Communication Means Participation WACC Europe Meeting Told

[Worldwide Faith News <wfn@igc.org>]

> News Release, 1 April, 2011

**Communication means participation and inclusion, WACC General
Secretary tells Europe meeting**

Frankfurt/Main, Germany. Reconfiguring communication in the ecumenical
movement means discovering, seeking and implementing new forms of
communication, the General Secretary of the World Association for
Christian Communication (WACC) has told a gathering in Frankfurt,
Germany.

"As communicators we have become pilgrims in space - and sometimes in
cyberspace - who have embarked on a long journey, by no means
complete, from the old concept of uni-dimensional, one-way
communication to the current multi-dimensional, multi-way approach
that emphasizes reciprocity and equality," said the WACC General
Secretary, Rev. Karin Achtelstetter, in her 31 March address.

Achtelstetter was giving the opening presentation - on "reconfiguring
communication in the ecumenical movement" - at a seminar organized by
the WACC Europe Region as part of its one-every-three-years general
assembly.

WACC is a Toronto-headquartered global organization that promotes
communication for social change. The Frankfurt seminar - from 31 March
to 1 April - has as its theme, "Communication and Reconfiguration in
Faith, Media, Society and Economy".

The aim of the seminar is to take stock of recent changes in the
media, church, societal and economic landscape in Europe, and focus on
the implications of these changes for WACC's principles of
communication as well as the communication tasks for churches and
Christian organizations and the coverage of religion in the media.

In her address, Achtelstetter noted that the word configuration is
often used in astrophysics and she compared the ecumenical movement to
the Milky Way.

"Despite its diversity and its vastness the elements are held together
by a large-scale magnetic field," she stated. "The galaxy is in
constant movement and in rotation - doesn't this description remind
you of the ecumenical movement?"

With this image in mind, she continued, reconfiguring communication in
the ecumenical movement suggests "discovering, seeking and
implementing new forms of communication with an openness to new shapes
and constellations".

She said, "If we want to reflect about how to reconfigure
communication in the ecumenical movement, then the first thing to do
is to identify our communication barriers and then in a second step to
dismantle them."

Illustrating this, Achtelstetter drew on the experiences of Robert
Geisendorfer from Germany, and Farajah Zawadi, from the Democratic
Republic of Congo.

Born in 1910, Geisendofer was a key figure in rebuilding Protestant
church media in West Germany after the Nazi dictatorship and the
Second World War. He founded the Frankfurt-based Association for
Protestant Media (GEP), was a WACC treasurer, and a founder of WACC
Europe.

One of his key statements was, "Communication in the sense of
participation and inclusion is a part of life ? If you cannot
communicate, you are disenfranchised, manipulated by the other, you
are turned into an instrument instead of a creative being."

Zawadi works for SAMWAKI, an association of rural women in the DRC
that runs a WACC-funded community radio station - Radio Bubusa FM -
focussing on key issues around rural women's rights and community
development, including discrimination, reproductive health,
gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. The radio station operates from
South Kivu, an area described in 2007 by a United Nations rapporteur
as having the worst situation ever seen for violence against women.

Achtelstetter recounted how she met Zawadi two weeks earlier at the
WACC Africa region assembly in Kigali, Rwanda. Zawadi had travelled 19
hours by bus from the DRC to attend the assembly.

The WACC General Secretary said that if Geisendorfer lived today, "he
would see how Farajah Zawadi and her colleagues ensure that rural
women are empowered by access to information, training and
communication in a country that has seen a great amount of violence".

Women from Radio Bubusa - the name describes a cry used by women to
wake each other up to work in the fields - "are living," Achtelstetter
said, what Robert Geisendörfer preached - with every word they
broadcast, they demonstrate that communication is about participation
and inclusion and that it is an essential part of life".

(By Stephen Brown, a member of the steering committee of the WACC
Europe region)

> Download full presentation here...

<http://www.waccglobal.org/images/stories/news/wacc/reconfiguring%20communi 
cation%20in%20the%20ecumenical%20movement-%20presentaiton%20by%20karin-wacc 
-eu-march%202011.pdf