An Ecclesial Community - a model of how to incorporate women in churches

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Elsa Tamez

Women's Visions and Voices

Every human being has the innate capacity to dream, and dreaming is a human right which must be respected. Life without dreams is not only humdrum and tedious, but one is also prone to feelings of resignation which act like a powerful virus for which there is no antidote, gradually eroding all desire to live, and leading eventually to nihilism.

A vision or a dream is a response to a state of affairs with which we are deeply dissatisfied, and which we want to change. The dissatisfaction many women feel towards the churches is well-known and to focus on that would mean repeating the complaints to be heard from various quarters -- justified though these may be. I prefer, therefore, to focus on women's dreams for the church as it should be. I start not from an abstract and unreal view of the church -- because that already exists and we can read it in many excellent ecclesiological treatises -- but with the churches themselves, with actual local congregations of believers in the various confessions. (The difficulty, I believe, with classical ecclesiology is that it does not take into account the gender, race and social condition of church members and is consequently abstract and ineffective.)

In this article I shall reflect on a prophetic vision, as seen by women, of what it means to be the church. I will take Isaiah 65 as our starting point, and conclude with some suggested steps that could bring us closer to that prophetic vision of how to be the church.

A prophetic vision of being the church from a women's perspective

A vision encapsulates the life we desire, not the life we live. The prophet Isaiah, in the famous chapter 65 of this biblical book, describes the yearning for a new way of living in society. It includes infants and old people, those who build and those who plant, and the animals. The whole poem overflows with joy and peace because there is human fulfilment and food in abundance for all. The visionary dream starts from a situation of discontent among the people in exile, and its aim is to motivate the exiles to extricate themselves from their current situation and to build a new society in their own land.

I shall take up this prophetic vision and re-read it from the standpoint of women and the church. The poem will provide me with a framework in which to offer a Latin American feminist vision of being the church today. At the same time I shall mention some of the present realities of a church which we do not want.

A joyful and happy ecclesial community(1)

A church community is joyful and happy when all its members feel satisfied in their work, and fulfilled and accepted as persons. Their joy comes from glimpsing a new way of being a community and seeing concrete progress being made towards this new church.

The poetic prophecy of Isaiah in 65:17-19 describes the joy that comes from the creation of new heavens and a new earth where the -- negative -- memory of former things will disappear. Although this refers to the people of Israel, we can apply it to women's desire to see the beginnings of a new way of being the church. Joy and happiness can be felt in anticipation, simply in the description of what is to be. "The former things shall not be remembered," says the poem. The joy that arises in a new ecclesial community springs from the longing for a radical break with what has come before. What is this unhappy past we would not like to see returning? For women and girls in Latin America, that "past" is the present which they endure today and which they want to end. Their present can be summarized in two words: poverty and violence,(2) and we shall look at these in greater detail below. Seen in terms of the church, the "former things" would be a patriarchal, hierarchical church that marginalizes women and other excluded groups. The vision insists on "wiping out" the memory of former things in order to avoid falling once more into the errors of the past, or being embittered by this unhappy past and bringing feelings of resentment with us into the new church.

The poet repeats that in this new community there will be no more weeping or cries of distress (v. 19), and the joy there will be so great that God himself will rejoice with the city and the people: a joyful, happy community also reflects God's happiness and joy, because God rejoices when his creatures are happy and fulfilled. It is important to note, however, that this is not a hollow or specious kind of happiness such as we sometimes hear in testimonies from people who say they are happy because "the Lord Jesus has saved them" -- when we can see in reality that they lead a miserable life. In the poem we find that the people are happy among themselves, at a human level, and that God is infected by their joy. The longed-for contentment is both vertical and horizontal, and for a very concrete reason: the past which caused unhappiness has been left behind. This dream of a society where joy prevails is important for women because we know the endless tears shed by women of all ages and from all ethnic groups and races in our continent.