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Speaker challenges Women of Color Scholars to think ‘glocally’

A UMNS photo by Kathy L. Gilbert The Rev. Namsoon Kang answers a question during a panel discussion.

The local cannot be separated from the global anymore, she said in a panel discussion at the Aug. 11-13 Women of Color Consultation. What one does at home affects what happens elsewhere, she said. “What you do here cannot be separated from what they do out there. Everything is so connected.”

As a result, people must think and act “glocally,” she said.

The consultation brought more than 150 people to Chicago to celebrate the Women of Color Scholars Program and discuss challenges that lie ahead. The program was launched in 1988 by the United Methodist Board of Higher Education and Ministry, which sponsored the consultation through its Office of Loans and Scholarships.

An associate professor of world Christianity and religions at Texas Christian University, Kang earned a doctorate degree through the Women of Color Scholars Program, graduating from Drew University, the Theological School, in 1993. She was part of a panel discussing women of color and the global church.

She noted that in South Korea, the term “women of color” is not understood. “When I am in Korea, I don’t need to use the term ‘woman of color’” but “it is revealing of where I am in the United States,” she said.

A UMNS photo by Kathy L. Gilbert Panelists (from left) Rev. Linda Thomas, the Rev. Lyssette N. Perez, the Rev. Beauty Maenzanise and the Rev. Namsoon Kang respond to questions.

“ Women of color are not a unified group,” she said. “We are a tremendously diverse group” from many traditions, from inside and outside the United States, but commonalities exist, she said.

During her remarks, she described how “globalization” has become a catch word for the “Coca-Cola-ization and McDonald-ization” of the rest of the globe, reflecting the Western influence in culture, commerce and politics.

The local church in the United States, she said, cannot just be local any longer, “as the power of the United States prevails and dominates all over the world. The U.S is playing the role of an empire today.” Local churches should be thinking about the world’s political and economic situations and the place of U.S. power in the world, she said.

She also discussed the need for addressing charity and justice in today’s world.

“We need to build communities of deep compassion,” she said. Reflecting on her theological teachings and learning from across the globe, she said, the “Christian church has been teaching charity and Christian love in a distorted way.” Charity and justice are immensely different, she said.

Charity does not ask the question of why things are the way they are. Justice, she says, “asks why it is what it is.” She suggested that justice is not enough. What also is needed is compassion because it carries the sense of solidarity and justice.

Clergywomen of color scholars must have an impact by standing between people on the margin and those in the center, Kang said. “Women of color have a huge task ... they are to transform the world and the church.”

A UMNS photo by Kathy L. Gilbert The Rev. Pamela Lightsey participates in a panel on "Women of Color and the Local Church."

She also reflected on the evil in today’s world. “Those who are evildoers do so because of the absence of critical thinking,” Kang said. The church does not teach critical thinking, she noted. “Being a good Christian does not mean just saying ‘amen’ and ‘yes.’ It means that you have to see the world from a different perspective.”

The church, she said, has removed the question marks from the faith and does not ask why it is what it is.

‘Where is our theology?’

In response to Kang’s message, the Rev. Sula Tyler, a faculty member of Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, asked where the church can find its prophetic voice. Women, she said, are driven by the consumerist attitudes of Western culture.

“What has kept us behind is (that) that has become our ideology. Where is our theology? Where is the prophetic voice of ministers in ministry and how can we empower it and nourish it?”

Others on the panel included the Rev. Beauty Maenzanise, dean of the Faculty of Theology at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, who told the scholars that the challenge of the global church is to empower women from a society that just wants women to support men and that treats women as second-class citizens. She said she uses her position to help identify promising women for ministerial and careers in education.

The Rev. Lyssette N. Perez, the executive secretary for Latin America and the Caribbean at the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, asked how Christians can bring their differences together to create “the masterpiece in space that God has provided for all of us.” Using the image of the kaleidoscope, she said the mission of the church must be dynamic, participative and colorful. Referring to the debate about immigration in the United States, she said society can be more enriched if all pieces are allowed to shine.

Three challenges

A UMNS photo by Kathy L. Gilbert From left, the Rev. Cristian De La Rosa, the Rev. Youtha Hardman Cromwell, the Rev. Pamela Lightsey and the Rev. Boyung Lee prepare to take questions after their panel presentation.

In a plenary session on the local church and how it can be reformed and reshaped, the Rev. Pamela Lightsey said three challenges — sexism, racism and elitism — are plaguing black women intellectuals in the Protestant church. Lightsey is senior pastor at Southlawn United Methodist Church in Chicago and adjunct professor of theology at Dominican University

Women of color are plagued by sexism because some churches only see females as supply pastors whom they will tolerate until a male can be appointed or sent to them, regardless of whether that woman of color outpaces the male in education, skills and talents, said Lightsey, who recently received a doctorate in theological ethics.

A pastor for 28 years, she told the gathering that the racism that women of color suffer today is a result of churches trying to “maintain a unified construct of reality.” This, she said, “asserts an archaic commitment to a single and powerful ideology of God as both male and white.”

The church is a microcosm of society, she added. To eradicate racism, “the church will have to contract a case of highly developed autoimmune problems within its own catholic body, launching a massive attack against its own self, its ideologies and teachings.”

Rather than turn in defeat, women of color strive to do better, to be better than their oppressors, Lightsey said.

*Green is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in Nashville, Tenn.

News media contact: Linda Green, (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.