wfn.org | New Leader Wants Reformed Churches to Form a Genuine Alliance

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Note #5893 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

12-May-2000
00190

	New Leader Wants  Reformed Churches to Form a Genuine Alliance

	Nyomi hopes to mobilize ‘ordinary pew-sitters' against economic injustice

	by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- The new general secretary of the World Alliance of
Reformed Churches (WARC) is visiting denominations in the United States and
Canada to get a sense of how the organization's 215 member churches might
cooperate more closely on local projects.

	The Rev. Setri Nyomi, 45, a pastoral theologian from Ghana, wants to make
the issues that the WARC has singled out -- such as global economic
injustice and abuse of the environment -- meaningful to ordinary
pew-sitters, rather than relegating theological thought to a scholarly
elite, which traditionally has been a problem in ecumenical circles.

	"We're asking: how do we bring things on (par)? How do we bring things down
to the level where everybody has access to it?," Nyomi said.

	"The work of WARC is done in the churches. Not by 12 people in Geneva."

	And that is why Nyomi is out and about just weeks after he became the first
non-European to be installed as WARC's general secretary. The Presbyterian
Church(U.S.A.) is just one of many member churches he intends to visit in
the early weeks of his term. Some of the others are  the United Church of
Canada, the Reformed Church in America, the United Church of Christ, the
Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the
Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America..

	"We need to find ways in which (the agenda) to which we've committed
ourselves to can be localized," Nyomi told the Presbyterian News Service.
"Economic injustice ... Is that just something we said in Debrecen, Hungary,
in 1997?"

	Nyomi's reference was to the last meeting of the organization's general
council, which formulates policy. The meeting's theme was "Break the Chains
of Injustice."

	 "We need people to bring these commitments back to the churches. ... It
was delegates on their behalf who said that was the commitment. So what can
we do to facilitate that?"
	
	Nyomi is quick to list the stances the WARC has taken recently, including
advocacy of the equality of women, assertion of the rights of indigenous
peoples, and a stand against racism -- two WARC member churches were
suspended for refusing to distance themselves from apartheid in South
Africa. Just this month, he said, the organization spoke out in human rights
hearings in Geneva -- opposing the death penalty and supporting religious
freedom.

	"WARC has a history of linking social action (and a theological rationale)
closer than the World Council of Churches (WCC). Theology has always
undergirded our actions," Nyomi said, commenting that this methodology
allows the council to defer to neither the left -- which tends to become
myopically issue-focused -- nor the right -- which tends to abandon social
action altogether.

	Nyomi wants WARC to make the biblical mandate for social action explicit;
and to make its materials more readily available -- by offering them on an
updated WARC web site, for example. One of his fondest hopes is to bring
WARC's southern hemisphere churches in line with the organization's stands
for justice.

	"I think the ecumenical movement on the whole has not touched the right
chords in a good part of the south," he said. " ... WARC has emphasized
theology, scholarship and good training for (church) leaders all along. And
you cannot help but speak to the issue of justice. That link can be heard by
the south ... because we are told so in Isaiah 58: ‘Christ came so that we
may have life in fullness.' That has to do with freedom from sin. And it
also has to do with freedom from anything that oppresses."

	More than half of WARC's membership lives in the southern hemisphere. Nyomi
himself is a former top executive with the All-Africa Conference of
Churches, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya.

	He was officially installed as WARC's general secretary on April 9 in
Geneva's historic St. Pierre Cathedral by WARC President Choan-Seng Song, a
Taiwanese Christian who teaches at the Pacific School of Religion and
Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.

	After the installation, WARC officers met for three days in Geneva,
identifying the central issues facing the 125-year-old organization: making
WARC more relevant to its members; urging member churches to oppose economic
injustice and environmental damage; pushing for better ties among Reformed
churches worldwide; and finding new ways broaden WARC's financial base.

	Nyomi said the work of the PC(USA) is "very relevant" and critical to
WARC's mission and to his own hope to forge better mission links within the
Reformed family.

	"If we dialogue among ourselves," he said, "there will be less stuff that
we'll need in Geneva."

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