The new faithfuls: the women breathing new life into ancient faiths
As mainstream religion scrambles to overcome widespread disenchantment, Samantha Trenoweth meets the women breathing new life into ancient faiths.
Bishop Genieve Blackwell is a little breathless. She has just raced in the door, back from an ecumenical conference on domestic violence. Her cheeks are pink, her sandy hair slightly tousled. There’s much to do and never enough time. “I see myself as part of the new Creation,” says the bright-eyed, 55-year-old Anglican Assistant Bishop of Melbourne. It’s her view that Christianity is a lively thing, not a static edifice, and that Creation happens all the time. “I am a woman and a Bishop in the Church of God, so I’m a sign of where the Church is heading. I think of verses like ‘In Christ there is no east or west, male or female’. I’m living out the trajectory of scripture – women and men working together.”
Bishop Blackwell has her eyes on the future, but first her Church must overcome its past. The past decade has not exactly been a boon for mainstream religion.
There has been the long, excruciating unfolding of the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses To Child Sexual
Abuse. There have been horrific acts perpetrated by violent extremists on the fringes of most faiths. The widening gulf between progressives and conservatives has led to internal power struggles, such as the recent backlash within the Vatican against the popular Pope Francis. Meanwhile, theologians and the faithful have struggled to orient their beliefs around a public moral compass that has swung radically on issues of gender, sexuality, conception and the right to live and die.
In the midst of all this, it came as no surprise that, in the 2016 Census, for the first time more Australians ticked the “no religion” box than ticked any single Christian church or other faith. However, before Richard Dawkins and his atheist brethren dust off their tap shoes to dance on the corpse of belief, it might be worth checking for vital signs because there are some. There are movements afoot that could yet reinvigorate the big three faiths and many of them are being hatched by women.
Bishop Blackwell grew up in Wagga Wagga in country NSW and went into the family business. Her father, who died when she was young, was a Methodist and a minister. She joined the Anglicans while she was at university and was the first female Bishop in NSW. She believes that initiatives such as the Anglicans Preventing Violence Against Women project, of which she is a part, “flow on from having more women in leadership positions in the Church”.
Reem Sweid would like to see a little of that flow-on effect in Islam. Reem is a 34-year-old community leader whose family hails from Syria, where she spent every summer holiday as a kid, but she grew up a citizen of the world. She lived in the UK, the US, Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates