Amid songs, United Methodist Women look at world's needs
4/29/2002 News media contact: Linda Bloom · (646) 369-3759 · New York
NOTE: Photographs and a sidebar, UMNS story #192, are available with this report.
*Bloom is news director for United Methodist News Service in New York.
PHILADELPHIA (UMNS) - Their songs were joyous and uplifting, but the message was serious: whether by poverty, racism or the effects of war, women and children must no longer be marginalized.
The message was repeated throughout the 2002 Assembly of United Methodist Women, held April 25-28 in Philadelphia. Under the theme, "Sing a New Song," nearly 10,000 participants engaged in worship and Bible study; listened to speakers who discussed issues crucial to women and children; took part in 63 different afternoon focus groups and enjoyed evening musical performances.
The million-member organization holds the event every four years, coordinated through its administrative arm, the Women's Division of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.
Assembly participants responded to a call to action by Marion Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund. Following her April 26 presentation, they wrote letters to U.S. senators and representatives, advocating the reauthorization of the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant and a funding increase of $20 billion over the next five years.
The effects of violence and war on children, especially in light of new aggression by the United States since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were highlighted by the Rev. Hea Sun Kim during her April 26 Bible study. Kim is a United Methodist clergywoman and Women's Division consultant.
Born "on the ashes" of the Korean War, Kim as a child attended a church established specifically for the war widows. "None of my Sunday school friends had fathers," she recalled.
Kim also learned that being a widow meant living in poverty because women with children could not make a living on their own.
The United States may have the most power in terms of military weapons and global influence, but Kim said, "War is not a way to build peace. We have learned that very well in Korea."
Instead, she suggested, adults must possess the humbleness of children to achieve peace. "They (children) are our spiritual center, and they are God's kingdom in our midst," she said.
Issues of war and peace also echoed in the April 27 Bible study presented by the Rev. Barbara Lundblad, a Lutheran pastor and associate professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary.
In telling the Old Testament story of Rahab, the prostitute who hid two Hebrew men and so assisted in the takeover of Canaan, Lundblad noted modern-day parallels. When Joshua arrived at the "promised land," he found that Canaan was not deserted but inhabited by other groups. In the same way, America was not an empty land when Columbus discovered it, nor was Palestine deserted when it was divided by the British in 1948 to create the state of Israel.
But while some 700,000 Palestinians were drive from their homes, "the Jewish people who sought this homeland had been driven out of their homes by a holocaust so tragic it is almost impossible to imagine," she said. "So don't make the mistake of thinking this is simple."
Rahab, who later lived among the Hebrews and is counted as one of the great, great, great-grandmothers of Jesus in the gospel of Matthew, "bids us to be attentive to those who live in the margins of life," according to Lundblad.
Rahab also puts a humanizing face on conflicts in which attempts are made to brand the other side as monsters - labeling all Arabs as terrorists, for example. From slurs against African slaves to Jews in Nazi Germany, "this has always been a way to destroy a people: to dehumanize them to make them expendable," she added.
Urging women to cross battle lines to make peace, Lundblad brought the audience to its feet in a standing ovation as she amended the lyrics of "God Bless America" to a more global perspective as "God Bless the World We Love."
Poverty is an offshoot of war, and several speakers during the assembly's April 27 morning session spoke about the effects of poverty on women and children.
Musimbi R.A. Kanyoro, from Kenya, and Michele Beg, an Australian, serving respectively as chief executive and communications director of the World YWCA in Geneva, Switzerland, gave an international perspective to the problems of poverty and racism.
Kanyoro pointed out that eradicating poverty is not just a moral imperative but "a commitment to provide human dignity to people who we despise simply because of poverty."
For poor children, according to Berg, the risks of poverty include being used for child labor, coerced into military service, sold into prostitution or forced to become child brides. "In all countries, young people are the most marginalized because they lack economic means," she said.
Empowering women by allowing them to make decisions about their own lives is essential to the eradication of poverty and a key element of the World YWCA's work. Also important is achieving equality of education, particularly in a world where about one billion people, the majority of them women, do not have access to education.
"Education covers more than literacy," Kanyoro explained. "It opens up a new world."
Celia Esparza, executive director of the United Methodist Community Centers Inc. in Fort Worth, Texas, is well aware of the connection between poverty and a lack of education. "The state of Texas has one of the highest rates of illiterate welfare recipients in the nation," she told assembly participants.
Her agency's four neighborhood centers, located "in some of the toughest, poorest neighborhoods in Fort Worth," deal with many single mothers who have little education and few skills to create a better life for themselves and their children.
"These women are victims of a system that has robbed them of the opportunity to be productive citizens," Esparza declared.
Founded in 1909, United Methodist Community Centers assists such women through a GED program and continuing education and computer courses; child care and after-school programs; classes on managing finances and a two-for-one matching savings plan.
Worship, music and dance were an integral part of the assembly experience. The three song leaders - Per Harling, a Lutheran pastor from Sweden and part of the Board of Global Ministries' Global Praise program since 1994; Helen Cha-Pyo, associate director of music at Riverside Church and music leader at the 1998 assembly in Orlando, Fla.; and Yolanda "Loni" Floyd, minister of music at Greater Bethel Temple in Louisville, Ky., and part of the Wesley Campus Ministries team at the University of Louisville - and the accompanying musicians set a lively tone for the event.
Weaving and swirling around the worship platform, liturgical dancers contributed a colorful yet reverent presence to the assembly. The Rev. Amy Gregory, a New York pastor and assembly movement coordinator, led the dance, accompanied by Danielle Morellino, Thania Acaron and the Rev. P. Kimberleigh Jordan.
A musical vision of how children imagine heaven highlighted the assembly's opening service. Twenty-nine New York City schoolchildren, ages 8 to 14, performed "Fly, Pretty Angel, Fly," directed by Jo Morris and Barbara Ames. Written by Harling, the musical depicts how the children, hanging around church one day, convince Holly, the cleaning lady, to play God as they make themselves into angels. Saundra McClain performed the role of Holly.
The assembly theme song, "Sing a New Song," with words and music by Mary K. Jackson of Birmingham, Ala., was introduced during opening worship. Singer-songwriter Linda Allen performed throughout the event. Evening performers included Tish Hinojosa, Sisters Grace and the 2001 Youth Mission Chorale.
During the April 28 closing worship, Joyce Sohl, the Women's Division's chief executive, urged her audience to listen to the songs of Mary and Elizabeth in the Bible, songs reflecting a "hope-filled faith in God's promises" even in the midst of oppression.
"To sing a new song," she said, "is to be alert to God's new and renewed call to be a disciple of Jesus in today's world."
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