wfn.org | Love says church encouraged her to ecumenical leadership

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June 5, 2000 News media contact: Linda Bloom·(212) 870-3803·New York
10-21-31-71BP{261}

NOTE: A photograph is available with this story.

A UMNS Feature
By Linda Bloom*

When Jan Love was a teen-ager, the United Methodist Church opened her eyes
to the world beyond her home state of Alabama.

Her experiences as a young director at what was then the Board of Missions
and its Women's Division spurred her to design a major in college on African
politics, influenced her career path and led to a 25-year involvement with
the World Council of Churches (WCC).

The United Methodist Council of Bishops recognized Love, a 47-year-old
laywoman from Columbia, S.C., for her "exceptional leadership in ecumenical
arenas" in a May 10 ceremony in Cleveland. Bishop Melvin Talbert of the San
Francisco Area made the presentation before the delegates to General
Conference, the denomination's highest legislative body. He later told
United Methodist News Service that church members "needed to know something
about this great woman who has served her church so capably."

It's not surprising that of the four daughters born to the Rev. James Neal
and Jean B. Love, Jan recalled, "I was the one who really went in gung-ho
for church activities."

Early on, her family was branded as being different. In the spring of 1958,
when she was 5 years old, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on their lawn in
Satsuma, Ala., "because Daddy had signed a petition requesting that blacks
be allowed to sit wherever they wanted to on buses." The Methodist church
where her father was serving refused to pay his salary because he signed the
petition. Through the connectional system, the district superintendent "kept
us from going hungry," she said.

That small involvement in the civil rights movement became an issue in every
future local church appointment, but Love considered it a positive
challenge. "I embraced that we were different," she explained, adding that
in eighth grade, she was one of two white girls who remained in a small-town
public school when integration began there.

Love's interest in race relations was expanded after an alert youth director
on the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference staff nominated her to serve
on the denomination's Board of Missions. She was 17 when elected. Through
that connection, she learned about the WCC's Programme to Combat Racism and
became fascinated with the continent of Africa.

When receiving her recognition on May 10, Love credited her "ecumenical
mothers" - United Methodist Women and its administrative body, the Women's
Division - for nurturing her passion for ecumenical relations and
understanding.

Stimulated by what she learned, she started taking courses on Africa while
attending Eckard College in St. Petersburg, Fla. Eventually, she designed
her own major in African politics and, after graduation in 1975, followed
the encouragement of her professors and continued her studies at Ohio State
University.

Love postponed her entry into graduate school to travel alone in Africa and
then attend the WCC Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, late in 1975. Calling upon
skills learned through the church, she helped organize the youth caucus,
which gathered in Tanzania the week before the Nairobi meeting. The caucus
pushed the United Methodists to give one of their six seats on the WCC's
decision-making body, the Central Committee, to a youth, and Love was
elected.

The Rev. Rob Houston, then chief executive of the United Methodist
Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, had watched Love.
"I took notice of her sharp intellect, her competencies that went far beyond
what you expect to find even in a precocious young person," he said.

As the denomination's chief ecumenical officer, he considered it his
responsibility to nudge "people with promise" toward positions of
responsibility. He "said a word or two in the right direction" to WCC staff
and the United Methodist Council of Bishops regarding Love.

At the next WCC assembly, in Vancouver in 1983, Houston nominated Love from
the floor to serve on that body's 25-member Executive Committee. By then,
Love recalled, she had "a lot of friends among Third World Christians" and
had retained the support of youth. A Lutheran bishop withdrew his nomination
so that she could be elected, she said.

In the meantime, she had received both a master's degree and her doctorate
from Ohio State, and had taken a teaching job at the University of South
Carolina in "a department that is really renowned for international studies.
They thought my involvement in the World Council of Churches was a wonderful
integration of academic research and service."

Now an associate professor there, Love said her continuing involvement in
the WCC has given her an exposure to both people and places that she can use
in her teaching. "I have great anecdotes to use in the classroom," she
added. "It gives me a wonderful perspective on the realities of
international relations."

Her academic work, in return, has provided her the opportunity to study
matters of war and peace, wealth and poverty, and how governments interact,
and has allowed her to look at the "bigger picture" to help the WCC stay
consistent in its ongoing work.

Love believes her most important contributions to the WCC have been teaching
process skills - learned as a United Methodist - "that accentuate
participation and democracy." She found that unlike her own denomination,
many churches did not allow open participation in decision-making, resulting
in "deep suspicion that somebody is controlling the process."

Her leadership in the WCC "was committed to transparency and accountability
and democracy. That garnered a lot of trust. When people see that their
perspective and their contribution is taken seriously and considered
important to the whole, they take on a new level of commitment and capacity
to stick with it."

Love stepped down from the WCC Executive Committee in 1991 but continued to
serve on the Central Committee through 1998. She has worked in a number of
other roles as well, including moderator of the WCC's Commission of the
Churches on International Affairs, 1992-98, and moderator of the unit on
justice and service, 1983-91. She also has been active in the U.S. National
Council of Churches and in ecumenical and United Methodist groups in South
Carolina.

The Rev. Bruce Robbins, current chief executive for Christian Unity and
Interreligious Concerns, noted that Love's strengths include formulating
ideas that are fresh and reasonable, finding common ground in opposing
viewpoints, and garnering support across the cultural and theological
spectrum of the WCC. "She developed enormous credibility through listening
to people and having them sense that she heard them," he said.

"I've never seen a person with such a broad grasp of what the inner workings
are of the various churches around the world," added Talbert, who has worked
closely with Love over the past eight years. "She knows the protocol, she
understands the people, and she understands the cultures of the churches in
a way that no one else does."

Love credits her husband, Peter Sederberg, with providing the support that
allows her to maintain a family life despite the enormous amount of time
required for her church work. "Without his ability to be a close partner in
parenting and household functions, I wouldn't be able to do all this stuff,"
she frankly admitted.

She married Sederberg, a colleague and professor in her department who now
is a dean at the university, in 1984. Their daughter, Rachel, was born in
December 1987, and was only 3 years old in 1991 when Love had to travel to
Canberra for a month for the WCC Assembly and related meetings. "It just
about killed me," she remembered. "I cried all the way to Australia."

Another difficult period was in 1992, when her grandmother was dying and
Love was chairwoman of the search committee for a new top executive of the
WCC. She was going to be away for about three weeks and knew it was likely
her grandmother would not survive, but her mother urged her to attend to her
WCC duties. Her grandmother's funeral was conducted exactly at the hour when
the Central Committee went into session to vote on the new executive. "Mel
(Talbert) was a wonderful pastor for me at that time," she said.

"I had to let her make her own decision about what she was going to do, and
when she did, I supported her, " Talbert recalled. "That was a high cost she
paid to be faithful to the demands of the church."

A new personal challenge has been the illness of her daughter. Since March
1998, Rachel has been severely sick or partially disabled from what has been
diagnosed as three separate medical problems. "Everything in life gets
reoriented around care for a sick child," noted Love, who is on sabbatical
from her teaching job.

But she continues to contribute to the WCC. She is the leader of the WCC's
new Programme to Overcome Violence and is a member of the Special Commission
on Orthodox Participation in the WCC.

Love considers the denomination's ecumenical involvement to be a theological
commitment, not just religious politics. 

"Anybody who claims the name Christian should be at the table," she said,
even if there are radical differences in practice and conviction. "The
challenge is how we can both stake out this claim (of Christianity) and how
we can be true to it."
# # #
*Bloom is news director of the New York office of United Methodist News
Service.

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United Methodist News Service
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