It is my great pleasure to join Javier in welcoming you to this consultation on behalf of all the member churches of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. I have come to know some of you through meetings with AIPRAL, and I look forward to knowing you all. We are deeply grateful to the leadership of AIPRAL, especially Epifanio Márquez Bordón of Venezuela, and Abel Clemente Vázquez of Mexico, and to the Latin American members of the WARC executive committee - Javier Torres Nájera of Venezuela, Abival Pires da Silveira of Brazil, and Carlos Camps of Cuba - for their support and efforts in organizing our meeting, arranging for us to meet in this beautiful place, and transporting us up the mountain.

I would like to focus my remarks today on the theme of interdependence so fundamental to the life of the Alliance, especially as it relates to issues of global economic justice, partnership of women and men in church and society, and ecumenical relations.

The concept of interdependence presupposes the mutuality of give and take among people who have different gifts and abilities, life situations, and resources, who have things to teach and things to learn, none of whom can experience comfort and security without having assured the well-being of the others. This is a concept which has come to have new meaning for me as I have spent time in the churches of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America where the understanding of community is profound.

The choice of this topic also grows out of preparations for the 23rd General Assembly of the World Alliance to be held in August 1997 in Debrecen, Hungary, with the theme, "Break the Chains of Injustice", from Isaiah 58.

The message of Isaiah 58 bears directly on our topic: interdependence in the Christian life. The prophet Isaiah denounces the false piety of those who imagine God will notice their fasting while they are also pursuing their own interests, oppressing all their workers, quarrelling and fighting. Isaiah announces that the piety God wishes is loosing the bonds of injustice, freeing the oppressed and breaking every yoke, sharing bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into the house, covering the naked and not hiding from one's own kin.

Our relationship with God is inextricably bound up with our responsibilities in the realm of human interdependence. During the general council meeting we will be reflecting on Isaiah 58 with relation not only to economic justice, relationships between women and men, and Christian unity, but also with respect to questions of nationality and ethnicity, of gospel and culture, and of human responsibility for the integrity of creation.

What is the World Alliance of Reformed Churches?

You may ask why the Alliance should have chosen such a theme for its general council. The answer is tied up with the question of who we are as a family of Reformed people, what we have experienced together in our history, and our theological understanding of the meaning of that experience. Therefore I will first sketch the context of Reformed experience which has shaped us, then turn to the issue of global economic justice.

Today [1996] the Alliance is a family of 208 member churches in 102 countries on every inhabited continent. About three fourths of our member churches are in the countries of the South: Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East. They are Presbyterian, Reformed, Congregational and United churches with roots in the sixteenth-century Swiss and Genevan reformations, though some, like the Waldensians and the Czech Brethren, stem from still earlier reformations. There are also some united churches with Reformed roots, like the Church of South India.

The Reformed churches were closely related in the sixteenth century, but they went their own ways afterwards till the nineteenth century when they began to meet each other on mission fields around the world and felt the need in 1875 to create an Alliance of churches in the Reformed family, the first and still the largest of the Protestant "Christian World Communions". The overarching theme of the early years seems to be a search for Christian unity and for human solidarity, a search set in the context of passion for Christian witness and the worldwide mission of the church. Alliance leaders set out first of all to reconvene the Reformed family for common service and witness to Jesus Christ, its Lord. English-speaking Reformed people in Great Britain and North America became conscious of their isolation from the Reformed people on the continent of Europe and wanted to re-establish family ties. The "daughter churches" in the British colonies of the South were quickly drawn in. They realized the urgency of the need for collaboration in mission, and they struggled again as in the sixteenth century over whether they should have a common Reformed confession of faith in addition to the confessions of their ancestral homes. They wanted to band together to support Reformed churches they found poverty-stricken or persecuted. When they heard of evangelical communities in Russia and the Middle East persecuted because of their faith, they sent the general secretary of the young Alliance on arduous journeys to visit them and to express their solidarity; then they campaigned for religious freedom. They were preoccupied with the worldwide mission of the church, urging their members not to perpetuate the divisions of the West on the mission field, urging that the new churches be rooted in the local culture, urging that they be allowed to become independent as soon as possible and to join the Alliance as independent churches. They were self-conscious about their "catholicity" as well as their cultural diversity. From the outset the Alliance also reflected the Calvinist ethical tradition of human solidarity, decrying slavery and the unjust treatment given to the native peoples of North America and to the labouring classes at the bottom of the economic pyramid in industrial countries. The dual focus on the unity of the church and on human solidarity has continued to shape the life of the Alliance.

The challenge of global economic justice

Our concern for economic justice has been strong in the Reformed tradition since the days of the sixteenth-century Reformation. Our teacher, John Calvin, spoke often of the justice of God and the need for God's justice to be reflected in the lives of all human beings made in the image of God. By the grace of God in Jesus Christ we are freed from the slavery of sin to live as real human beings according to God's law.

Obedience to God's law requires active engagement for the good of our neighbours, Calvin believed. In a sermon on Deut 5.17 concerning murder he explains that merely refraining from the act of murder is only the beginning of justice. We can also be guilty of murder if we fail to respond to the neighbour's need and to help sustain the lives of others. We must learn to recognize that the image of God in every human being lays an ethical claim upon us, calling us to see in that person, however evil or unworthy, a child of God who is flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone.

In practice, how did Calvin expect his parishioners to provide this support for the neighbour? Calvin supported efforts already under way in Geneva when he arrived to reform the social service structure by laicizing the foundations formerly administered by the clergy and consolidating them for efficient service. He wrote into the new ecclesiastical ordinances the office of deacon and worked to provide able deacons to supervise the new hospital and other institutions to care for the poor, the aged, the ill, and the orphans. This involved not only emergency care but also funds for apprenticeships for boys, dowries for girls and health care and food supplements for the poor aged people living outside the hospital as well as those within. He devised and developed with other French refugees the "French Fund" which helped to settle newly arrived refugees, providing housing and jobs or job training to make them self-sufficient.

Calvin also held the city government accountable for justice for all and for defence of the poor and oppressed. He preached to the city officials gathered under his pulpit and sometimes went to the Council meetings to advise them. In his commentary on Ps 82.3 he argues that even if the government is not asked to take action, injustice itself has a loud enough cry to be heard, and God will hold the government responsible if it fails to give justice to the oppressed.

Calvin did not approve of preachers being fearfully submissive to civil authority, reluctant to call city leaders to account, so it is easy to understand why there was an ongoing struggle between Calvin and the city council, even if both believed they sought justice.

Calvin also tried to mobilize lay people by educating them theologically to make ethical decisions in their daily work. He urged careful choice of vocation, considering service to the common good and providing for one's family as well as the needs of one's neighbours rather than simply self-enrichment. The Genevan catechism printed a prayer to this effect to be said before beginning work each day as well as prayers for morning and evening and mealtimes.

While insisting that God created food and drink and beautiful things to be enjoyed, Calvin taught voluntary self-restraint in consumption so that all could enjoy these things. In a city often under siege with food shortages, if the rich indulged themselves the poor would go hungry. Calvin used the term "mutual communication" to describe sharing among the members of the community according to their needs. But this "mutual communication" is not just from rich to poor. The farmer, for example, can provide food but needs the skills of others to make candles, shoes, and clothing. The law of nature is that everyone must both give and receive.

There is an enormous gap between the context of village life in the Bible and of early modern cities in sixteenth-century Europe and the global economy of the twentieth century, but this theological vision still remains compelling. Though I see it as Reformed for historical reasons, many other Christians share such a biblical vision.

For some time ecumenical groups along with some Reformed churches have been studying and discussing their concerns about unjust consequences of the global economy. I shall draw especially on a new and extensive report from the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) this last June, entitled "Hope for a Global Future: Toward Just and Sustainable Human Development" and from a study document prepared for the Alliance general council next year entitled "Reformed Faith and Economic Justice".

The PC(USA) 1996 report begins by calling the General Assembly to prayer:

"Some prosper, others languish.
Lazarus, full of sores, desires to be fed, but Dives does not look.
God in creation wills for all to be filled with good things.
But the fruitful land becomes a desert,
bonds of community break,
the hungry and displaced are scarcely noticed.
Those with much grow weary of charity, oblivious to justice.
Those anxious before unsettling change turn inward, resisting insight and compassion.

O God, we care, help our unconcern!

The modern spirit falters, confidence fades.
Technology and aid, trade and development were dispatched to make all nations modern.
Yet poverty persists, disparities widen, nature revolts.
The cold war ends in cold, fragmented peace.
Promise of progress and prosperity extended to the world with pride
but without sacrifice, without sharing, without acknowledgement of limits turns to dust.

O God, we repent of pride, help our continuing presumption!

In light of the Resurrection despair is always premature.
God has a project in today's events.
In paths we have not known God leads, turning darkness into light.
We may follow, chastened but emboldened,
acknowledging the failures of development but willing to reconceptualize it,
coming to terms with the radically new factor of sustainability,
realizing that the "developed" world does not have answers for every "undeveloped" place,
but trusting that when justice is the central focus,
justice as a people's participation in sustainable sufficiency, we can remove some roadblocks to a community's own development and accompany struggling, hopeful people with enabling resources.

O God, we trust and hope, help our hesitation!"

The interdependence of the world's social and ecological and economic communities is becoming ever more pronounced as all nations become part of one global market. Though certain problems can be addressed locally, many cannot. Polluted air and water cross national boundaries. Poverty, war, repressive governments, and disease push enormous numbers of people out of their countries. As never before we realize that to cope with the problems that beset us, there is an urgent need for human solidarity in tackling these problems and for coordinated efforts among people of many nations. The Alliance is one of the international forums where concerned people of the North and of the South can come together to share their perceptions of what has gone wrong, to learn from each other the consequences of each other's actions, to analyse together our common situation, to strategize for concerted action. As Reformed Christians, we know that our lives are intertwined and interdependent, and that God holds us accountable for each other's welfare.

The prayer I read speaks of persistence of poverty, widening disparity, and the revolt of nature despite the efforts of technology and aid, trade and development. The promise of progress turns to dust. In fact the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. Only about a fifth of the world's population lives very comfortably, but they receive almost 85 per cent of the world's income and consume a disproportionate share of the world's resources. The poorest fifth of the world's population lives in deep poverty, receiving only 1.4 per cent of the income, and that income is falling. In 1960 the richest fifth had income thirty times larger than the poorest; in 1991 the richest fifth received 61 times the income of the poorest. This is a striking measure of the way the disparity is growing: the gap is now twice as large.

Another measure of injustice is the economic situation of women. According to United Nations statistics, "women do seven-tenths of the world's work, earn one-tenth of the world's income, and own one-hundredth of the world's capital and land... overwhelmingly in all societies [women] carry the burden of poverty".

Reformed people know that all things have been created by God to promote life, and that God desires abundant life for all. Economic systems should serve to enhance life, not to destroy it. Though productive work is a gift of God, it is not God's will that children and adults should have their health destroyed by grinding labour in unhealthy conditions, or that they should have no leisure to enjoy life. Nor is it God's will that the desire for material possessions should obsess people to the point where they ignore or deny the needs of others. Reformed people have a tradition of synodal structures which encourage shared decision-making, and we should encourage this in our communities, enabling all to share in decisions about their own lives. Governments and economic agencies need to operate in more transparent fashion to enable all to have the knowledge necessary to participate in decision-making. They need to be held accountable for the effects of their operations on the most vulnerable people in our world. Reformed people also understand the connection between sufficiency and simplicity of life. We believe that resources are available to permit all to have sufficient to meet their basic needs, if resources are fairly shared. To insure sufficiency for all, our tradition of modest lifestyle, of voluntary restraint in consumption in order to permit all to share in the blessings of God's world needs to be shared with our communities even where it cuts against the culture. Reformed people also have a tradition of resistance to authorities and values which threaten human rights and well-being. This tradition must be kept alive through active resistance to economic injustice and through support of communities of resistance against economic agents and policies which threaten life. We must be willing to struggle for the transformation of an unjust economic order into one which affirms life for all humanity.

In order to "break the chains of injustice", the Alliance study document makes recommendations for action. There are proposals for dialogue with the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization to solve the problem of the debt crisis and the suffering caused by structural adjustment policies, to take account of women's needs and their essential roles in the development process, to incorporate basic norms of social justice and environmental sustainability into the international trading system. There are also calls to the churches of the North especially to examine their lifestyles and values and to work for changes in their own societies to facilitate global economic justice.

The challenge of partnership of women and men

The ideal of full partnership of women and men in the mission of God has been an ongoing challenge to the Alliance itself, requiring struggle for change. Still, the witness of the Alliance to this call of the gospel has been a challenge to its member churches and to the broader society.

This afternoon I have talked about interdependence in terms of human solidarity, mutual responsibility, following Calvin's insistence on human solidarity by virtue of common creation in the image of God and union with the Christ who is not only divine but also fully human. Following this line of thought, twentieth-century people could then understand women to be full partners with men in the Christian life by virtue of their sharing fully with men the image of God from creation, and also by their sharing fully the solidarity of humankind with Jesus Christ in the incarnation, making possible their full membership in the church, the community of all those baptized into the body of Christ.

Women's situation has not always been so understood in the church. For centuries theologians taught that men reflect the image of God more fully than women because the male human being is the norm of humanity and women are "botched males" or defective human beings. Even today there are theologians who understand that in the incarnation Christ was made male in such a way as to bring greater honour to male human beings, and that Christ's maleness brings special privileges in the church to men which are not available to women, notably the privilege of ordination to the ministry of word and sacraments. And of course we still struggle with Paul's advice to women to be silent. For many centuries the only real partnership men imagined with women was the familial one of procreation and household management, but even there women were understood to be subordinate to their husbands.

This history lives on overtly-above the surface-and covertly, below the surface. Where people are clear that they believe in the subordination of women to men, it is overt and easily identified. Where people imagine they believe in the equality of women and men but still harbour unconsciously the old stereotypes and attitudes requiring subordination of women, this history is covert, hidden. Yet it remains startlingly powerful even then, shaping behaviour. For this reason we cannot simply assume that everyone knows what we mean by "partnership".

The full partnership of women and men as understood by the Alliance is one of equality, where there is true solidarity of women with men by Calvin's standards, and where the relationship is rooted in justice for both. We understand that the early New Testament community understood itself to be such a community of equals where the breaking in of the reign of God in the power of the Holy Spirit had broken down all human barriers. Among the baptized "there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus' (Gal 3.27-8).

Churches and ecumenical bodies have long been concerned that this full partnership does not now exist anywhere in the world. The time has come to affirm its importance and work more enthusiastically towards its implementation, since it will not be achieved without struggle. It often seems that the secular world has accepted women more fully than the ecclesiastical world. Therefore various approaches are being taken. Women's groups all over the world have taken initiatives to work for greater acceptance of women. Another approach is being taken by the World Council of Churches programme of The Ecumenical Decade of the Churches in Solidarity with Women (1988-1998), where women and men together identify issues and problems facing women and attempt to stand together in the church to free women from what hinders their full participation in church and society. These two approaches are complementary, not contradictory.

The Alliance inaugurated its own programme in 1992 as PACT: the Programme to Affirm, Challenge, and Transform Women and Men in Partnership in Church and Society. It called as its executive secretary Rev. Dr Nyambura J Njoroge, the first woman pastor ordained by the Presbyterian Church in East Africa a decade ago, a theologian experienced in pioneering in church life. A committee of women and men from the executive committee of the Alliance works with her in planning the PACT programme.

The inauguration of this programme was part of a long series of initiatives taken by women to claim their place in the life of the Alliance. It is interesting to look back to the somewhat different experience of women in the two predecessor bodies of the Alliance which joined in 1970 to become the present World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Dr Njoroge's research in the archives has brought this story to light.

The World Presbyterian and Reformed Alliance was founded in 1875. It was nearly fifty years before the first woman delegate, Mrs Martin Yças of Lithuania, participated in a Council meeting in 1921. From the beginning, however, some wives of delegates accompanied their husbands and met separately during the Council meeting for discussion of their own activities in the flourishing new mission societies of the nineteenth century. During the third Council meeting in 1884, the male delegates discussed women's work as part of an agenda dealing with the work of lay people and elders in the church. They formed a committee to consider the matter further. At the 1888 Council meeting, the committee recommended formation of an organized programme of women's work parallelling the courts of the church and subordinate to them. This proposal was approved, along with another proposal to "set apart" (not "ordain") women as deaconesses. One delegate expressed his pleasure that the action did not give women "the right to rule", but merely made use of their abilities to work in certain areas. The vitality of independent women's work seems to have been a threat to the male leadership of the church.

During the same meeting in 1888, the wife of the general secretary, Mrs Matthews, proposed that the women form an International Union for the women's societies from member churches of the Alliance, and that the Union hold conferences during Council meetings. The Council approved this recommendation, and in 1892 the Union was inaugurated.

This pattern of women's organizations structured in parallel to and subordinate to church bodies led by men was challenged in 1929 by Mrs F.S. Bennet of the USA. She and Mrs W.L. M'Kerrow of Scotland had been invited to address the Council, though they had no official status. Mrs Bennet told the Council:

"At the time of the American Civil War when the organizations of women were being formed, those in ecclesiastical authority within the church had every opportunity to make such adjustments as would make it possible for men and women to move together as a great unified body, but those leaders either did not sense the coming of a new period or, looking down the vista of the future, were affrighted and chose to continue male and female rather than to plan a united church. It is not unjust to say that masculine failure to recognize and seize this opportunity has been the background of the present separation of men and women in the service in the church."

Women continued to urge their full incorporation into the life of the Alliance, and by 1948 seven women came to a Council meeting as delegates. In 1954 the requirement that delegates be ordained as ministers or elders was removed, making it easier for women to serve. In 1954 several other steps were taken. First, a resolution was passed approving the ordination of women as ministers. Second, a department of women was created. Third, women were elected to the executive committee. One of these, Lady Louise MacDermott, became moderator of the new department and went on to become, in 1959, the first woman vice-president of the Alliance. From that time on there was a succession of women in the leadership of the Alliance. But it took about 80 years to reach this level of partnership of women and men in the Alliance.

The story of women in the International Congregational Council is quite different. This body was formed in 1891, and at its very first meeting the delegates discussed "The Ministry of Women". They asked: "Who are we that we should assume an air of authority or patronage towards those who have hitherto been the strength and glory of our churches?" The committee planning the next Council meeting was instructed to invite women delegates to participate. At the next Council meeting in 1899 women delegates were present, and three spoke about women's work.

Why was the experience of women at the ICC so different from that in the World Presbyterian and Reformed Alliance? It is useful to point out that women moved into public leadership in the Congregational churches in the USA well ahead of the Presbyterian church. In 1846 Antoinette Brown Blackwell entered Oberlin College in Ohio with the clear intent to become a minister. After a determined struggle, Blackwell was ordained to the ministry in 1853. The Congregational churches continued to ordain women in the USA from that time on. Therefore, by the time the International Congregational Council was formed at the end of the century, there was a tradition of Congregational women ministers giving public leadership in the church. Women were also ordained in a united church with Congregational roots in Britain in 1919, and in Congregational churches in Australia and Scotland in the 1920s.

In the Presbyterian churches in the USA, the first woman to be ordained was Louisa Mariah Layman Woosley in the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1889. Though many challenges were made to her ordination by those outside the presbytery, she was strongly supported by the two presbyteries in which she served, and the challenges seem to have ended by 1911. Despite the public debate about her status, she served as Stated Clerk of her presbytery for 25 years, as commissioner to the General Assembly, and as moderator of the Kentucky Synod in 1938. She preached widely and published a tract on the question of women's preaching.

Though Ms Woosley herself was able to weather the storm, I know of no other Presbyterian women ordained as ministers in the USA till 1956. In Europe in 1930, the Reformed Church in Alsace and Lorraine, France, ordained its first woman minister. In the early 1930s there were united churches with Reformed roots and probably also Congregational roots, including the United Church of Canada and the Church of Christ in Japan, which began ordaining women as ministers. After the 1950s women's ordination became quite common in the Reformed family. This correlates well with the 1954 decision of the Alliance to approve women's ordination as ministers, though I do not know whether the Council's action stimulated or merely reflected the action already taking place in the churches.

In view of all the activity of the women's movement in many churches in the 1960s and 1970s, some women arrived at the 21st general council in Ottawa in 1982 rather shocked at the overwhelmingly male leadership and control of the Alliance. I was there as a delegate to the Caribbean and North American Area Council (CANAAC) which was meeting concurrently, and I was also giving talks on the history of women in the Reformed tradition in the visitors' programme. Women delegates, too outraged to sit in the meeting, appeared in my visitors' seminars, looking for a sympathetic context to think about strategy to make the Council more open to women. Women delegates worked hard to elect a larger number of women to the executive committee and also a woman vice-president. They also began working to include a woman among the executive staff members in the Geneva office. Members of CANAAC, sensitized by their presence in Ottawa, offered to help with fund-raising to make it possible. In 1985 Rev. Jill Schaeffer became secretary of the department of cooperation and witness.

When the next general council met in Seoul, Korea in 1989, the Korean women had prepared well. Members of a large Presbyterian church had been struggling for decades to receive approval for ordination of women as ministers. Many women seminary graduates were working essentially as ministers, responsible for congregations, but paid a fraction of a minister's salary, unable to celebrate the sacraments, and cut off from the decision-making process of the presbytery. Out of their passionate concern, they organized a communion service to be held the night before the Council opened, presided over by a Korean woman minister from a small Korean Presbyterian church, the only one which permitted women to serve as ministers. She was Prof. Sang Chang, now moderator of the Alliance's department of cooperation and witness and presidentof Ewha Women's University in Seoul. The women had invited all the women ministers attending the Council to join in the leadership of the service and those of us who were elders to assist in serving communion. Glorious large women's choirs and orchestras of native instruments enriched the service. Thousands of women from as far away as six hours' drive arrived by the busload to share for the first time in a communion service led by women. The emotional impact of this service on the delegates, both men and women, was extraordinary. Embraces and tears communicated where language failed. Perhaps this experience had some influence on the fact that strong actions were taken by the Council to urge the member churches to reconsider their position on the question of women's ordination if they had not already approved it and to urge fair and equal treatment of women in the leadership and staff of the churches. At Seoul the proposal to hire a woman for the Geneva staff to work with the churches on women's questions was advanced, leading to the hiring of Dr Njoroge in 1992. Actions were also taken to encourage the member churches to examine the language of their liturgies and documents so as to use language affirming the community of women and men, and to use language about God utilizing a broad range of biblical images, not merely masculine ones. Churches were urged to act in such a way as to become models of mutuality and reciprocity as a witness for the world.

One of the chief goals of the PACT programme has been to organize a series of regional meetings to discuss the partnership of women and men in the church, to develop regional networks of women and men concerned with this issue, and to prepare a major section programme for the general council meeting next summer in Debrecen. The partnership of women and men in God's mission has been the theme of the regional meetings and will also shape the PACT section in Debrecen. Regional consultations have been held in Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and Europe. We believe that the churches in each region must find the ways to move forward, drawing on their analysis of the special historical and cultural and theological aspects of their context.

Though we are first of all concerned with the respect of the church for all women, the willingness of the church to welcome ordination of women as ministers is an important part of women's partnership with men in the life of the church. We have seen that the movement to include women began a century and a half ago, yet its task is not yet complete. At the time of the last general council in 1989, only about half of the member churches of the Alliance ordained women. Much progress has been made since then. When the statistics were last updated in 1992, about two thirds of the churches ordained women. About half the churches in Africa and Latin America in 1992 ordained women; the numbers in Asia were higher, and highest of all in the countries of the North.

After the Seoul general council, even before the PACT programme began, a consultation was convened to discuss the ordination of women. Pairs of delegates were invited from various regions: one from a church which ordained women and one from a church which did not. For example: Poland and Czechoslovakia; India and Pakistan. In each region the culture was similar, but the decision different. We tried to identify what the issues were which most needed to be discussed and explained in order to assist churches in moving towards full partnership. From the participants in that consultation came a book, "Walk My Sister", dealing with biblical interpretation, cultural issues, history, theology. It was so enthusiastically received that the edition was quickly exhausted. Since then three ministers from the executive committee have made translations into their own languages: a Korean woman into Korean, a Lebanese man into Arabic, a Cuban man, Carlos Camps, with his daughter into Spanish. The Spanish translation will soon be available.

What is the nature of the continuing resistance to ordaining women? Almost none of the Reformed churches officially cites theological or biblical objections. Usually the objections given are practical, cultural, or ecumenical.

An example is the story of Najla Abou Sawan Kassab of Lebanon, the only woman licensed to preach in a Reformed church of the Middle East, though not yet ordained. When she wished to study theology, she was refused admission to the theology programme of the Near East School of Theology in Beirut, though she could have studied Christian Education. Instead she studied theology in the United States. On her return the church appointed her as director for Christian Education of the national synod of her church, where she is having a fruitful ministry. She rejoices that women can now be admitted to the theology programme at NEST, and that the new president is a woman. She reflects: "While many agree that the difficulty of living full partnership in the church today is not rooted in any biblical or theological reason, still some raise the question of social pressure, where we are living in a multi-religious context and where Christians are a minority. Some see that the society, which is a patriarchal society, cannot accept women in full partnership. Besides, the Reformed community is a minority within the Christian family. While Islam has no role for women in leadership, and other traditional churches are far from including women, then the obstacle for the ordination of women becomes a social one. In my preaching license exam, I was asked, "What would happen to our ecumenical relationships if we were to ordain you?" I remember this question well. I remember answering that not all that we do in the Reformed churches is acceptable whether by other religions or even other churches, and still we are ecumenically accepted... For quite a time the ordination of male Protestant pastors was not accepted since ordination is not seen as a sacrament. Did we change what we believed in? Also marriages that were held in our churches were not considered legal by other churches since marriage is not seen as a sacrament. Still marriages were performed and accepted! We cannot but live according to what we believe. We will be threatened as a community only when we do not live what we teach. We cannot undermine our prophetic role for other religions, churches, or the societies as a whole."

Increasingly there seems to be a movement in the direction of regarding the church's openness to women's ordained ministry as a matter of faith, not merely a practical matter of the Book of Order. My own church, PC(USA), when we adopted a new confession of faith in 1992, included a line which states that the Holy Spirit calls women to all the ministries of the church. This statement is now a part of our doctrine of the church and the Holy Spirit's work.

The challenge of ecumenism

Reformed people understand that there is only one church of Jesus Christ and that all its members are interdependent, each responsible to and for the other. We have been heavily engaged in the modern ecumenical movement from the beginning, believing that this movement towards unity is a sign of the work of the Holy Spirit. The general council in Ottawa in 1982 declared:

"Faced by a plurality of churches throughout the world, we have a choice between claiming to be the one true church to which all others ought eventually to come and, on the other hand, seeking the fullness of Christ's church by entering into dialogue and fellowship with those other churches which share with us the gospel. As we may not claim a monopoly of the gospel, there is for us no alternative to involvement in the ecumenical movement."

Therefore the Alliance has carried on a series of international dialogues with all the major Protestant world bodies, and we are currently engaged in conversation with the Orthodox churches, the Pentecostal churches, and the Roman Catholic Church, trying to find more effective ways to work together to express our unity. The most recent dialogue report from conversation with the Catholic Church, Towards a Common Understanding of the Church (1993) has been translated into Spanish.

Conclusion

Through the examples of global economic justice, partnership of women and men, and ecumenical relations, I have tried to illustrate the Alliance's understanding of interdependence.

Nyambura and I are honoured to be present with you as the delegates of the Latin American churches meet to express your interdependence in the struggle towards full partnership of women and men in church and society. We will listen and learn and try to discover how the Alliance can be helpful to you in your context. We hope you will feel the solidarity of the Alliance with you in your struggle.

Prof. Dr Jane Dempsey Douglass was president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (1990-1997) and moderator of the PACT Programme (1992-1997)