Seeking Allies Within the Institutional Church: Reflections from South Africa on Partnership as Means to Unsettling Deadlocked Conflict?

Abstract

One of the means that has long been proposed with regard to addressing the deadlocked conflict with regard to issues such as gender and sexuality, race and class has been to seek allies from the seemingly oppositional group in order to facilitate social change. Social movements have also made use of this approach over the years. In an era within which issues of race, class and gender are becoming seemingly more oppositional—due the re-emergence of right wing and fundamentalist discourse—this chapter seeks to explore the complexities and possible opportunities inherent in this approach from the perspective of a decolonial feminist lens.

Introduction

One of the means that has long been proposed with regard to addressing the deadlocked conflict with regard to issues such as gender and sexuality and race and class has been to seek allies from the seemingly oppositional group in order to facilitate social change. Social movements have also made use of this approach over the years. As a practical theologian, positionality and situatedness is always the starting point. I grew up as the child of church leaders in South Africa, who did not subscribe at all to the kind of headship submission popularized as being particular to evangelicals like ourselves—neither in our home nor within a church context, and over the past 25 years have witnessed my mother emerge as a global church leader. It is also important to note that perhaps the latter reason makes me uniquely positioned to reflect on the notion of gender solidarity—my father was in many ways my mother’s first ministry ally and a fierce one at that. So, it strikes me as sad and perhaps even heartbreaking that the gains made by my mother’s generation, which saw women ordained to the ministry, appointed as professors of theology in major universities and ordained to prominent church leadership roles, appear to be eroded in an era which has seen the re-emergence of rightest thinking and praxis in the benches and on the pulpits of local congregations. This thinking does not appear constrained to fundamentalists, although they may certainly make up the majority, in an era within which issues of race, class, and gender are becoming seemingly more oppositional—due to the re-emergence of right-wing and fundamentalist discourse.

I, therefore, seek to attempt to engage the notion of deadlocked conflict with regard to gender issues in the church and argue that what is needed is to harness—and perhaps simultaneously problematize—the notion of allyship in order to facilitate social change. This lens is also shaped by the understanding that the experiences of women in the West are not normative for all women and seeks to take a “multi-dimensional analysis of oppression,” which starts with women’s experiences as the departure point.¹ This chapter will begin by discussing the ways in which intersecting oppressions emerge as exemplified in praxis with particular reference to the South African context. Phiri and Nadar,² emphasize the point that “African women theologians must be bilingual ‘speaking the language of academy and that of their communities not just linguistically, but culturally and socially’” and it is hoped that this is exactly what I will do in this chapter by beginning with storytelling. This is also in line with decolonial research methods which promote storytelling as a methodology.³ In addition, the chapter will explore the definition of allyship and solidarity and the forms it has taken in recent years with concluding thoughts in reflection on the possibilities and complexities of the notions of partnership and solidarity.

Where God Stands—Starting from the Point of Oppression

Although I am not a Reformed theologian, my thinking has been deeply shaped—I must confess—by the Confession of Belhar, a statement which in a liberationist vein calls on the church to “stand where God stands, namely against injustice and with the wronged; that in following Christ the Church must witness against all the powerful and privileged who selfishly seek their own interests and thus control and harm others” (Belhar Confession, Article 4).⁴ Belhar was written as a prophetic call to the racist oppression of the Apartheid South African state; however, it is no less powerful when applied to the intersecting oppression of patriarchy. For African women theologians, African women’s theologies “take women’s experiences as its starting point, focusing on the oppressive areas of life caused by injustices such as patriarchy, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, capitalism, globalization and sexism.”⁵ To work, therefore, from lived experiences of oppression as the starting point in this chapter is to understand where God stands and what exactly the church must witness against.

In the week that I sat down to write the keynote address on which this chapter is based, I read the following post by a current PhD student of mine who is an woman of color and ordained clergyperson.⁶ It is important to observe that it is written in South Africa’s Women’s Month—a month in which we usually celebrate the ways in which our foremothers took on the might of the Apartheid state.

I am not one to put church issues on Facebook, but i cannot keep silent anymore. Today i am disgusted, i am hurt, i am disappointed, i am angry, i am broken. How dare we call ourselves church, how dare we say we embody the Belhar Confession when there are still congregations/church councils that DECIDES that they won’t call a female Proponent or female Reverend. How dare we call ourselves church when a female minister goes for an unsuccessful interview and the feedback is, it’s because she’s a female? How dare we celebrate women’s month when female elders and deacons agree with such decisions? During women’s month devotions i have seen and heard the beautiful, blessed women and i thought how rich our church is. But today, today i am so sad for my sisters. My sisters that’s struggling in congregations, my sisters who has been deeply hurt and is still hurting, my sisters that must still come into ministry and experience this in church. God must be crying. Today i am just hurt. (Claudette Williams Facebook post 3 September 2021)

In many ways, this post sums up the frustration and challenges faced by women in ministry. It is also striking that the Belhar Confession is used here as a counterpoint to the oppression of women in her post. While in the South African context there remain many churches that do not ordain women—largely of the independent Pentecostal or evangelical persuasion—more subtle is the exclusion of female clergy and women from the mainstays of power within denominational hierarchies and the implicit message that to be appointed to a position of power and influence, one must still behave “like a man.” This perspective is reinforced even by female leaders who have seemingly assimilated and internalized the systems wrought by patriarchy to such an extent that one female church leader remarked to me that she had no time for women clergy’s complaints about patriarchy, they simply needed to “get on with the job.” Le Roux & Bowers Du Toit⁷ note that “terms like ‘toxic femininity’, ‘formenism’, and ‘patriarchal bargaining’ have been used when discussing this phenomenon. These terms have often been used in relation to the actions of religious women when attempting to explain their compliance with patriarchal religious structures.”

Pillay⁸ notes that while in the Anglican church in South Africa there have been attempts to ensure that women are well represented since they were first granted ordination three decades ago, “very little has been done in regarding transforming the dominant male ethos in ecclesial spaces.” She further notes that in these ways, despite the presence of women in such ecclesial spaces, “patriarchal normativity is reinscribed through the reproduction of knowledge, which sustains skewed gender power relations amongst the clergy.”⁹ Thus, in institutional spaces, such as the church, a greater representation of women in the structures of such institutions will not necessarily dismantle patriarchy in all its guises if cognizance is not taken of the way in which the causes of oppression “are embedded in the unquestioned norms, habits and symbols in the assumptions underlying institutional rules.”¹⁰ In the majority of church spaces, at least in South African, LGBTQI¹¹ ordination remains an ongoing struggle within mainline denominations and a taboo in the rest of the churches.

It is interesting too that despite the ongoing challenges faced by women in broader society, as still evidenced by lower pay, soaring Gender Based Violence (GBV) rates and the clear correlations between gender oppression and inequality, there appears to be a re-emergence of a troubling (toxic?) masculinities discourse, which pits men against women. At a recent conference for Christian development/diaconia practitioners which I addressed, a fellow African woman noted that the men in her organization were complaining that the girl child was garnering more donor aid and attention than the boy child and that they believed this to be reverse oppression—despite the overwhelming evidence of oppressive and harmful practices with regard to the girl child on our continent and the feminization of poverty. Year after year, this underlying discourse of “reverse oppression” is sadly confirmed when I teach Gender and Development to my students. On much of our continent, “women’s lives are deeply affected by religious values, norms and laws, linked to indigenous customs, which legitimate male dominance and female subordination,”¹² so it is not surprising that these views are held. They are also not unique to our context. In fact, while such views may not be overtly expressed, implicit bias in the form of toxic masculinity remains in many of our church institutions in hiring practices (as also implied in the Facebook post), the sidelining of clergywomen in leadership, and the struggle for the ordination of openly LGBTQI+ clergy in many denominations, and also continues in hidden transcripts and practices often brought to light in fascinating ways and fueled by what I believe to be a re-emergence of rightist discourse within the church. A recently ordained Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) clergy women—a church which has openly ordained women for many years—became caught in a media frenzy when she was labeled a heretic by a retired minister in her own denomination for referring to God as “she.”¹³ The abuse and harassment she suffered as a result were shocking—as were the views expressed by DRC members in the pews on social media. While the DRC might be aligned in many ways with the ecumenical movement and has openly repented of its Apartheid complicity as a denomination, it still serves a white constituency, who in the wake of the demise of Apartheid appear to be increasingly clinging to the security of the racist and patriarchal Apartheid past—a past which included the belief that women should be subordinate to men.

Perhaps still more explicit has been the #Churchtoo movement’s exposure of sexual abuse in the church which has uncovered the depth of the sickening morass that the worldwide church finds itself complicit in.¹⁴ In South Africa, recent media reports highlighted the case of Rev June Dolly-Major, whose alleged rapist is a fellow clergyperson. A media report noted the following:

A year ago, the Rev June Major staged a hunger strike outside Archbishop Thabo Makgoba’s home in Bishopscourt, Cape Town. The reason for her hunger strike? She wanted the church to hold her alleged rapist accountable. After six days of sleeping in a tent outside Makgoba’s home, Major agreed to end the hunger strike and go home. Makgoba had agreed to Major’s demands, which included an internal investigation into her rape complaint and other alleged victims of the perpetrator.¹⁵

The response of the church with regard to this case is perhaps not surprising when one considers the empirical research of my colleague Lisa Roux regarding the complicit role of churches in sexual violence, which found that according to the participants,

“Churches do not take sexual violence seriously and do not apply the Bible contextually to the issue. Participants consistently spoke of the misogyny of churches and their theologies, their complicity not only in ignoring the reality and silencing those who speak out, but their own role in perpetration. According to the majority of participants, many church leaders were themselves guilty of perpetrating sexual violence. However, they remained unconfronted by the wider church leadership because these perpetrators were persons with authority.”¹⁶

For clergy women of color, such as the Rev Williams and Rev Dolly-Major, there is also the double or intersecting burden of race and gender, which implies that we are often on the lowest rung of the privilege hierarchy. This certainly does not imply a lack of agency on the part of the incumbent or any of the stories recounted as resistance enacted by the marginalized, but it does point to the weight of transformation.

Towards Allyship, Partnership and Solidarity

Radke et al.¹⁷ make the point that while it should not be implied that “the participation of advantaged group members is necessary for social change to be achieved … the role of advantaged group members in political movements for social change is warranted.” In this respect, the authors cite white Americans’ involvement in the civil rights movement and heterosexuals’ involvement in the legalization of same-sex marriage as allies in these struggles. During the #FeesMustFall university-wide protests for free decolonized education in South African universities, we also saw this enacted by white students placing their bodies on the front line of pickets as police were less likely to engage them violently than they were black students. Indeed, sociologists note that “solidarity is unlikely to emerge as long as gender inequality is framed as a women’s issue” and highlight the fact that “men as advocates of gender equality—particularly those in positions of public leadership and authority—signal to both men and women ‘that we are all this together’, making widespread engagement in collective action more likely.”¹⁸ In fact, we have viewed this emerge recently also in global movements such as #HeforShe. An empirical study undertaken by the Unit for Religion and Development Research on the role of African male faith leaders in combatting GBV indicates the efficacy and importance of targeting male faith leaders as allies in the struggle against GBV based on a mutuality which “recognizes that partnership means working together, sharing responsibility, calling forth each other’s gifts and working and caring for the life of community.”¹⁹

The role of male and cis gender allies in the struggle for gender equality then is important to reflect on in the context of deadlocked gender conflict. Joerg Rieger and Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger²⁰ argue openly for the notion of “deep solidarity” in the context of systemic exclusion. In their understanding:

Deep solidarity recognizes that the system works for the few rather than for the many and that nothing will change unless more of the many come together. Deep solidarity does not mean that we are all alike or that our differences do not matter anymore, just the opposite: deep solidarity allows us to deal with our differences more constructively and put them to work for a common cause.

Although the Regiers are largely calling for solidarity within the context of labor, the notion of deep solidarity is an important one in confronting structural oppressions such as patriarchy. Indeed in my own theological faculty, during a time of deep mourning in our country over the GBV pandemic, this Facebook post by two of our male students emerged where they declared solidarity in the following way:

In black solidarity with the women of the soil … we will never imagine how it feels to be a woman in this country but what we know if how they are feeling around is the same way we feel about prison… we are scared of prison, women are scared of present SA Nkosi sikelela izwe lethu. “(Lord be with our country)” (Ntsika Facebook post September 2019)

The notion of solidarity and allyship is not, however, without contestation, as will be further explored.

Theology as Lock or Key to Solidarity?

Such solidarity in the context of patriarchy cannot take place, however, where theology acts as a “lock” to shutting off equality of partnership and solidarity between the sexes. African womanist theologian, Isabel Phiri, in writing in the context of mission and partnership, makes the important point, for example, that the manner in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been perpetuated in certain circles as an all-male trinity has long been critiqued by feminist theologians as lending tacit support to the subordination of women to men and the “sense that the human male is normative for all experience.”²¹ This view has in fact found open support in fundamentalist circles, both in the United States of America and also in a particular evangelical mega church movement in my own context, which has led to a deadlock with regard to the appointment of female clergy. Of course, other womanist theologians argue positively for the notion of the social trinity²² and this is certainly not the only problematic theological perspective amongst a range in the global church, which includes the extreme view that women do not reflect the image of God and the ways in which the so-called “6 shooter texts” have been applied to LGBTQI+ issues. The role of theological reflection is, therefore, key in beginning to unlock this conflict as that is after all where it begins; however, even the most theologically liberal amongst us could hold implicit/hidden patriarchal transcripts shaped over many years and not openly declared. African womanist theologian’s argument for an action-reflection model is perhaps helpful, as it consists of “critically reflecting on traditions and culture then taking action by deconstructing and reconstructing and finding new ways of doing theology” invites communal ways of doing theology as a departure point, rather than normative perspectives as a departure point.²³ Such hermeneutical praxis may assist even those allies among us who consider themselves and their institutions beyond reproach on the issue of gender to deconstruct the ways in which hidden transcripts and harmful institutional practices and habits could be reflexively engaged through such a model for the purposes of greater solidarity.

Subjecting the church to such reflections requires a vulnerable ecclesiology:

Vulnerability is not merely based on the vulnerable environment in which the church finds itself; rather, vulnerability is part of the essence of the church, since the church lives in solidarity with the vulnerable human beings and within vulnerable eco-systems. The emphasis on vulnerability invites Christians and the church to witness with greater gospel integrity to the liberating logic of the reign of God.²⁴

Such a perspective seeks to turn the domination of racism, classism, and sexism on its head—in the way of God’s reign—and calls for solidarity through vulnerability. In this understanding, the Body of Christ is called to be bodily present in the light of gender injustice—to put “skin in the game” so to speak.²⁵ This vulnerable ecclesiology does not allow for the liberal to hide but poses the question whether we are prepared to “risk becoming vulnerable as a result of our solidarity with others in their precarity?”²⁶ Phiri²⁷ makes the point that that the root of true partnership is “participation in suffering and struggle is at the heart of God’s mission and God’s will for the world. It is central for our understanding of the incarnation, the most glorious example of participation in suffering and struggle.” Such solidarity implies risk—that those who become allies and join the struggle of gendered others on the margins will themselves experience suffering with those who are marginalized and excluded. I think young adults often better understand how solidarity is embodied. I think of the way in which one young female theological student stood openly for LGBTQI+ rights knowing that her church was not fully affirming and that she would soon face ordination in that same church. I also think of the recent dismissal of a young South African pastor in a conservative evangelical megachurch due to his stance of open support for female ordination.

One of the key aspects of the notion of deep solidarity, therefore, is that solidarity is certainly not charity, nor is it even advocacy. Advocacy certainly seeks to challenge the powers that be on behalf of others, nevertheless, the Riegers’ note that it is often one sided with the privileged/advantaged group often assuming the less privileged group have no power (thereby stifling their agency) and “acting as if they had the ability to fix the problems themselves” (the savior mentality).²⁸ This is in line with a “donor to receiver model” often rooted in a kind of colonial and patriarchal mindset.²⁹ The latter caution applies to all who seek to be allies as Decolonial feminists also make the point here that even white feminist allies should be weary of speaking on behalf of women from the Global South whose struggles are additionally rooted in the intersecting oppressions of racism, cultural oppression, and colonialism. From the Circle of Concerned African Women theologians we learn that power should be shared by all³⁰ and it requires that theology is always done in community and within an understanding of reciprocity and solidarity.

Rieger and Henkel-Rieger argue that in the Exodus stories God herself “is not working from the outside, employing models of charity and advocacy; rather God is part of the struggle.”³¹ In line with my reference to the Confession of Belhar, it is to stand where God stands—to stand in fact where the stories of oppression I have told are and where the stories of marginalization and oppression lie in each your own contexts. It is also the case that women or LGBTQI+s are often accommodated or offered places at the institutional table as guests to appease politically correct notions of Christian hospitality but are not viewed as full members and still treated as guests. Russell³² makes the important point that looking at hospitality in terms of structural injustice and the need for “partnership across barriers of difference,” calls for a decolonizing of the mind. This implies that we think from the margins rather than the center and “reframe hospitality as a form of partnership with the one we call other, rather than as a form of charity or entertainment.” True partnership is costly and kenotic, not only performative. We would do well to remember the ecumenical movement’s call for Thursdays in Black “towards a world without violence against women and girls.”

I find it interesting that the Riegers noted that the dominant powers are also called to conversion and repentance—in a way that doesn’t push them aside but calls them to be part of a new way.³³ Perhaps a helpful start to the latter is held by Selina Palm, who argues that ecclesiologies of vulnerability must indeed go beyond merely embracing solidarity, but also requires lament and a public confessional witness to the silence and complicity of churches. This is because the church “in its institutions and ideas” is “deeply entangled in forms of hierarchical violence that are sinful.” There must be a metanoia that recognizes our guilt and repents and laments our complicity as church as the starting point so that we can move together as “humans in imaging divinity together in life enhancing mutual relationship.”³⁴ I would further argue that this metanoia is a continuing “turning away”—not a once-off event—from the ways in which patriarchy is inscribed not only on our hearts but in our institutional practices and habits.

Concluding Thoughts: Making the Circle Bigger

In Cape Town we have a rap song that says “make the circle bigger.” When it comes to allyship and solidarity, for men and cisgender allies, the elephant in the room is always whether they will be welcomed in their quest to stand alongside those marginalized by patriarchy. I recently wrote that those of us that are on the margins in terms of race, class, gender only create our own tables or circles because of the ways in which we have been excluded from spaces and the hurtful things that occurred in those spaces. Our spaces, however, are not linear—there is not a door or a lock to be had in such spaces if you begin by listening to our stories, employ a vulnerable ecclesiology that understands the notion of power and patriarchy and is open to conversion, and seek self-reflexivity as persons situated within systems. Men do not need to be pitted against women, cis gender against LGTBQI. The call to solidarity is a struggle for justice for all, not just for one group. Indeed as African Women Theologians argue, our struggle is the fight for the liberation of “all men, women, children and societies.”³⁵ It is for the flourishing of all. I end with the following untitled poem, which was written by Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the founding mother of the Circle of Concerned Women African Theologians:Verse

Verse A Circle expands forever It covers all who wish to hold hands And its size depends on each other It is a vision of solidarity It turns outwards to interact with the outside And inward for self-critique A circle expands forever It is a vision of accountability It grows as the other is moved to grow A circle must have a center But a single dot does not make a Circle One tree does not make a forest A circle, a vision of cooperation, mutuality and care.Footnote

Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “The story of a circle,” The Ecumenical Review 53 no. 1 (2001):1.