Glory Dharmaraj: Gender, Intersectionality, and Being Home in Mission - A Reflection Under the Shadow of COVID-19 Crisis (Part 2)

Today's post is by Dr. Glory Dharmaraj. Dr. Dharmaraj is President of the World Association for Christian Communication, North America and Retired Director of Mission Theology for United Methodist Women. This post is the second of a two-part series.

As explained in my previous post, the COVID-19 crisis has shown the need for ground-up community-level solutions for survival. It is time for niche advocacy in specific localities with a focus on the most vulnerable people, with an intersectional perspective, while interrogating why certain groups of people have been less protected and allowed to die. It is time to align ourselves in a mutually respectful dialogue and joint action with those who are at the margins of survival, and work with those who build coalitions for human flourishing from ground up. It is also time to include the voices of those at the margins in building such coalitions. In this way, we can build a new concept of home as hearthhold of hope.

Sisterhood and Neighborhood
These new practices must be rooted in concepts of sisterhood and neighborhood. Sisterhood and neighborhood existed long before women organized themselves for mission. Sisterhood is as old as neighborhood.

For instance, in the story of Naomi and Ruth, it is the sisterhood of Bethlehem that visit Naomi often, bless her in her journey of survival, and rejoice when she takes over the child care of Ruth’s new-born baby. It is the neighborhood women who even come up with a name for the new-born child (Ruth 4: 14-17). Something unprecedented!

A sisterhood of lament is found in the story of Jephtha, who makes a hasty decision that if he wins his fight over the enemies of Israel, he will sacrifice anyone who comes to meet him first on his return home. It is his virgin daughter who comes to greet him first with music and dance! A group of women immediately accompany this unquestioning daughter in order to bemoan her “unfulfilled” life. A sisterhood of lament, the women perpetuate the memory of this nameless victim whose life is cut short, in an annual ritual of remembrance (Judges 11: 29-40).

In the not-too-distant past, sisterhoods have played many roles for survival, running soup-kitchens, offering child-care, sewing clothes, and making it possible for families to function. Instances of sisterhood and neighborhood coming through in the best and worst of times are not rare occurrences. Emerging in the communal spaces during crises where inequality persists due to class, race, and other categories of oppressions, sisterhoods have strengthened women, children, and men, and the community as a whole, and have sought to address systemic gaps, by community organizing projects and neighborhood unions.

Home and True Womanhood in Mission History
As a base, home has been pivotal in women’s mission. So is the notion of the “cleansing” influence of home on the neighborhood and community, that home offer a moral and spiritual framework to shape the latter.

A key thread in the history of women in Christian mission is a story of how the female leaders negotiated the ideology of separate spheres along gender lines in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In a binarily divided cultural framework, the domestic sphere defined “true womanhood,” characterized by piety, submissiveness, and domesticity; public sphere fostered men’s roles in hard core activities.

While the definitions of home and household labor have gone through sweeping changes over time, there have been gaps and cracks in the concept of women sanctifying the private sphere from its inception. African American and poor immigrant women had toiled along with their men side by side, be it in farms, fields, or crowded urban settings. The ideal of true womanhood failed to include the so called “heathen” within the U.S., such as the “blacks, mountaineers, rural people, and immigrants.”[1] Gaps of inequity, be it class-specific or race-related, tend to become “systemic gaps.”

The rallying cry for women’s mission was centered around the notion of the private sphere in the slogan, “Women’s work for women.” Single female missionaries, both home and foreign missionaries, and the deaconesses put to use the notion of separate spheres as a strategy around this catch phrase, while playing a key role in women’s move from the private sphere into the public world. These women used concepts of home to propel their mission but refused to be limited by the home.

This circumvention of patriarchy is an interesting thread of this story and an important lesson to take with us as we re-examine home in this COVID-19 reality, though a full accounting of this history is beyond the scope of this article.

Local Solutions and Community Organizing
Localized solutions to the problems revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic have sprung from home and extended neighborhood spaces. Garages, driveways, and porches have become communal spaces where groceries, masks, and essentials are distributed to neighbors. Some clergy make “driveway” visits in place of home visits in the New York area, and pray aloud to the parishioners who keep social distance in their garages and in their front yards!

In the midst of it, practices of togetherness, however fragmented it be, take on many shapes. In my immediate neighborhood in Westchester County, New York, a father of a nine-year-old suggested that we have a backyard barbeque and that we celebrate togetherness in groups of two or three households. The idea is well mapped out by this dad that the “fired-up” barbeque grill be common and each bring their own meat or vegetable and grill from an assigned area on the grill plate. A common fire and a shared grill!

Hearthholds of Hope
This localizes the age-old concept of hearthhold, alluded to by Felicia Ekejuiba, and developed into a theological idea by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, a Methodist minister and a former leader in the World Council of Churches: a fireplace set inside or outside the home. It is a concept familiar across many places in Africa and Asia, and migrant camps including the one in Brownsville, Texas.

Some years ago, a group of women in Angola, Africa interpreted what hearthhold meant to them in a Bible Women training in Luanda which was sponsored by the Angola Council of Christian Churches and the United Methodist Women. Surviving the Civil War in Angola, these women were rebuilding their communities. To them, the fireplace meant “warmth,” “food,” “solidarity,” “protection,” and “presence of the life of the household.” Women created heartholds in the fields where they spent long hours of work, and they created these heartholds in places of survival. Men create a central fire place in communities called “Njango” and “Kibanga.” One of the women leaders urged the others in a Bible Study to nurture the fire of hope, “Nutrir da palavra de Esper.”

Thanks be to all those who tend the heartholds, be it homes, neighborhoods, migrant camps, and returnee routes. Though we are not together in Covid-19 crisis due to pre-existing and current deep systemic gaps, we are called to be in mission, “together towards life.” Lest this remain a mere aspiration, may we continue to imagine durable mission practices from the ground up, for and as resilient communities locally, regionally, and inter-regionally taking seriously into consideration the interstices and the systemic gaps that persist and resist human flourishing, healing, and wholeness.

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[1] Mary E. Frederickson, “Shaping a New Society” in Women and New Worlds, vol. 1, Hilah Thomas and Rosemary Skinner Keller (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1981), 349.

Glory Dharmaraj: Gender, Intersectionality, and Being Home in Mission - A Reflection Under the Shadow of COVID-19 Crisis (Part 1)

Today's post is by Dr. Glory Dharmaraj. Dr. Dharmaraj is President of the World Association for Christian Communication, North America and Retired Director of Mission Theology for United Methodist Women. This post is the first of a two-part series.

Even during ordinary times, laws notwithstanding, inequalities due to gender, age, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality and other social markers exist. The current environment, rife with fear and uncertainty, has exposed some of the entrenched inequities such as access to resources, health care, and social services. COVID-19 compels those of us who are engaged in mission to delve into current mission practices and examine them through the lens and baseline of intersectionality. Focusing on the concept of home helps us do so.

The Place Called Home
During COVID-19, the place called home has adapted itself to be an office space and a learning center for online classes, while continuing its role as a basic habitation for its members. This place has often become more gender-inflected with women taking on an additional load of work such as care of their children as well as their studies, on-line or otherwise, during the lockdown.

In the world of the academy in recent months, submissions of articles for journals have become fewer from women than men. Among those who lost their jobs in the low- income and wage-earning categories, women are the most adversely impacted. Women form the majority among the essential workers, and yet they have to take care of their children at home and their studies.

The rate of domestic violence across the spectrum has risen significantly during this pandemic. The face of poverty, the face of victims of domestic violence, and the face of care-giving is female, as it has been during “normal” times, but the COVID-19 crisis has compounded the gendered and intersectional nature of these impacts.

Home and Convergences of Inequality
During this COVID-19 crisis, many thousands of migrants around the world, women and men, are engaged in journeys toward home, voluntarily or involuntarily. Like Ruth who becomes a returnee, they are on the move to neighborhoods in their home countries.

In India, migrant construction workers in cities are on an arduous journey back to their rural homes, along the railway tracks. Many have been en route over sixty days, and some are still on their journey toward home.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers are sent home from Europe, the Middle East, and from other parts of the world. Some are forced to move due to loss of jobs and others due to policies of nativism, as in the case of U.S. While migrant labor is still a deep need in fields and food chains, migrants are deported on a routine basis.

In the meantime, the agency of sisterhood in lament is left to envision processes of remembrance in families and communities. At present, it is practically impossible to observe rituals of loss and mourning over lives cut short by COVID-19. People are deprived of the sense of home provided by ritual and by family and kin.

Lament, too, has exposed intersectional vulnerabilities, since disproportionate deaths are race-and-class inflected. There is no accurate count of the death of the migrants. There is a cry for justice in the lament of the black and the poor, since these are the people often turned away from hospitals without proper testing or adequate treatment due to implicit or inherent bias. Scars of “moral injury” of those who made these decisions are a reality to grapple with in post-COVID-19 contexts.

To cap them all, certain racial and ethnic groups have been harassed and attacked as the cause for spreading COVID-19. Chinese Americans in the U.S. are a target. Asian American doctors and nurses have been attacked, along with other medical workers, most of them women. In India, Muslims are attacked as the cause of spreading the virus, and tourists and travelers in other parts of the world. These groups are made unwelcome in their own homes.

We are not in it together in this COVID-19 reality, though the slogan is an appealing one.

While focusing on the concept of home allows us to see the problems exposed by the COVID-19 crisis, the concept of home can also help us explore solutions, as I explain in my next post.

Glory Dharmaraj: The Impact of Christianities in Motion

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, retired Director of Mission Theology for United Methodist Women.

In an earlier article on “The Global and Local: A Mutuality of Exchange,” I referred to Odysseus and Penelope, protagonist and his spouse, in the twin epic, Iliad and Odyssey, in order to convey the complex nature of global and local mission. Penelope and Odysseus are no longer singular monolithic subjects representing changeless principles of rootedness and roaming. 

This article is about re-naming Penelope’s identity relative to migration, which is helpful for today’s diasporic mission, while making room for the Christianities in motion in the midst of us. In the Odyssey, Penelope is left at home to raise her infant son. Harassed by men and her family property stolen, she resorts to an upper room in the house, away from the public space in her house, and commits herself to the laborious task and cunning device of weaving and unweaving a shroud in order to ward off the advances of her suitors. Her son, grown up in the interval of twenty years, sets out to look for his father, and the epic story ends happily with reunions.

While acknowledging that Odysseus is not someone we would describe as a migrant, it is worth looking at Penelope’s human predicament as a spouse left at home to fend for herself and naming this condition. Far from the imperium-making routes of yester years, the major migratory routes of today are paddled with oars and made with shovels by those fleeing disasters, wars, oppressions, and persecutions. Migrants take multiple routes through multiple settings, but there are inseparable connections between the migrants and those loved ones left behind.

The erstwhile dichotomy of categorizing these two entities, Odysseus and Penelope, as mere “roaming” and “homing” does not do justice to naming their respective struggles, especially the ones left behind. Migratory interpretation of diasporic mission needs to factor in women like Penelope and their interconnectedness. Penelope is not identical or exactly the same as today’s people left at home by their migrant relatives abroad. But there are parallels between her condition and that of those left at home in modern day migration.

Penelope in Motion
For Paulo Freire, a great transformative educationist, re-naming is a form of radical action. For those engaged in diasporic mission, re-naming the weight of the human existence of one massive category of people left behind in the physical migration of their loved ones is a helpful way to formulate further actions.

Often missing in the migration mission narrative is a key insight that women, men, and children left at home in their home countries are also people in migration, since they, too, bear the painful and lonesome burden of migration, though differently. In a holistic diasporic missional understanding, beyond the “push and pull” forces in migration, there are fragile human links and relationships being lived out. A mere instrumental view of migrants as remitters of funds and boosters of their respective home economies, or potential tools for the host countries revitalizing our declining churches does not represent their gifting fully.

Recent research has shed more light on women and men left at home. Fifty percent of the world’s estimated 232 million worldwide migrants are women.  Advocacy organizations such as Women and Global Migration Working Group (www.wgmwg.org) lift up the migrants as agents of change. At the same time, with a focus on women, this advocacy group names the women left behind as “women in migration.” As a religious non-governmental organization (NGO), United Methodist Women works with such organizations that amplify the voices of the migrants as well as those left behind.

Christianities in Motion
Diasporic missional undertakings by Christian communities in the U.S. such as the Hmong, Cambodians, Filipinos, the Middle Eastern etc., among their own dispersed and displaced communities may not be fully visible on the missional radar of the structural United Methodist Church. The migrant church and its members are often alienated by the dominant culture and marginalized by settled Christianity. Often they are relegated to the status of belonging to a minority “foreign Christians.” There is much reluctance and hesitancy to cross the threshold of culture that separates us.

The church that embodies the mission of Christ cannot remain indifferent but must rather expose itself to the lived global Christianity in our midst by interacting with migrants in an ongoing basis. We simply cannot repeat the entrenched narrative. The experiences of migrant, refugee communities, their collective experiences, and their invisible network of relations with those left behind in their home countries or in a third country constitute the center of diasporic missional theology.

Here Be Dragons
Some of the ancient geographical maps had references to “here are dragons” (hic sunt dracones) pointing out the threatening nature of the unexplored areas. Maybe it is time to give ourselves to one of the following in this fall season:

• Spend a Sunday immersed in a worship environment, not typically our own, but in a congregation comprised of migrant or refugee Christians.
• Try to talk to a family and strive to understand their journey to this place by asking questions and listening to their stories, their community's history, language skills, linguistic challenges, and their traditional customs and norms.

Knowing something about their dreams, aspirations, and goals will indeed demonstrate that we care for them, and will also remove much of our anxieties that here be dragons. Seeing rightfully and acting justly draw us into the fuller circle of emerging Christianities in motion with our brothers and sisters in Christ.

Glory Dharmaraj: From Salinization of Mission to Uberization of Mission

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, retired Director of Mission Theology for United Methodist Women.

In the timeless twin Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, the hero of the sequel, Odysseus, undertakes two major journeys in his lifetime. The first one is an outward journey full of overseas expeditions and escapades, wars and conflicts, dominance and triumph. The second one is a sober one without much outer paraphernalia but with a deeply ingrained truth of an inner journey. Both the journeys throw light on a key functional tool of his mission: a sailing oar.

Beyond Salinization: A Journey
After twenty years of ceaseless outbound seafaring adventures, Odysseus comes home, and undertakes a second journey. This second journey away from home is a spatial reversal of his former sea-bound journey.

In this journey, the hero carries his sailing oar balanced on his shoulders, as a visual symbol of what he has achieved so far, until he arrives at a place whose people know nothing of sails, sea, or salt. As he is carrying the oar, well-balanced on his shoulders, a traveler from the inland region puts forth a stunning yet innocuous query: “What is the winnowing fan” you are carrying? A functional tool of a life time of work is being misrecognized! A sailing oar for a winnowing fan!

It is the end of an era. It is time for Odysseus to go home. That is what he does. He plants his sailing oar in that unknown soil, offers a ritual ceremony, and goes home! Erstwhile tools are inadequate to navigate a new landscape.

Changing tools of mission
In his book The Death of White Christian America, Robert Jones frames an edificial approach to American Protestant Christianity, and laments the decline and loss of denominational and ecumenical influence over the past decades on the cultural and political landscape of the nation. The three major buildings mentioned in his book are The Methodist Building on the Capitol Hill, The Interchurch Center on the upper west side of New York City, and the Crystal Cathedral in California. What Jones bemoans is the loss of institutionalized Protestant Christianity that has wielded an enormous cultural and political leverage in yester years. His findings do not spell the end of Christianity in America but a yearning to re-imagine and reform it!

There is an unspoken yearning in many of us, white or non-white, for a Christianity that can reform, reimagine and-reinvent, and take an engaging and appealing responsibility with the diverse social, cultural, and religious cultural milieu of our time. As the Protestant Christian world is getting ready to commemorate the 500th Anniversary of Reformation, it is a good opportunity for our own denomination to reinvent and reform the structure and polity, and find new ways to proceed into a renewed missional future, and take transmuted ecclesial action. It is not an easy task. But we need to start somewhere, as we stand on the threshold of another axial age when the functional tools erstwhile mission era are unusable in a newly emerging context.

“Uberization of mission”
During an informal conversation with Harriett Olson, General Secretary of the United Methodist Women, about the emerging Uber entity in rideshare and business, and the healthy imagination we should have for our mission today, she exclaimed with enthusiasm, and uttered, “Uberization of mission”! Indeed, healthy imagination helps us form deeper connections through integrated content strategies, right time, right channel of communication, and creative story-telling that inspires action. What happened to consumer services like taxis with Uber will happen to other areas of business services as well. It is not a question of how, but when.

In the past, businesses and companies relied primarily on their brand name to lock in customers by building trust around their product and offering services. Modern day customers expect convenience, experience and flexibility. They also expect a communal engagement and mutual transaction experience as self-serve as possible. In other words, customer experience is the key point around which all systems, people and processes function. Taxis treated consumers as commodities, and Uber grouped these discontented customers to fashion the largest consumer transportation corporation in which cars are now the commodity. An aggregate disruption! Uber business models are being emulated in other fields, from daily chores like grocery shopping to legal service whose workforce is not full-time employees.

Our historic mission imagination has always been fired by biblical theology and tempered by pragmatism. As we are well aware, theology is an activity of the imagination as much as of reason, in which we seek to transcend boundaries and move forward

We now get a kaleidoscopic view of happenings as they unfold, often in real time, on our computer screens and handheld devices. History is not impartial or identical with truth, but the internet doles out to us a newfound vantage on the totality of passing time. Today we should become more aware of our missional responsibility with our ever morphing culture. The Church needs to develop and forge new ways to enter into a dialogical relationship with the surrounding culture and its people as they are closely linked to questions concerning the value of an individual, core human need, the meaning of human existence, and action, and especially their relationship with one another and creation. At this level, mission engagements should give priority to promoting a renewed and vital synthesis between faith and culture.

In the larger context, mission scholars as well as mission practitioners have a responsibility and burden to offer a more expansive landscape, and create spaces for the students and constituents, laity and clergy, so that they can imagine and dream of their ecclesial future, ritually bury the “old oars,” come up with workable winnowing tools, recognizable gears and apparatuses for negotiating the discontinuous changes in our missional journey. Let us not lament the losses of our cherished past, rather let us clang the bell of warning to the evils of unjust society and dehumanizing values, and create and facilitate spaces for innovating new functional tools!

Recommended reading: Women by the Numbers

A month ago, we ran a piece by Glory Dharmaraj on "Gender and General Conference." Given the interest in that piece, I want to refer readers to three additional pieces from the General Commission on the States and Role of Women (GCSRW) that elaborate on some of the data and themes from Dr. Dharmaraj's piece. GCSRW published a three-part series:

"Women by the Numbers: Who is At the Decision-Making Table?" provides an overview of women's representation at General Conference

"Women by the Numbers: Who from the Central Conferences Is at the Decision-Making Table?" provides the data for Central Conferences delegates

"Women by the Numbers: Who from the Jurisdictions Is at the Decision-Making Table?" provides the data for delegates from the US Jurisdictions

Glory Dharmaraj: Gender and General Conference

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, retired Director of Mission Theology for United Methodist Women.

History was without women for a long time. The history of our General Conference has not been exempt from this blind spot and irony. We have made gains in the recent election of delegates to the General Conference. But still there is a lack of gender parity.

Openings and Closings
While approving the category of deaconesses, the 1888 General Conference refused to seat elected female lay delegates. Another contradiction is the approval of the full-time lay vocation for women as deaconesses, while warding off ordination of women with rights to administer sacraments. In the midst of these contradictions, women had to live out their vocations within the church. The 1880 Methodist Episcopal General Conference not only voted against the ordination of women but also decided to revoke all the local preachers’ licenses granted to women since 1869.[1] Women had to wait till 1956 to gain full rights of ordination.

With reference to offices such as class leaders, stewards, and Sunday School Superintendents at the local church level, the challenge of inclusive language was addressed by the1880 General Conference. Its decision removed the exclusive use of pronouns such as “he, his, and him” for such offices.[2] While the question of lay women and gender was addressed in the General Conference 1880, it took a century to officially include inclusive language for God! In 1980, the Task force on Language Guidelines (inclusive language) was set up.

General Conference 2016
The recently released results of the monitoring done by the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women reveals lack of gender equity, as evident in the article on “Women by the Numbers: Statistics and Research about Women in the United Methodist Church” at www.gcsrw.org. From among the 865 delegates elected to the General Conference, the break up details, as shown by the GCSRW research, are below:

In her recent presentation to the Interethnic Strategic Development Group in Baltimore, Washington, Leigh Goodrich, staff of GCSRW, pointed out that of the total 431 lay delegates, 192 (44.5%) are female and 237 (55%) are male. Out of 434 clergy delegates, 119 (27.4%) are female and 313 (72%) are male.

Among the total 865 delegates to the 2016 General Conference, 360 are from the Central Conferences. Out of the 360 Central Conference delegates, 267 (74%) are male and 90 (25%) are female with 3 delegates not listing gender. From among the 180 lay delegates from the Central Conferences, 116 (64%) are male and 63 (35%) are female; male clergy constitute 151 delegates (84%) and female clergy 27 (15%).

Since the break-up details of race and ethnicity are not available yet, my reflection does not deal with the “intersectionality” of women.

The Face of Women in Structure and Movement
The membership percentage of women in the United States UMC is 58%.

As for the southern hemisphere, the phenomenal growth of Christianity, especially, Africa, Asia, and Latin America is unprecedented. The emerging, burgeoning, and living forms of Christianity are mostly indigenous, and their agency primarily non-Western. They embody what is known as World Christianity today.

Today, two-thirds of all Christian are women, as Professor Dana Robert of Boston University points out. Robert asks, “What would the study of Christianity in Africa, Asia and Latin America look like if scholars put women into the center of their research?”[3] In the growing grassroots movement of Christianity, the role of women is a key factor.

In the feminization of Christianity, do women occupy key positions, along with men, in their respective church structures in World Christianity? Until church systems and structures are open enough for women to gain positions at the structural level, women’s voices may not be converted into perspectives and mainstreamed.

Movement and structure need not necessarily be oppositional. Any movement which merely ends up as a structure loses its grassroots vitality. Any structure that is not rooted in the praxis of a life-giving movement is a mere skeleton without the embodiment of flesh and blood. A mere movement that does not structurally ensure power for its women is likely to be co-opted, and its power relegated to those who are at the top rungs of the structures. Movement and structure ought to form a life-giving hybridity.

Women stand to lose if they are not vigilant enough. As opinion-makers and decision-makers, men have a great role to play in the emerging Christianity, assuring that women get shared power in the growing movement.

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[1] General Conference Journal, (25 May 1880), 316. The Christian Advocate 55/24 (June 10, 1880): 377.

[2] The Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church 1880. Appendix 22. Pages 409-10.

[3] Dana Robert, “World Christianity as a Women’s Movement,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 30, no. 4 (October 2006), 180.

Glory Dharmaraj: Transformative Learning and Transformative Spirituality

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, a consultant for United Methodist Women. It is the third of a three-part series.  Dr. Dharmaraj contributed this piece as part of our reflections on the WCC's new document on mission and evangelism, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes.  You can find more posts in this series by clicking on the "Together towards Life" tag at the bottom.

“Transformative Spirituality” is one of the key concepts in the new ecumenical affirmation on mission and evangelism by the World Council of Churches, Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Times. In this series of articles, I would like to share how I have adapted and applied this concept as a pedagogical practice in facilitating the annual United Methodist mission studies.[i] This final blog piece explains the connection between transformative learning, described in the previous piece, and transformative spirituality.

Equally important as the intersectional oppressions of mission study participants I described previously is the spiritual identity of the adult learner as a child of God. Recalling one’s baptism, naming one’s baptismal identity as a child of God, and claiming it as a call for all the baptized believers to “resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves …,” as the United Methodist Service of Baptism articulates it.[ii]

Transformative spirituality includes addressing personal sins as well as corporate sins and systemic evil. The hall mark of transformative spirituality is addressing sin as well as sinned againstness, the systems that perpetuate poverty, war, conflict, and that constantly push people to the margins of society and living.[iii] A key characteristic of transformative spirituality, as stated in Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, is “Disturbed by the asymmetries and imbalances of power that divide and trouble the church and world, we are called to repentance, to critical reflection on systems of power, and to accountable use of power structures.” This is the only sentence taken from Edinburgh 2010 Common Call, and used in Together Towards Life in its specific treatment of transformative spirituality.[iv] Interestingly enough, in formulating the final version of this particular sentence in the Common Call, Harriett Olson, the General Secretary of the United Methodist Women, spoke from among the audience, emphasizing “critical reflection” and the “accountable use of power and structure” at the 2010 Edinburgh Missionary Conference in Scotland.

Transformative spirituality undergirds transformative learning in addressing the cry of the needy, the sinned against people here and elsewhere. Creating the environment for the Holy Spirit to renew the participants through prayer and learning is an opportunity intentionally created in the facilitating of the mission studies. The pedagogical core intentionally promoted in facilitating mission studies is that teaching is learner-centered, and learners themselves are agents of change and interveners in places of injustice to transform them. Study leaders are not unquestioned authorities; they examine their own presuppositions and social locations; they are enablers and creators of environments for transformation.

Mission educational settings prepare the way for the church to be in the world in new ways, facilitating a conversation between the center and the margins. The center creates and facilitates spaces for multiple voices and the margins shape and influence the center. Facilitating mission study is more than the act of studying; it is study that leads to action in order to make a difference. A story in the Babylonian Talmud captures this timeless truth. Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Tarfon debate the question, “Which is greater, study or action?” Rabbi Tarfon answered saying that action is greater. Rabbi Akiva answered saying that study is greater. The listening elders agreed with Rabbi Akiva that study is greater than action because it leads to action.[v]

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[i] A fuller version of this article was presented as a paper in the 2014 American Society of Missiology, Association of Professors of Mission. See Glory Dharmaraj, "Transformative Learning versus Informative Learning in Facilitating Mission Studies." http://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/37

[ii] “The Baptismal Covenant I” and “The Baptismal Covenant II” in The United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1989), 34 and 40.

[iii] Raymond Fung, “Human Sinned-Againstness “ in International Review of Mission, vol. LXIX, no. 275 (July 1980): 332-333.

[iv] Jooseop Keum, ed. Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches, 2013), 14. The document was approved earlier in 2012.

[v] Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 40 B. http://on1foot.org/text/babyloniantalmud-kiddushin-

Glory Dharmaraj: Transformative learning as an educational model

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, a consultant for United Methodist Women.  It is the second of a three-part series.  Dr. Dharmaraj contributed this piece as part of our reflections on the WCC's new document on mission and evangelism, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes.  You can find more posts in this series by clicking on the "Together towards Life" tag at the bottom.

“Transformative Spirituality” is one of the key concepts in the new ecumenical affirmation on mission and evangelism by the World Council of Churches, Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Times. In this series of articles, I would like to share how I have adapted and applied this concept as a pedagogical practice in facilitating the annual United Methodist mission studies.[i] Last week’s article explained the history of United Methodist mission studies as a site of struggle. This week, I will look at the approach to transformative learning used used in facilitating the Mission Studies sponsored by the United Methodist Women.

Transformative learning is a key process outlined in the adult education aimed at emancipatory knowledge in the late mid-twentieth century in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire where he emphasizes education as a process which centers around critical reflection on one’s personal and collective reality that leads to engagement in actions. Critical reflection is a component integral to transformative learning methods used in facilitating United Methodist mission education.

Using the spiritual growth study for 2012, Immigration and the Bible by Joan M. Maruskin, as an example, let me examine some of the ways in which the study leaders were trained to facilitate at the regional levels.

The pedagogical strategy we have used is to reading the bible through the eyes of the migrant, immigrant, and refugee in this particular study. In fact, Maruskin’s central thesis is that the “Bible is the ultimate immigration handbook. It was written by, for, and about migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.”[ii] Enabling reading through the perspectives of people at the margins offers a range of insights into the pain and cry of the least of these. Reading the stories from the Bible, as a community of people from different cultural backgrounds inside a class setting, and reflecting on what God is saying in specific contexts is both an individual and collective learning process.

Braiding the stories of immigrants, along with the insights from reading the biblical stories, the adult learners are led to further reflection. As reflections unfold, the participants identify patterns, similarities, differences in the stories they hear from each other. The facilitator makes sure that while reflection takes place voices of those not present at the table are included, since in analyzing the relations of power in the interconnected structures of class, race, gender etc., it is vital to include a diversity of voices. This part of the learning process is often known as critical reflection or critical thinking.

Diagrammatically, the process of critical reflection can be represented by a spiral, starting with sharing one’s experiences relating to the issue, reading the Bible through the eyes of the migrant and immigrant, locating patterns of similarity and dissimilarity, naming the barriers and resistance to change, discerning God’s voice in the readings and at work in the world, looking for clues of transformation, and coming up with actions. The process is repeated again with the cycle of experience, reflection, and action. The spiral image captures the flow of the transformative method as it involves experience, reflection on experience, social analysis, strategies for transformation and action. The spiral is not a closed one.



In the critical reflection, a key component is social identity and location of the person doing the analysis. Often social identities are connected to each other, and they are not isolated entities. The term “intersectionality” is both a revealer of the layered and complex nature of issue at hand, and also a tool available to address the issue. The term intersectionality was first coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. A lawyer by profession who worked among battered women, Crenshaw named an experience which several of the women whom she encountered embodied. These women underwent multiple layers of oppression due to their race, class, sexuality, language, locality etc. In their daily lived existence, these multiple oppressions intersected.

Crenshaw has identified the site of multiple oppressions and named the place of such an experience. A woman of color, with no education, and who has difficulty living above the poverty line embodies the impact of many strikes against her.[iii] It is important to address the convergence of these knotted oppressions as a whole using the lens of intersectionality. Intersectionality is both a revealer of the complexity of the issue at hand, as well as a tool for addressing it.

Intersectional oppressions and God’s shalom are mutually exclusive. In order to engage in the work of shalom, fullness of life for everyone, it is helpful to shape our tools for greater engagement in God’s mission by naming the intersectional and fluid nature of identities, and not compartmentalize the various categories. Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialist query, “Can the subaltern speak?”[iv] is still a powerful one in the context of intersectional oppressions. Amplifying the vocal silence of those at the margins is done by walking in solidarity with them, creating an environment for them to speak, and holding the microphone to them.

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[i] A fuller version of this article was presented as a paper in the 2014 American Society of Missiology, Association of Professors of Mission. See Glory Dharmaraj, "Transformative Learning versus Informative Learning in Facilitating Mission Studies." http://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/37

[ii] Joan Maruskin, Immigration and the Bible: A Guide for Radical Welcome (New York: Women’s Division, General Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church, 2012), 3.

[iii] Kimberlé Crenshaw in “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review, 43.6 (1989):1241-1299.

[iv] Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in its updated version in Reflections on the History of an Idea: Can the Subaltern Speak? Ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University, 2010): 21-80.

Glory Dharmaraj: Mission Studies as a Site for Transformative Learning

Today's piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, a consultant for United Methodist Women.  It is the first of a three-part series.  Dr. Dharmaraj contributed this piece as part of our reflections on the WCC's new document on mission and evangelism, Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes.  You can find more posts in this series by clicking on the "Together towards Life" tag at the bottom.

“Transformative Spirituality” is one of the key concepts in the new ecumenical affirmation on mission and evangelism by the World Council of Churches, Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Times. In this series of articles, I would like to share how I have adapted and applied this concept as a pedagogical practice in facilitating the annual United Methodist mission studies.[i] I begin this week with a history of mission studies as a site for transformative struggle and learning.

Story of mission studies

The story of mission studies, originating as an ecumenical women’s venture, has found its parochial home now in the United Methodist Women. The ecumenical roots of the current mission studies go back to the Central Committee on United Study in 1900. Beginning in 1901, the committee published a mission study annually for the use of women interested in mission in the local churches.[ii] Ecumenical Schools of Christian Mission, with an emphasis on the preparation for teaching, began in 1904, thanks to the efforts of the Federation of Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions. The Federation and the Council of Women for Home Missions started a National School for the training of trainers in the spring for two weeks for the summer schools of mission.[iii]

As with all the women’s mission boards, due to overall structural changes and mergers, the work of the annual mission studies came to be housed within the Federal Council of Churches, and its later version, the National Council of Churches in the U.S., till 1999. With the disbanding of the Friendship Press which published the annual mission studies, the ecumenical endeavor became a United Methodist shared endeavor by the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries and GBGM. In 2006, the Women’s Division of the General Board of Global Ministries took on the major responsibility for the work. The story of mission studies is a story of survival, though it may look like a regressive journey, seen through ecumenical eyes.

However, in the educational pedagogy used by the United Methodist Women, critical analysis plays a key role: a legacy of ecumenical learning. Critical analysis is conceived by Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and serves as an educational concept “aimed at freeing the parochial mentality from its limitations and at participation and change.”[iv]

Struggles and Sites

A transformative learning experience which precedes the use of critical analysis is the collective resistance of Methodist women in the teaching of mission studies in the wake of the creation of the Central Jurisdiction in 1939. This Central Jurisdiction was created as a segregated structure for the black Methodists during the unification of the Methodist Church, South and North. While five of the jurisdictions across the U.S. were geographically structured, the sixth one was racially based exclusively for black Methodists.

This was a challenge to the teaching of mission studies. The Methodist women leadership insisted that the then Schools of Christian Mission be held on a regional basis and not on a racially segregated jurisdictional basis. Hence the Regional Schools of Christian Mission (emphasis mine) were conducted in five places subverting the segregated structure of the larger Church.[v]

Until 2012, the Regional Schools of Christian Mission were held in the five geographically divided regions, long after the Central Jurisdiction was abolished in 1968. The name, Regional Schools of Mission, however, remains in memory as an act of subversion of and resistance to the unjust structure imposed on the African American Methodist members. Now due to strategic investment of time and personnel, the regional level training is offered in three places across the country, with a name change Mission u, while keeping the component of “how-to-teach” as a core component. The Mission educational settings for the mission studies are often known as university without walls.

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[i] A fuller version of this article was presented as a paper in the 2014 American Society of Missiology, Association of Professors of Mission. See Glory Dharmaraj, "Transformative Learning versus Informative Learning in Facilitating Mission Studies." http://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/37

[ii] See pages 156-157 in R. Pierce Beaver, American Protestant Women in World Mission: A History of the First Feminist Movement in North America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980). First ed., published in 1968 under title, All Loves Excelling.

[iii] Beaver, 157.

[iv] Konrad Raiser, Ecumenism in Transition: A Paradigm Shift in the Ecumenical Movement (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches, 1994), 21.

[v] See To a Higher Glory: The Growth and Development of Black Women Organized for Mission in the Methodist Church, 1940-1968 by the Women’s Division and the Task Force on the History of the Central Jurisdiction Women’s Organization (Cincinnati, OH: Board of Global Ministries, The United Methodist Church, 1978), 55.

A Response from a Hybridized Location: Glory Dharmaraj on Grace Upon Grace: Mission: Global

Today's post is the latest in a series of posts that are re-examining the mission document of The United Methodist Church, Grace Upon Grace (Nashville: Graded Press, 1990). Various United Methodist mission professors and practitioners are re-examining this theological statement and how it can inform our corporate life in The United Methodist Church today.  This piece is written by Dr. Glory E. Dharmaraj, a consultant for United Methodist Women.  Dr. Dharmaraj is commenting on the fifth section of the document, "Mission: Global."  Use the "Grace Upon Grace" tag to identify other posts in this series.

(Para. 24)
We are inheritors of mission, not innovators of mission. We are participants in mission, not proprietors of mission. We are recipients of mission, not owners of mission. Mission belongs to the Triune God. Therefore, we are all partakers and partners in mission, not path-setters or trend-makers of mission. Christian mission has one origin--God. It has one goal—reconciling the world to Christ. Christian mission is not a destination. It is a journey – a journey the whole Church undertakes.

Right from its onset, Christian mission has been involved in cross-racial and cross-cultural engagements. The gospel that was preached and witnessed from the Jewish world of the first century was shared not by Westerners but by the Jewish converts living in the Mediterranean world. The gospel that was carried to all of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the then known world, was done primarily by the early apostles and converts from Judaism.

Today, the global south is the major area of Christian growth. More Christians are living in the global south than in the global north, and the focus of mission today has become multi-directional, “from everywhere to everywhere.” The former "Christian" lands of Europe and North America have seen church participation plummet, and the emergence of new forms of Christian community which have little to do with the established Christian congregations.

We, as inheritors of mission, are called to create new mission and theological categories in the context of worldwide, multicultural, polyphonic and pluralistic societies, as so many variables and uncertainties continue to challenge the followers of Jesus Christ.

(Para. 25)
Women class-leaders during John Wesley’s days, and later on itinerant ministers’ wives, lay women organized for mission in various predecessor organizations of the United Methodist Women, Bible women who undergirded the work of the missionaries in the receiving countries, and deaconesses in urban and rural settings undertook many journeys on one path: witnessing to Christ as embodiments of the church’s dynamic engagement in the world. Women have expanded the church’s vision in the use of inclusive language for God and expansive language for fellow human beings. Women’s ordination and women’s theologies have set milestones in leadership, agency, and decision-making as women.

Gender equity is still a process. Experiences of women differ, and their identities are shaped by intersections of their race, ethnicity, language, culture, sexuality, class, migrant and refugee experiences etc. Postmodernity has shown that there is no universal self. The needs and challenges of women doing theology in the contexts of indigenous communities, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and environmental disasters call for local, regional, and worldwide networks.

Women still have to negotiate their various identities in order to be in sisterhood in an unequal world. Mary Dustin’s well-meaning longing in her poem, “Who is our sister?” (1873) assumes a universal self, and remains a quest: “She is our sister who doth wear/ The robe of womanhood/ One worldwide sisterhood declare/ Beneath the pine and palm.”[i]

The challenge for women, like the rest of the church in the global north, is to move past the modernist past, to find ways forward. Today, a cultural hermeneutics of intersectionality needs to be fully developed and placed in service, for recognizing and respecting the various identity markers that shape women in the worldwide church.[ii] This multifaceted nature of women’s identity is a local, regional, and global reality. Gaps and interstices abound significantly in the lives lived out by women and children. An intersectional approach as well as a means to address the gaps and interstices has to be envisioned. A theology of interstices can help provide moving beyond analyses of the respective contexts to how to build bridges among the various margins. In the midst of their criss- cross journeys, negotiating their various social identities, women claim their baptismal identity in Christ, and bring gifts from the margins to the church.

(Para. 26)
The diverse and pluralistic nature of the church and its particularities are held together in the person of Jesus Christ. It is not a cosmetic or decorative diversity but a shared inclusivity and diversity in the building of the body of Christ. It is not merely empirical but organic. When one part of the body suffers the entire body suffers (I Cor. 12:26). In a mutually intertwined and globalized world such as ours, what the Christian community in one part of the world does has an impact on another part of the world. At the same time, each is an organ of the Body and exists for the sake of the community in which it is situated. The mission and ministry of the church, and all that it stands for, are related to the community where it is lived out.

(Para. 27)
Facilitating mission from the margins is a key missional responsibility today. The giving-receiving-and giving cycle does not begin with a mere sharing of material resources. It involves the sharing of knowledge, experience, technology, human potential, liturgy, wisdom of the church traditions, and anything that would enrich our mutual, witnessing mission and disciple-making ministries.

Mutuality is not profit-centered. It is a value; it is relations-based; it is a long-term, organic growth paradigm. Mission today cannot be done by the churches in the global south alone, or by the churches in the global north. We need each other, not just as mere organs to function, or merely to meet the needs of the dominant members of the body. We need one another to heal human communities and transform the whole of God’s creation. The connectionalism of the United Methodist Church is an enabler of mutuality.

(Para. 28)
The ecumenical movement, which began in the 1940s in order to bring together European churches, had indeed reached far beyond its boundaries in the 1960s and embraced the global Christian community. But in this century, ecumenism has lost its steam and faces new challenges.

The worldwide Christian community does not have just one mission theology or one universal Christianity but many theologies and many Christianities. This fragmented theology should not be taken as a sign of weakness but a source of strength as all are striving to be faithful followers of Christ in their respective communities as the worldwide body of Christ.

Ecumenicity today has to grapple with more than inter-denominational unity. It has to address multifaith concerns. At times, when politicization and ethnicization of religions tend to create narrow and closed understandings among adherents of various faiths, is there not a call for unity among common humanity? While addressing narrow interpretations of religions, when it comes to people of other religious faiths, we rely on Kingdom principles rather than church principles, as we all share a common humanity. As a community involved in Christ’s mission, we join hands to build a kin-dom where all of us live together in peace, justice, and harmony.[iii]

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[i] Quoted in Karen Seat’s “Providence has Freed Our Hands”: Women’s Missions and the American encounter with Japan (Syracuse University Press, 2008), 112.

[ii] The term “intersectionality” was coined by Kimberlè Crenshaw in her article, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” in Stanford Law Review. Vol. 43, No. 1. 1989, pages 1241-1299.

[iii] Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz coined the phrase, “kin-dom” of God to emphasize relationality, community, and equity as the basis of God’s reign. It is an obvious contrast to systems of oppression and relations of domination.