CRUEL CHRISTIANS!
Bishop blasts those who use Bible to justify abuse
It is not just the minister beating his wife, but we also see Christian couples fighting, and that’s violence, and we see the women not speaking out because they don’t want to destroy their nice image of their Christian husbands.
ACKNOWLEDGING THAT the Bible has been used by some Christians in instances to justify abuse in the church, deputy general secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Professor Isabel Apawo Phiri, has called upon the clergy to also consider violence against women as a sin and denounce it.
“I know there are some who read the Bible and they think the Bible is telling them to be violent to their partners, and that kind of reading of the Bible we are saying no to, because it is a wrong way of reading the Bible,” said Phiri.
“We want to read the Bible a new way; that it promotes life, because Jesus Christ came to give us life and life in fullness. Life in fullness does not include destroying another life. It means we learn to celebrate each other,” added Phiri, who is an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church.
The professor, who is based in Switzerland, was among several women from Jamaica and around the world who attended the WCC 20th anniversary celebrations of the Ecumenical Decade in Solidarity with Women at the Knutsford Court Hotel from last Tuesday to Friday.
The women were militant on Thursday as they marched to Emancipation Park to protest acts of violence against women and children. They also visited the Women’s Resource and Outreach Centre and Eve for Life, which serves adolescent mothers living with HIV and girls who have been sexually abused.
“Violence must come to an end,” declared Phiri during an interview with The Sunday Gleaner.
“We know that violence against women comes in different forms, we are also looking at women’s participation in the church, through ordination, or through any other ministries. We are looking at economic structures that affect women and any form of discrimination on the basis of gender,” she stated.
TRY TO SILENCE VICTIMS
Phiri said her organisation has hosted workshops and has had consultations with members of the clergy to discuss this issue, but instead of denouncing abuse, she finds that some church leaders are the perpetrators. In some cases, they also try to silence the victim.
“We have cases of rape in the church. In this meeting we heard a story from India, of a bishop who raped a nun 13 times. The church tried to hush it down and even offered this woman gifts as a bribe to stop her, but she refused and they went to court,” shared Phiri.
Apart from rape and sexual harassment, she finds that women in the church are sometimes subjected to spousal abuse.
“It is not just the minister beating his wife, but we also see Christian couples fighting, and that’s violence, and we see the women not speaking out because they don’t want to destroy their nice image of their Christian husbands. So they are Christians outside, but not Christians in the home,” she said.
“We have heard from the children who say if we want to stop violence in the schools, we have to start by stopping violence in the home, because the children see what’s happening in the home between the mother and the father and they copy it, and they do the same things to their friends at school,” added Phiri.
She said the WCC will continue to hold consultations and workshops aimed at getting people to understand what the scriptures say about what it means to be a man or a woman.