As the first session in a series of six, the Council for World Mission (CWM) Pacific Member’s Mission Forum (MMF) was held from 19 to 22 January in Apia, Samoa on the campus of the Malua Theological College.
Themed “Together in Transformation,” the MMF fosters dialogue and strengthens collaboration and synergy among the region’s member churches as the delegates explored and shared strategies and approaches to address the region’s key social, economic, and cultural challenges.
The Pacific MMF delegates representing the region’s ten member churches and two observing churches were warmly received on 18 January by the students of Malua College and representatives from the Congregational Christian Church of Samoa (CCCS), the hosting bodies of the event.
Decolonised education
In a keynote address, Rev. Dr Seforosa Carroll, from the United Theological College of Charles Sturt University in Australia, challenged the gathered delegates to “transform power” through decolonising education.
Carroll’s presentation touched on the three main strands of Pasifika Indigenous traditions that illustrate the importance that the community has placed on the value of wisdom: storytelling (Hanuj) that fosters conversation, mat weaving (Sa’a) that brings communities together and breaks down walls, and “way-finding navigation” that displays the interconnectedness of the earth, sea, and sky.
By decolonising the dominant way of education that is steeped in the perspective of the colonising powers, a decolonised education will enable and empower students to embrace their theological voices and identities, and retake their agency for transformation.
This transformation, posited Carroll, was integral to the regions as a transformative theology and its subsequent form of theologising has the power to change what is unjust and systemic in societies since it embodies a different worldview than what has become dominant.
“They (the students) need to learn the skill of navigating and negotiating the vast ocean of (theological) knowledge,” said Carroll, drawing parallels to the history of the Pacific peoples that was synonymous with seafaring. Carroll also called for intersectionality to be used as a pedagogy method as it “offers a theological telescope to see not one world, but the constellation of worlds within human beings created by crisscrossing relationships.”
Standing together
Dr Sudipta Singh, CWM Deputy General Secretary-Programmes, shared with the delegates CWM’s contemporary approaches to transforming mission via The Onesimus Project (TOP). He also referenced the plethora of regional challenges that plague the Pacific such as the ongoing climate change impacts, economic injustice, the attempted repair of the oceans, child labour, sexual exploitation, and gender-based violence.
He exhorted the Pacific churches to work together in the face of the sheer intersectionality (connectedness) of these various issues.
“Mission in the Pacific must address the woven-ness of these issues and start to unpick the mat as an act of liberation,” he urged strongly.
Gender justice
Delving deeper into the call made by Singh was renowned Pacific academic, Dr Mercy Ah Siu-Maliko, a lecturer in theology at the Piula Theological College in Samoa. Ah Siu-Maliko gave a prayerful reflection on the damning issues of gender justice and gender-based violence – twin challenges that have plagued the Pacific society.
Making the audience shift in their seats with two heart-wrenching accounts of Pacific women who have had their lives thrown into disarray by prevailing gender-based injustices and inequalities, Ah Siu-Maliko highlighted the fact that patriarchal mindsets and social relations in the private sphere are often not just contained there, but go on to permeate most economic, social, and political institutions.
Even though indignant feelings may arise from stories of the dehumanising of women in gender-biased, patriarchal societies, Ah Siu-Maliko called for a biblically grounded approach in addressing these societal injustices.
Quoting from Jeremiah 29:7 that contains God’s command to the Jewish people who were in exile in Babylon to seek the welfare of the city, Ah Siu-Maliko urged likewise for the faith community to engage the wider population in a theologically informed discourse about these issues, in forms of advocacy that can be evaluated and judged by society at large, and thus possibly prompt change.
“Go light your candle as our collective transformative response to gender injustice and gender-based violence as we go out to serve in wherever God has called us to serve in humility and love,” exhorted Ah Siu-Maliko.