2009-2019: Decade Of Hearing and Singing New Songs To God

Some highlights of the report include:

A call for transformation of the church, focusing on the intersections of gender, race and class.

Direct the General Assembly Mission Council, in consultation with Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns and Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns, to expand on the basic antiracism training to include modules on the intersectionality of race, gender and class and provide focused training on internalized oppression and privilege.

Seek inclusivity with equity: moving beyond tokenism in the participation of women of color of all ages to valuing and embracing the gifts they bring to the life of the whole church.

Adopting an understanding of shared power as a fundamental element of community.

August 2006

Task Force Approved to Respond to Women of Color Consultation Report

Participants celebrate at the 2004 Women of Color Consultation. Photo by Marnie DelCarmen.

By Eun-hyey Park

This year's General Assembly approved the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns (ACREC) and the Advocacy Committee for Women's Concerns (ACWC)'s joint resolution affirming the importance of the Report and Recommendations from the Women of Color Consultation with a hand vote.

The resolution called for the creation of a task force that would take the next two years to respond to the report's recommendations. As the recommendations were addressed to specific Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) entities and program offices, the resolution also called for the task force to design a way to monitor their responses.

The Committee on Mission Coordination and Budgets, to which the resolution was assigned, heard from three people who attended the Consultation. During the open hearing, the attendees spoke of the value of the Consultation, which took place in Atlanta, Georgia in the fall of 2004. A Korean American seminarian spoke of "finding her voice" at the Consultation. Others testified that the Consultation created a space in which they could openly share their experiences of discrimination as women and as racial ethnic minorities within the church and society. They also highlighted the need for space within the institutional structure of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. for women of color, one of the central themes of the report.

Representatives from ACREC and ACWC also affirmed the need for the Consultation to occur regularly, given the lack of institutional support for women of color in the PC(USA). With regard to the task force, they argued that the recommendations in the Consultation's report called for much weightier consideration and response than could be accomplished by their two committees, or in less than two years. In their resolution, they also called for the national staff, and the wider church to "read, study and respond to" the report and its recommendations.

Several of the committee's commissioners advocated strongly in favor of the resolution, citing the barriers to ministry and life in the church that women of color in their presbyteries have experienced. One of the commissioners, a faculty member of a PC(USA) seminary, spoke passionately of the resolution's importance. Her experience with the work of Biblical interpreters who were women of color from within and outside of the United States, as well as with the women of color seminarians in her classrooms, have convinced her of how little room exists for their voices to be heard.

The only serious objection to the resolution in committee was its financial implications. However, as the PC(USA) news service reported, "Despite the cost ... the committee felt the consultation's work was well done" (June 21, 2006).

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