wfn.org | WARC Leaders Press For Concrete Action

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11-August-1997 
97309 
 
    WARC Leaders Press For Concrete Action 
 
    by Jerry L. Van Marter 
    World Alliance of Reformed Churches Newsroom 
 
DEBRECEN, Hungary--World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) general 
secretary Milan Opocensky said Aug. 7 that he "hopes the 23rd [WARC] 
General Council won't be another noncommittal meeting." 
 
    Instead, Opocensky told a group of international journalists at a press 
conference, he desires that WARC member churches will "covenant with each 
other and with God to take these issues [to be addressed by the General 
Council] back to their churches and engage them seriously in finding 
concrete solutions."  He said he expects 196 of WARC's 208 churches to be 
represented here. 
 
    The theme of the Aug. 8-20 General Council is "Break the Chains of 
Injustice."  Opocensky said two of the key specific issues on which he 
hopes covenants for action will be adopted by the Council are "the 
realities of the global economy" and the tensions created in numerous 
places in the world by "heightened racial and ethnic identity." 
 
    Benjamin Masilo of Lesotho, vice president of WARC, agreed, saying that 
the commitment to justice in the world "has been left too much in the hands 
of the politicians."  Insisting that commitments to justice have been 
"halfhearted" by governments and churches, he said, "It's God's world -- 
how can we not speak up and say, `This is not the way it is supposed to 
be!'" 
 
    Jane Dempsey Douglass of the United States, president of the Alliance, 
supported Opocensky's call for "covenants" of action. "We need not just 
understanding, but strategies to change unjust structures," she said. 
 
    Douglass cautioned, however, that some of those structures are within 
the churches.  Noting that only about two-thirds of WARC's  member churches 
ordain women despite WARC's  advocacy of their inclusion for more than 50 
years, Douglass said that a pre-Council women's conference resolved to 
press the issue of women's ordination as a justice issue along with the 
economic role of women in broader society. 
 
    The issue of the economic role of women in society is crucial in 
Hungary, said Bishop Guszav Blcskei, the ministerial president of the Synod 
of the Reformed Church in Hungary.  He said that with capitalism replacing 
communism in his country, "injustices for women are emerging rapidly." 
Formerly, women had an equal right to work as men, but "now they are first 
to be let go, with artificial explanations such as `how wonderful it is to 
be back in the home' put forth as justification," he explained. 
 
    Blcskei warmly welcomed WARC to Hungary and said he hoped that the 
General Council "will see the problems of the church in a dialectical 
fashion -- with local problems seen in relation to the general problems of 
the church." 

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