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An Asian woman church leader says Christian women in that continent still face a “stained-glass ceiling” due to the patriarchal nature of many Asian cultures, as well as the churches.
The Executive Secretary of the Asian Church Women’s Conference (ACWC), the Revd Lee Moon-Sook, said one challenge was to attract younger women to take a more active role in churches as Asia moves into a new era.
Ms Lee, an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea, said South Korea’s rapid economic growth since the 1980s had run in parallel with a rapid growth in Christianity there. About 20% of Koreans were now Christians, she said.
She visited Melbourne in October and was a guest of honour at an Australian Church Women’s lunch at Bishopscourt, which Mrs Joy Freier made available for the event. Twenty-five women, including a former Mothers’ Union president Mrs Anne Kennedy, attended the lunch, which also honoured Melbourne Salvation Army Captain Donna Bryan, who had recently been elected president of ACWC.
Captain Bryan, who was elected ACWC President at its Indonesian assembly last year, is Fellowship Corps Secretary for the Salvation Army’s Southern Territory, based at Blackburn. She works with long-distance corps, many in remote areas of Australia.
Ms Lee said ACWC was about Asian church women “getting together, sharing fellowship and working together – going beyond the barriers between men and women, nation and nation and culture and culture”.
The organisation emerged from an invitation in 1956 from Presbyterian Church Women of the USA to churchwomen from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe to their assembly at Purdue University in Indiana.
Many Asian churchwomen met for the first time at this assembly and realised how little they knew about each
other’s situations.
An Indian delegate, Miss Felicia Sunderal, challenged her Asian sisters to host a meeting as big as the one in the US and two years later, in Hong Kong, the first gathering of the ACWC was held.
Since then, assemblies have been held every four years, most recently in Indonesia in 2010.
Australian Church Women is a member of ACWC, which has 19 member countries – Australia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Thailand.
The ACWC says that women “have been bound or sheltered too long by tradition and culture and have taken the role of second-class citizens at home, in church and in society”.
“Currently, in some countries, the women still struggle with the above plight.”
Its vision declares that “together and in unity, Asian women can achieve a greater role and responsibility in the family, the society and the church”.