By Stephen Brown
Harare, 7 December (ENI)--For some churches belonging to the World Council of Churches, the mere presence of Dr Chung Hyan Kyung at the WCC's assembly, now in progress in Harare, is offensive.

Dr Chung, a Korean feminist theologian now aged 42 and teaching in the United States, is a visitor at the assembly. She participated in the Decade Festival held immediately before the assembly which was organised to mark the conclusion of the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women, where she led a healing service drawing on indigenous Korean spiritual traditions during a hearing about violence against women.

Dr Chung first came to international prominence during the WCC's last assembly, in Canberra in 1991, when her keynote speech - evoking, in traditional Korean style, the spirits of people martyred and murdered, and linking them to the Holy Spirit - was welcomed by some delegates in Canberra, but outraged others - particularly Orthodox officials - who accused her of paganism and syncretism.

Since then, her Canberra presentation has remained a flashpoint for those in the WCC who believe that the organisation is being monopolised by liberal Christians.

"I don't have any regrets, I don't regret anything," Dr Chung said. "Of course, I was young and innocent, it was my first major international speech in my entire life. But I learned much about the vision of the church, how we can use the issues to cover our political interest, how many theological misunderstandings we have.

"The Orthodox Church talks about my presentation as syncretism, but when I look at them and the German theologians who criticised me, they are as syncretistic as I am, only our ingredients are different," she said. "I made it very clear, I said: 'Yes, I am a syncretist, I know where I am coming from'. I think that any Christianity which is meaningful, which is incarnated in a specific people's history, is sure to be syncretistic ... Christianity has to be relevant, otherwise it becomes a museum piece. Who wants to see a museum piece? If we want to see something alive today, it should be incarnated in a real context."

In an interview with ENI in Harare during the assembly, Dr Chung showed that she has not moderated her views because of the harsh criticism directed at her in 1991 and since then. She said that fundamental cultural change was needed in the church if it was to confront human history's "5000 years of patriarchy".

Dr Chung, who is now professor of ecumenics at one of the most famous religious teaching institutions in the United States - Union Theological Seminary, New York - said that the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women - launched by the WCC in 1988 - had given women a "public platform" to raise issues such as violence against women, economic justice and women's participation in the world.

Chung was a keynote speaker in 1993 at the "Re-Imagining" conference organised in the United States as part of the Ecumenical Decade.

Although the Ecumenical Decade had been intended to promote solidarity by churches with women, "women are having solidarity with the church, but the church is not having solidarity with women", Dr Chung said, adding that this was not surprising since "there have been 5000 years of patriarchy, we cannot just dismantle it in 10 years".

"When I look at human history, freedom will never be given freely. It's the same with women's rights," said Dr Chung, stressing that leaving the church because of its patriarchy was "no option" for women. "If you go out of the church, do you think that society is not patriarchal? There's no way out. The church is also our home, so we have every right to transform our home.

"I try to transform the church, because we don't want the church to go towards right-wing patriarchal fundamentalism, we want to stay and transform the church, because the church has enormous power to transform people," she told ENI.

During her healing service in the Decade Festival, Dr Chung referred to Oscar Wilde, the late 19th-century Irish dramatist, who was imprsioned in England because of his homosexuality, adding: "I think of my brothers and sisters who cannot be here because they are homosexual."

Asked by ENI whether there was not a contradiction between herself as a Third World theologian and the fact that many church leaders from the Third World described homosexuality as a Western practice foreign to the culture of developing countries, Dr Chung responded: "It's not true! In many Third World countries there are many gays and lesbians, in every country I visit.

"When I was in India, many church people said: 'We don't have homosexuality,' and the next day I saw in a major Delhi newspaper that hundreds of homosexuals were making a demonstration in Delhi," Dr Chung said, adding that she had seen many gays and lesbians at the Harare assembly "who could not talk about it because of the policy of the Zimbabwean government".

"I don't think that this issue of homosexuality is a Western issue. No. I saw enough homosexuality in Costa Rica, Brazil, Korea, Manila, Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, in Africa, Zimbabwe," she said. "Many people who have power think that only things that they know is the truth, if they don't want to see it, they say it doesn't exist. I don't buy it."

Asked about the future of the ecumenical movement, Dr Chung said that the crisis facing ecumenism in general and the WCC in particular was symptomatic of "postmodern culture" and the fact that people wanted to have "many centres" rather than "one monolithic, centralising world organisation".

On the one hand, Dr Chung said, this could be a positive development. "It means we don't want to follow one tiger or elephant, or lion, any more, but rather to be in our specific cultural heritage and context".

But the scattering of the ecumenical movement could mean it would lose its political power, she said.

"It's like growing pains. We cannot pretend we will be one family in Christ. No, it seems like a big dysfunctional family. In order to overcome the dysfunction, everything needs to become open as when women talk about their experiences of violence.

"As a church we really have to listen and experience our differences enough so we can really appreciate them. Without hearing these experiences enough, we make a very superficial bridge, which can fall down at any time," she suggested, adding that a process was needed to allow the emergences of differences, "even of divisions, until we have another need to come together".

Of the future of the World Council of Churches, she said: "Maybe the WCC will remain [in 10 years], but not in the present form, on a small scale, more of a connecting switchboard rather than giving an agenda to the world, a clearing house where people get together."

According to Dr Chung, the Harare gathering, which coincides with the WCC's 50th anniversary jubilee, is a "transitional assembly" -"Jubilee means for me that one life cycle is over. You have a new opportunity. It is as if one paradigm is over and another one is emerging." [1206 words]

Photographs of the assembly are available from Photo Oikoumene

Related sites:

WCC Assembly Web Site

Photo Oikoumene

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