Winnie Bartel knows firsthand the pain caused by a church’s silence. She says when she was 10 years old, her male schoolteacher—who was also a deacon in her church and a friend of her father—locked her in a closet with him where he sexually abused her.
When she finally broke her silence 25 years later, Bartel says her abuser quietly left town, but her church ignored the issue. Bartel, now 59, has since forgiven her abuser, but the experience has strengthened her resolve to help other women. “I have to speak for those who don’t have a voice,” she says.
As the executive chair of the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) Com mis sion on Women’s Concerns, Bartel is launching an international task force to survey 600 women about abuse. “We want to bring this problem before the church,” says Bartel, who will present the findings to WEF in 2001. “When have you ever heard a pastor preach on abuse against women and children?”
Bartel is one of a growing number of evangelical women who are dissatisfied with Christian female gender-issue discussions that center on women’s ordination and wifely submission. Instead, a new movement is shifting the focus to international women’s concerns such as slavery, poverty-driven prostitution, female genital mutilation, and the dowry system.
The Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society (ECWS), sponsored by the renewal-minded Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD) of Washington, D.C., may become a place of common ground for evangelical women on the ideological spectrum from the traditionalist Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood to the egalitarian Chris tians for Biblical Equality. ECWS formed to present a conservative voice at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (CT, Oct. 23, 1995, p. 90). Organizers issued “A Christian Women’s Declaration” in 1997, articulating their aim to “reverse detrimental cultural trends” (CT, Nov. 17, 1997, p. 86).
GLOBAL VIEW: But at the recent second annual ECWS Washington Summit in Chantilly, Virginia, the group shifted its focus—to the apparent surprise of the group’s leaders—to include the needs of women in the developing world. Opening plenary sessions featured Kay F. Rader, world president of women’s organizations for the Salvation Army, and Caroline Cox, deputy speaker of the British House of Lords and an activist with Christian Solidarity Worldwide. “There are signs God is telling us we need to be concerned about women around the world,” IRD president Diane L. Knippers told more than 200 evangelical attendees from mainline, Orthodox, and Catholic churches.
Feminists tend to portray women as victims, but Rader says Western women have more education, power, and influence compared to women in the developing world. More than 70 percent of the world’s poor are female, but “women often choose silence instead of speaking out,” Rader says.
UNIFYING VISION?: Focusing on international women’s concerns may be a way for ECWS to duck more controversial domestic issues. “They cop out by not having a statement on women’s ordination,” says Susie Stanley, professor of historical thought at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. Stanley also believes the group’s agenda “seems clearest in what and who they oppose,” adding that secular feminists should not be antagonized or ignored, but evangelized.
But Janice Shaw Crouse, director of ECWS, is undeterred by the criticism: “If we get bogged down in issues that are controversial, we’re not going to make a difference in the world.”
Crouse says there are Christian women’s conferences that focus on spiritual inspiration and intellectual stimulation, but none that focuses on networking well-informed women who are committed to both their families and communities. “It’s a recognition that there is a different kind of evangelical Christian woman out there,” Crouse says. “They’re not willing to go to meetings and be patronized. They’re not willing to exist on pabulum.”
Sarah Sumner, director of the Council for Christian Women in Leadership at Azusa Pacific University, hopes ECWS’s focus on international issues will help unite evangelical Christian women. Sumner believes 70 percent of Christian women are disappointed with groups that support either an egalitarian or traditionalist view of women. “What if the third option is not flee, not fight, but go forward?” she asks.
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