministry, the IGI-AWRC community journeyed together in search of new expressions of being church. The old ways of being church have been patriarchal in character and essence, more andro-centred than Christ-centred. These ways are no longer relevant to women and all those who have been marginalized because of class, race, colour and gender. Therefore, women's aspirations to live as church, and as a community of renewal, have evolved from a concrete socio-cultural and religious setting.

The AWRC constitution amended in 1996 discloses the rationale of our formation, existence, growth and development. "Convicted" by faith, we see the need to expose and challenge the oppression of women in church and society as well as in culture and in other religions. There are two key underlying principles; the first states the perspective and analysis of the situation of Asian women in church and society, and the second affirms the needs of Asian women in koinonia, as expressed in the formulation and articulation of our own contextual theology. Thus the AWRC constitution asserts that:

    We women in Asia are becoming aware of our status and worth as human
    persons and are challenging the discriminatory social and cultural
    barriers imposed on women over the centuries. Together, as women of Asia,
    we are addressing the issues of women's oppression.

      Women in the church, including those involved in theology and ministry,
   know and experience the pain of discriminatory and sexist practices that
   continue within the Christian church which claims to be the household of
   Jesus Christ. Jesus spoke and acted to affirm the dignity and equal value
   of all human persons, women, children and men. The traditional church
   worldwide and in Asia has taken on the gender-biased stance of
   socio-cultural practices in society, so that male-oriented views and
   practices of authority and subordination, and male-oriented traditional
   theology determine the life of the church community.(3)