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Sing Canto de Esperanza, number 432, 432. We will sing it in Spanish, then in English, and then, now that you know what you're singing, back again in Spanish. My name is Tina Blair, and I direct the Doctor of Ministry program and teach in the area of practical theology. It is a great pleasure to introduce our speaker for the second Curry lecture today.

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To say that Dr. Jane Dempsey Douglas has been a model for me and for others does not really say enough. When I was a student at the Claremont School of Theology 20 years ago now, which is a United Methodist school, there were eight Presbyterian students. And Jane was put in charge of us as a mentor and a guide through the Presbyterian process.

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And in that process, she made sure the moderator, when he or she was in Southern California, stopped by to see us and made sure we remembered to take ordination exams and a few things like that. She became my model of a scholar who knew her subject in depth, enjoyed teaching it, and could make even the poorest student interested in Calvin. She also became the model of a scholar who could advocate for the powerless and the marginalized, who could demonstrate her interest in women's rights with scholarly integrity, as she has done in her work on Calvin and women. I remember some years later when she promised Presbyterian church educators at APSE that the new confession that she was working on, the brief statement of faith, would contain a clause that women can be ordained.

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And it does. And over the years, I have watched her take time out of her busy schedule to attend meetings of Presbyterian women faculty in which we discussed ways to make seminary education more friendly to women. And then there was the conversation about why she had chosen to be an ordained elder rather than a minister of the word and sacrament. Jane Dempsey Douglas opened the door for us to understand the meaning of ordination in the Presbyterian Church.

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and to model for us, clergy, another way of being a church leader. Some years later, I returned to Claremont to be one of the pastors at Jane's church and a leader of the youth group in which her youngest son, John, participated. I discovered other ways in which she was a model, a working mother with much love and commitment to her family, and an active local church participant. For not only were Jane and her husband Gordon in worship every Sunday that they were in town, they were also faithful teachers in Sunday school, participants in mission dinners, family advent nights, and all the rest of those kinds of activities.

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And so I learned that first and foremost, Jane Dempsey Douglas is a church member, a disciple of Christ who loves his church and all its particularities, as well as in its global unions. And so welcome, Jane, active member of Christchurch. Thank you very much.

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One of the joys of moving around the country is to see old friends and to hear what they're doing, and so this is always lovely to be introduced by old friends. Today we're talking about new partnerships of women and men in diverse cultural contexts. I want to start by thinking about hope in the promises of partnership. I'm glad Tina decided to sing this hymn, because it fits very well with what I want to say about hope.

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You may wonder why I have chosen to talk about new partnership of women and men in a North American context, where many people are already weary of the topic, even while they know in their heart of hearts that full partnership does not yet exist. I do so because women in the world church have taught me about hope. They have taught me that hope lives, that living in hope is living as though the promises we have inherited are indeed beginning to be fulfilled.

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even when we cannot see the evidence of it. What are those promises? They are promises about the reign of God, promises about the new creation in Jesus Christ, giving rise to a new community where all human barriers of gender and race and social class will fall, promises about justice and peace embracing, promises that swords will be beaten into plowshares, and people will be able to enjoy the fruits of their land without being driven into exile.

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This kind of hope is rooted in a firm belief that in the Church we see the beginnings of the reign of Christ, a reign of love, peace, and justice, and that through the power of the Holy Spirit this reign will become more and more visible to the world. This kind of hope gives rise to the courage to live as though it were true, to help make the reign of Christ more visible. Therefore, I would like to tell you about some of these Christian women in other parts of the world, and especially about Presbyterian or Reformed women, since those are the ones I've come to know the best in recent years, though I think you could duplicate these stories from any denominational tradition. but also the way these women have been helping us to change the world and helping the World Alliance of Reformed Churches in its attempt to bring about new partnership of women and men.

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These women are mostly from the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, since three-fourths of the World Alliance's member churches are in those countries. In the case of these particular women, and obviously I being very careful not to generalize, their vision of partnership of women and men is not an import from European or North American feminism, and it rarely has been nurtured by missionaries. Rather, it grows out of at least three sources.

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First, the biblical promises we have just evoked about the new creation in Christ, where human barriers fall. Second, a sense of human dignity, which survives the battering of social injustice. Often this sense of the dignity of women comes out of the local cultures, which were there long before the church, the Christian church came. In the third place, there is a strongly communal vision of society, where the welfare of each person is essential to the welfare of all.

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Women's rights will always be placed in the context of the welfare of the community. I thank Professor Nelson this morning for elaborating this point so helpfully as the background to what I will be talking about. Though the way of thinking of these women may often be different from that of North American or European women or men, it reflects their reading of scripture and their own experience. And there is nonetheless a powerful movement by these women to bring women into relationships of full partnership with men in church and society.

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Women are reading the Bible as a liberating gospel for women, much as some women in the West have done since at least Christine de Pisan at the end of the 14th century in the West. There has been a long line of women who managed not only to see the patriarchalism in the Bible, but also to hear those texts like Galatians 3 and many others which emphasize the way Jesus dealt with women and so forth. They stand in that tradition.

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First, we should reflect on the general situation of the world's women. Though women are the majority, they rarely are proportionally represented in positions of power. In most cultures, they have special responsibility for the raising of children. And in some, they are also the chief merchants and the chief agricultural workers.

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In general, according to the United Nations, Women do seven-tenths of the world's work, earn one-tenth of the world's income, and own one-hundredth of the world's capital and land. Overwhelmingly in all societies, women carry the burden of poverty. Women also carry the burden of homelessness.

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The United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees estimates that of the many millions of persons living outside their countries as refugees today, or displaced within their countries, about 80% are women and their children. Women are disproportionately victims of domestic violence, from dowry deaths in India to suburban USA. Where the desire for male offspring is culturally most powerful, Most abortions are of female fetuses, and in some places very young girls are so systematically neglected that they die at nearly twice the rate of boys.

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Women worldwide make up about two-thirds of those persons who cannot read and write. We need this perspective on women's situation worldwide. Yet it is equally important to realize that many women, whether religious or not, simply refuse to be defined by those dismal statistics. They redefine their situation to retain their freedom to choose and their fundamental dignity, a gesture of hope.

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They may claim and live out roles as full partners in society which society would not officially grant them. Let me suggest two examples where women are claiming an authority which the society has not given them. In the spring of 1991, at the height of the democracy movement in certain countries of West Africa, huge groups of unarmed people were regularly demonstrating peacefully in public squares against the resident dictatorships and on behalf of democracy. Government troops at time were brought in to fire upon them.

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I was making a pastoral visit to reform churches in that area, and I was shown a square where the previous week a large group of secondary school children had peacefully demonstrated. I was told that suddenly the troops had moved in and opened fire, and some of the students were hurt. But then women poured into the square from the surrounding houses shouting, These are our children, and the shooting stopped.

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My male informant added, And now that the women have taken to the streets, things will get better. You may know the story of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, a much more sustained and more self-consciously political response to oppression. Uppalled by the disappearance of their children under the dictatorship, the mothers began to march every week around a central square right in front of the government buildings, carrying pictures of their disappeared children and posters demanding an accounting of their whereabouts. Till the dictatorship fell, this action was truly dangerous.

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But they continued even after the fall of the dictatorship till very recently in protest against the cover-up of the past. My backbone was certainly stiffened up by joining the mothers in one of their weekly marches, hearing from them about their lost family members and feeling their courage and their rock-solid commitment to human rights. Two years ago, a retired Argentinian Navy officer, Alfredo Astiz, was publicly stripped of his rank and pension when he defended those tortures and killings of the 1970s in which he is widely believed to have participated.

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A leader of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Ebe de Bonifini, is reported to have commented, It's taken 20 years of marching around this plaza and my feet ache, but we're finally getting closer to some kind of justice. Some of the women in these examples are certainly church women. Some are probably not. The churches cannot make any exclusive claim to hope and courage in working for human dignity.

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Yet I have heard church leaders in the countries of the South say that one of the precious things they can contribute to their societies is hope. Hope that God still rules the world. Hope that evil will not always triumph. Hope that new beginnings are possible even after disastrous wars.

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Hope was required for women to remain. loyal to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches for the first 80 years or so of its life, beginning in 1875, as they pressed again and again for roles of leadership which were more than token or auxiliary. The desire of women for full partnership of women and men in the mission of God has been an ongoing challenge to the Alliance itself, requiring struggle for change. Still, the witness of the alliance to this call of the gospel has now become a challenge to some of its member churches and also to some broader societies.

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We understand women to be equal partners with men in the Christian life by virtue of their sharing fully with men the image of God from creation, and also their sharing fully the solidarity of humankind with Jesus Christ in the incarnation, making possible their full membership in the church, the community of all those baptized into the body of Christ. Women's situation has not always been so understood in the church. For centuries, theologians taught that men reflect the image of God more fully than women because the male human being is the norm of humanity and women are botched males or defective human beings, as Aristotle taught.

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Even today, there are theologians who understand that in the incarnation, Christ was made male in such a way as to bring greater honor to male human beings, and that Christ's maleness brings special privileges in the Church to men which are not available to women, notably the privilege of ordination to the ministry of word and sacraments. For many centuries, the only real partnership men imagined with women was the familial one of procreation and household management. But even there, women were understood to be subordinate to their husbands. This history lives on overtly and covertly.

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Where people are clear that they believe in the subordination of women to men, it is overt and easily identifiable. Where people imagine they believe in the equality of women and men, but still harbor unconsciously the old stereotypes and attitudes requiring subordination of women, this history is covert. Yet it remains startlingly powerful even then, shaping behavior. We see some of this at work in the Presbyterian Church USA today in the unrelenting attacks of some unofficial publications

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on any women's programs which do not appear to be supervised by men. For this reason, we cannot simply assume that everyone knows what we mean when we talk about partnership. The full partnership of women and men, as I understand it, is one of equality, where there is true solidarity of women with men, and where the relationship is rooted in respect and justice for both. We understand that the early New Testament community understood itself to be such a community of equals where the breaking in of the reign of God and the power of the Holy Spirit had created a new community and broken down all human barriers.

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To the extent that this full partnership has not yet been achieved in the churches, it remains a challenge to the churches. Churches and ecumenical bodies have long been concerned that this full partnership does not yet exist widely, although the time has come to affirm its importance and work more enthusiastically toward its implementation. Therefore, various approaches are taken, approaches which are complementary, not contradictory. Women's groups all over the world have taken initiatives to work for greater acceptance of women.

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Another approach was taken by the World Council of Churches program of the Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women from 1988 to 1998, where women and men together were to identify issues and problems facing women and attempt to stand together in the church to free women from what hinders their full participation in church and society. The Ecumenical Decade provided a wonderful opportunity for the development of women's networks, but it has sometimes been unofficially called the Ecumenical Decade of Women in Solidarity with Women, because the response of the official structures of the churches was disappointingly small. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches inaugurated its own program in 1994 in solidarity with the Ecumenical Decade, as PACT, the Program to Affirm, Challenge, and Transform Women and Men in Partnership in Church and Society.

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It called as its executive secretary, the Reverend Dr. Niambora Jiroge, the first woman pastor ordained by the Presbyterian Church in East Africa, a Kenyan theologian well experienced in pioneering in church life. A committee of women and men from the executive committee worked with her in planning the PACT program, the inauguration of... This program was part of a long series of initiatives taken by women from the earliest years to claim their place in the life of the Alliance.

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Despite the slow progress, there are signs that the Alliance valued this partnership. For example, Mrs. Shanti Solomon of the Church of North India, Vice President of the Alliance from 1970 to 1977, remembers a meeting of the Executive Committee in Indonesia where the executive committee was invited to dinner by the nation's president.

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At the last minute, some began to worry about the problem created by the presence of a woman, since the Indonesian president was Muslim. The Alliance president at the time, Mr. William P. Thompson, declared, The Alliance has a witness to make, and he then boldly escorted Ms.

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Solomon in to dinner. Mr. Thompson and Ms. Solomon were seated on either side of the Indonesian president, and Ms.

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Solomon remembers that he was cordial and interested in her work. The ordination of women as ministers in the American congregational tradition actually precedes the founding of the Alliance. In 1853, Antoinette Brown Blackwell was ordained, and the Congregational churches continued to ordain women in the USA from that time on. I believe the first Presbyterian woman minister was also an American, Louisa Woosley, ordained by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1889, but there seemed to have been no others in America until 1956.

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But in Europe, already in 1930, the Reformed Church in Alsace and Lorraine ordained its first woman pastor. In the early 1930s, on the other side of the world, there were united churches with reformed roots and probably also congregational roots, including the United Church of Canada and the Church of Christ in Japan, which began ordaining women as ministers. After the 1950s, women's ordination became very common in the reformed family. This correlates well with the 1954 decision of the Alliance to approve women's ordination as ministers.

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Though I do not know whether the council's action stimulated or merely reflected the action already taking place in the churches. But it is very interesting that it was happening in Japan as well as in Europe and North America. In view of all the activity of women's movement in the churches in the '60s and the '70s, some women arrived at the General Council meeting of the Alliance in Ottawa in 1982 thoroughly shocked at the overwhelmingly male leadership and control of the Alliance.

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I was there as a delegate to the Caribbean and North American Area Council of the Alliance, which was meeting concurrently, and I was also giving talks on the history of women in the reformed tradition in the visitors program. Women delegates, too outraged to sit on the floor, appeared in my visitors seminars looking for a sympathetic context to think about strategy to make the council more open to women. These women delegates worked hard to elect a larger number of women to the executive committee and also a woman vice president.

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They also began working to include a woman among the executive staff members in the Geneva office and succeeded in 1985. When the next general council met in Seoul, Korea in 1989, the Korean women had prepared very well. Members of a large Presbyterian church had been struggling for decades to receive approval for the ordination of women as ministers.

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Many women seminary graduates were working essentially as ministers, responsible for congregations, but paid a fraction of a minister's salary, unable to celebrate the sacraments, and cut off from the decision-making process of the presbytery. Out of their passionate concern, they organized a communion service to be held the night before the council opened, presided over by a Korean woman minister from a very tiny Korean Presbyterian church, the only one which would ordain a woman. She was Professor Sung Chung, elected in Seoul as moderator of the Alliance's Department of Cooperation and Witness, and now president of Iwa Women's University, one of the distinguished universities of the world.

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The women had invited all the women ministers in attending the council to join in the leadership of this service, and those of us who were elders to assist in serving communion. Glorious large women's choirs and women's orchestras of native instruments enriched the service. Thousands of women from as far as six hours' drive arrived by the busload to share for the first time in a communion service led by women. The emotional impact of this service on the delegates, both men and women, was extraordinary.

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Afterwards, embraces and tears communicated where language failed. Perhaps this experience had some influence on the fact that, despite these very small number of women delegates to the council, very strong actions were taken by the council. to urge the member churches to reconsider their position on ordination of women, if they had not already approved it, and to urge fair and equal treatment of women in the leadership and staff of the churches. And it was at Seoul that the proposal to hire a woman for the Geneva staff to work with the churches on women's question was advanced, leading to the hiring of Dr.

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Jiroge. Actions were also taken to encourage the member churches to examine the language of their liturgies and documents so as to use language affirming the community of women and men, and to use language about God utilizing a broad range of biblical images, not just the male ones. Churches were urged to act in such a way as to become models of mutuality and reciprocity as a witness for the world. One of the chief accomplishments of the PACT program was to organize a series of regional consultations of church leaders to discuss the partnership of women and men in God's mission in church and society in their part of the world, to develop regional networks of women and men concerned with the issue, and prepare a major section for the worldwide general council that would meet in Debrecen, Hungary in 1997.

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Regional consultations were held in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Caribbean North America. The leadership of the consultations came from the regions and was shared between women and men with Bible study, lectures on topics relevant to the region and the work of the church in that culture, and work groups together. Men in leadership have played an important role in opening up the discussion. For example, Bishop Erme Kamba of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, at the Consultation for Asia and the Pacific, told of some of the experiences through which his concerns about the place of women in the church have grown.

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He was surprised at the difficulty in placing some of the finest women theological students in internships. Congregations would agree that the women were fine preachers when he sent them out to preach. But then they would say, but she's a woman. He was invited to be one of the very few male participants in the Women's Pre-Assembly Conference at the World Council of Churches meeting in Canberra and discovered what it was like to be a gender minority.

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He says, a third experience was when I was invited to give a keynote address on the New Testament view of women. I did not know what I was getting into when I accepted. I am not a New Testament scholar, and I did not know much about women's issues or the feminist movement. Whatever information I had at that time came from superficial attendance in some women's meetings and our church's program on women prostitutes.

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Perhaps I accepted the invitation in the chauvinist belief that a male bishop can speak on any subject. You can imagine how I sweated it out, plowing through the voluminous literature in a very limited time and trying to talk with as many women as possible. Women have eagerly set to work developing networks for action and support. In Africa, this opportunity was particularly appreciated because it is so rare that church people from the various regions of Africa have the opportunity to meet each other.

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Distances are vast, transportation systems are poor, and the division between Anglophone and Francophone Africa is very stark. Initially, some of the men at the consultations were a bit ill at ease, though all came with a good spirit of cooperation, willing to participate fully. One Asian man, sole delegate from his small church, felt so responsible to represent the women as well as the men, that he arrived with a carefully written document analyzing exactly how women participate in his church, in what roles and functions, and at all levels, though pointing out that women do not hold church office.

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His meticulous preparation was much appreciated. At the end of the consultation, he reflected thoughtfully on the strange situation that his culture had been matriarchal till the missionaries came and taught them about the proper subordination of women. The Bible study groups in all the consultations were especially lively.

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Focusing on passage is not often chosen where women and men work together in God's mission. I think the women and men felt free because of the context to react to the passages out of their different life experiences, and perhaps the sense of special need for biblical guidance energized the groups. I particularly remember being invited by some male Latin American church leaders to join them as they were reflecting on a presentation made by a Brazilian woman pastor on John's story of the woman at the well. They admired the scholars

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preparation and could not fault her faithfulness to the biblical text. But they were genuinely puzzled as they realized that they were hearing the story with new ears, particularly the focus on the transformation of the woman who goes off and becomes an evangelist to her own people. They were aware that the story had a different ring as it came from this woman pastor. This was a very interesting, recurring experience in the consultations, the awareness that one hears the text with different voices.

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Not only did women and men read the biblical text differently at times, but sometimes also the cultural context in which a text was read proved very significant. For example, the Asian delegates were especially intrigued in their study of the story of the birth of Moses, to acknowledge the important role played by a woman of another religion, the daughter of Pharaoh in the history of Israel. In nearly all the regional consultations, there have been delegates from churches where women play no official role and churches where women are free to hold any office in the church.

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The exception was the Middle East, since no member church there ordains women to the ministry, though there are some women elders. The disparity of experience again created a very challenging situation for dialogue. It became apparent that it was not simply the culture that prevented ordination of women in one place where a very similar culture permitted it in another. Out of all of the consultations has come the general agreement that the ordination of women as ministers must not be the sole focus of our concern.

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Establishing mutual respect and partnership among all women and men in the church is far more fundamental. Without that, even a decision to ordain women will not make it possible for them to work effectively. Even in churches that ordain women, the leadership often remains largely male, and there is work to be done on partnership. Everywhere there is strong advocacy for change in established patterns of church life to support women's full participation.

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One male minister attending the African consultation said at the conclusion, I came to the consultation believing that the church had no use for women ministers. It's not in our tradition for women to play such a role. But then, of course, I had never met a woman minister. In these days, I have heard African sisters who are ministers preach and teach, and now I know that my church needs them too.

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And he pledged he would go home and persuade his church to permit women's ordination. A second major function of the PACT program was to challenge all of the life of the Alliance itself, to be sure that women were fully included in the mainstream of its work. Now let me move in a somewhat different direction and ask, how are the churches around the world enabling women to move towards full partnership with men in church and society? I shall offer simply a small sampler from a very extensive array of programs.

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First, economic development. In some of the poorest countries of the world, economic survival is a very high priority for women and their families in the church. Churches are deeply involved in development projects of various sorts. In Burkina Faso, the church is related to a broad development program that includes reforestation, agricultural, and fishery projects.

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A group of women farmers who were being exploited by their miller were helped to buy grinding mills to process their grain cooperatively. In El Salvador, the Reformed Church gives leadership to an ecumenical grassroots program which develops simple health clinics for families and literacy programs and teaches sustainable agriculture methods. This program also teaches basic skills for managing small businesses, micro-enterprises, and makes small loans as seed money. It strongly encourages women to participate.

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and the president when I visited was a young woman. I talked with a mother and her daughter, perhaps about 20. The mother had been a successful baker until her bakery was destroyed in the war. Now this program was helping her get started again.

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She had found a very small place where she could make one kind of bread each day. She is saving as she repays her loan to expand bit by bit into a larger operation. The daughter had received a small loan to buy a few supplies as the start of a tienda, a little shop. With her profits carefully saved, she will be able to expand her inventory.

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Those who receive loans are tutored in basic bookkeeping and other mercantile skills by people like themselves, men and women. As the loans are repaid, others can be financed, expanding the scope of the project. The daughter told me with pride how much confidence she had gained from her involvement in the project and how certain she was now that she could make it as a businesswoman.

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She has a tiny daughter and she wants a better life for her own daughter now that the war is over. In Togo, in West Africa, the women's program of the church is not only organizing Bible study groups and spiritual development, but also doing similar work to the grassroots group in El Salvador. Literacy work, helping women improve their agriculture work with sustainable methods, for this is indeed one of the areas where women are the chief agricultural workers, and leadership training. The Women's Program helps organize small groups of women to raise capital for their enterprises collectively.

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Each month, five or six women in the group contribute a set amount, a small amount, to a pool, which is then given in rotation to members of the group. In this way, each woman every few months receives enough capital to buy seed or tools which would otherwise be unaffordable. B, the legal status of women. In Indonesia, I visited with a group of lawyers who advised the church on legal matters of concern to the church.

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One member of the group was a woman. I asked her about women's legal status in Indonesia. She replied that in theory, it is very satisfactory. Their rights are well protected by law.

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In practice, however, many of the provisions of the law are not enforced by the male judges. She commented that there were similar problems in church courts, where women were treated very differently than men for similar offenses. As she warmed to the subject and gave examples, her colleagues looked more and more surprised. Finally, one said, Why have you never talked with us about these things before?

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I came away from the meeting with the sense that some useful collaboration between the woman lawyer and her colleagues was being developed. C, women elders. In many Presbyterian churches in countries of the South, women hold office in the church as elders, even where women are not ordained as pastors. It is also true that in this part of the world, church offices often have broader responsibilities than in the United States.

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It is not uncommon for elders to be responsible for conducting Sunday morning worship services and organizing new congregations. I met a woman elder from Malawi who told me she had been imprisoned under the Banda regime, and I asked her how that had come about. She replied, Well, I never really found out. One day on my way to work, I was picked up by the police and taken to prison.

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They never explained why. I suppose it had something to do with my preaching. I was responsible for services in a small congregation. You know, it's impossible to really preach the gospel without saying something that's offensive to a dictator.

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When I got to prison, however, I found out why. God had a new ministry for me. Some of the political prisoners had been there so long that they were losing hope. So I had plenty to do to keep me occupied for several months, keeping hope alive.

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Of course, it was hard on my family. In Cameroon, there was a need for new congregations around the edge of a large city where migrants were moving from rural areas. Teams of elders, some of them women, from large city churches took responsibility for each new congregation. The government resisted these efforts, apparently because organizing these poor people and giving them a voice was a threat.

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When the day came to ordain the new elders of one of the congregations in order to constitute it as an independent congregation, police were waiting at the field where the services had been held to bar entry to the field where they met. In a scuffle, a pastor lost an eye, but the elders did not lose hope. A woman elder took everyone to her home, and the new elders were ordained there that same day. She spoke of the strength they all received in that very special act of worship in defiance of police interference in church affairs.

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In just a couple of years, the new parishes had two to three hundred members and were calling their own ministers. We return now to the ordination of women as ministers as an important part of women's partnership with men in the life of the church. At the time of the General Council meeting in Seoul in 1989, only about half of the member churches of the Alliance ordained women. Much progress has been made since then, bringing the proportion today closer to three-fourths.

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Yes, those Korean women we talked about are now ordained. Though many churches have moved to ordain women, many of the new member churches since then do not yet ordain women, a fact which keeps the proportion down. These tend to be small, isolated churches which are more likely to move toward full partnership of women if they are drawn into the alliance than if they remain excluded.

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Still there is a steady progression toward the inclusion of women. It is important to notice that within every region of the world, except the Middle East, there are churches in both camps where some ordain women and some do not. What is the nature of the continuing resistance to ordaining women? Almost none of the Reformed churches officially cites theological or biblical objections.

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Usually the objections given are practical, cultural, or ecumenical. In West Africa, one of the churches made the decision several years ago to make women's ordination possible, and women were admitted to the seminary. Now the first group of women has graduated, but the church and the women seem unable to explain why there is no plan in motion to permit them to be ordained and called to pastorates. A similar situation in Central Africa created such a heated confrontation that the alliance was asked to send a team to assist in mediation.

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The women were ready, they were trained and prepared, and yet there was no place open to them. Sometimes in predominantly Muslim countries, there is a fear that women members of the clergy would be considered scandalous. In Catholic or Orthodox countries, the argument is sometimes made that ordaining women would damage the image of the Reformed Church in the eyes of its ecumenical neighbors and partners. An example of this difficulty is the story of Najla Abu Sawan Kassab from Lebanon, the only woman licensed to preach in a Reformed Church of the Middle East, though she is not yet ordained.

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When she wished to study theology, she was refused admission to the theology program at the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, though she could have studied Christian education. Instead, she studied theology in the United States. On her return, the church appointed her as Director for Christian Education of the National Synod of her church, where she is having a fruitful ministry. She rejoices that women can now be admitted to the theology program at the Neri School of Theology, and that the new president there is a woman, Mary Mikael.

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Najla reflects, While many agree that the difficulty of living full partnership in the church today is not rooted in any biblical or theological objection, Still, some raise the question of social pressure, since we're living in a multi-religious context where Christians are a minority.