Rise to Life

By Nikotemo Sopepa, CWM Mission Secretary to the CWM Pacific Region

The Pacific is waiting to receive Rev. Melanie Smith and Rev. Mark Meatcher as Partner in Mission at the Pacific Theological College (PTC). Melanie and Mark, both ordained ministers of the United Reformed Church, UK. Melanie is will be working as the Director for the Women’s Development Centre. The aim of this centre is to train and empower women for leadership across various spectrums of life, and not just in the church.

The intentional focus on women empowerment and leadership is an attempt to invite all Pacific peoples to define and decide the region’s future. This is not part PTC’s objective for developing such a centre. This is my own reflection on what rising to life means for Pacific women as CWM sends a long-term PIM in Melanie and Mark.

In recent yesteryears, women have begun to play important roles in making decisions pertaining to the political and economic development of the region. But the region has yet to see the church providing such a platform for equal footing for women. Women ordination has been introduced to the region, although some churches find excuses as to why women cannot be ordained without negotiating a way forward. But the evasion of the issue of women leadership in the church remains a problem.

Yet rising to life is not something CWM introduces to the churches and world mission. It has been an intrinsic part of the Christian faith. Yet, for many Christians, ‘rising to life is conditional’. In the case of the Pacific where women leadership in church is not an issue for discussion, culture and biblical interpretation plays a vital role in this stalemate. Contextualising theologies and liturgies have been part of the Pacific church journey for over half a century, taking into consideration that Christianity in some parts of the Pacific is less than 100 years old. But the church has begun to contextualise its theologies, yet the same church cannot bring itself to be in conversation with culture outside the academic hallways.

The real problem in the fear to fully provide an environment for women leadership to thrive in the church is the issue of power. Beginning from the family, men have yet to come to term that decision

Married ministers Rev. Mark Meatcher and Rev. Melanie Smith presented to the Enfield parish Image via www.enfieldindependant.co.uk

making at the family level is a shared responsibility. The same attitude is carried forward to the church setting. The stark separation of roles according to gender is a matter of fear, fear that eventually becomes power.

Sadly, power in turn becomes violent and unjust. And this violence and injustice is translated into the defending of culture and church polities that prevents women from reaching the helm in the Pacific church. But I want to make something really clear, sometimes we think that it is only men that prevents women from rising to leadership. It has been identified that even women in church vouches for men to remain in leadership. Sometimes this comes from women with privileges. Those who are wives of ministers and sees the elevation of other women to ministerial posts as a threat to the privilege they enjoy. What is more daunting is the intrinsic instilled culture of gender discrimination that is the result of over a century of biblical interpretations that has influenced Pacific culture. The line between this connection of biblical interpretation and what is now considered Pacific culture is invisible, and many today think that culture as it is what we practiced during pre-Christian era

So, when we speak of rising to life, as a Pacific church, there is a need for this area of ministry to be considered. Yes, women have been ordained. What we need now is a recognition of their calling to ministry, a calling equal to their male counterpart. When this is realised without prejudices, then I can say that women have been treated as equals.