Purpose Statement

             Empower International Ministries works alongside existing ministries in historically non-Christian and developing countries to promote biblical teachings on the equal worth and potential for unity among all human beings, regardless of gender, ethnicity, social, or family status.  We seek to emulate the early Christian church in raising the respect, freedoms, and rights accorded women; in freeing men from norms of worldly masculinity that lead to violence and despair; in encouraging equal-regard marriage and family happiness; and in helping to create and develop community values that eliminate sexual, ethnic, and other social antagonisms.     

Strategy

             Empower International Ministries works by establishing personal relationships with national pioneering Christians and church leaders who are willing to take risks for the sake of the gospel. Conferences and training events are organized jointly with them to plant a renewed vision of equal regard relationships within the body of Christ in the respective countries. The local leaders will be the ones to incorporate this vision into their ministries, and will be in charge of the sustained training and resource development in culturally relevant ways.

            An important component in these relationships is EIM’s openness to what we and the developed world can learn from our fellow Christians in the developing countries, seeking to facilitate cross border relationships between our respective churches.

Need for this New Ministry

Overview 

        Much of the developing and historically non-Christian world exists in conditions of oppression and despair.  These situations are aggravated by restrictions and burdens imposed on men and women because of their gender, or by attributes such as age, ethnicity, marital status and social class.  At the same time, the forces that have led to the deterioration of marriage, family and sexual morality in wealthy, developed countries are also being felt in developing countries and historically non-Christian countries.   EIM offers direction in the midst of massive change, encouraging Christians globally to reject both historic and contemporary secular pattern and choose instead the Christian path of self-giving love, unity and mutual respect.   

Problems with relationships, gender oppression, and child rearing

             Women and girls in developing countries suffer from a variety of abusive practices, including as female infanticide; polygamy; forced marriage of prepubescent girls or widows, the shunning and oppression of widows; isolation and veiling; genital mutilation; domestic violence; sexual assault; lack of access to education; and male usurping of household resources for personal consumption in alcohol, tobacco, and womanizing.  They might be sold or kidnapped into marriage, expected to bear large numbers of children, forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive or pay for school fees, or suffer abandonment when their husbands lose interest in them sexually – all while receiving a cultural message that as females they are not worthy of better treatment.

            Men also suffer from gender-typed expectations placed on them.  Their abusive or self-serving behaviors towards women and children (alcoholism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, sexual infidelities) are often expressions of their own frustrations in dealing with high rates of poverty, joblessness, violent victimization, and pressures to conform to socially-prescribed norms of masculinity.

            Economic pressures in developing economies lead adults to  value children as a source of labor or social status.  Hence, parents routinely bear more than they can care for.  Children suffer from lack of food, safe water, health services, and education, and may be neglected, sexually-abused, abandoned, or orphaned.  Ethnic strife, distrust, and violence is commonplace, as families/lineage groups/tribes scramble for their own survival in the face of limited resources.   

Relationships at the Crossroad

            Although wealthy countries have abandoned most of the maladaptive gender and sexual norms typical of pre-industrial and non-Christian countries, their family practices are undergoing a crisis of their own.  The developed world is struggling with increasing divorce rates, decreasing rates of marriage, high rates of non-marital births, and growing sexual promiscuity, and decreased child welfare.  Even with crippled economy and overwhelming poverty, developing countries still have a foot in both worlds, and are increasingly impacted by the technological and social changes ongoing in the developed (post-) Christian world. Young, educated citizens of the developing world especially are grappling with this transition and its attendant questions of what kind of marriages to form, how many children to bear, how to treat those children, what will the “new man” be like, and what part women will play. 

            Christianity is growing rapidly in many of these countries, with projections that by 2025, the majority of the world’s Christians will live in the southern hemisphere (Africa and South America). [Footnote 1]  Although government restrictions make accurate measures of the growth of Christianity in China difficult to obtain, there is evidence that it is growing rapidly there as well.  Christianity has already gained a strong presence in South Korea.   Christianity in India is also on a slow but steady rise.

            For the most part, neither Christianity nor secular feminism has challenged the old patriarchal systems in these countries, although for different reasons.  Secular feminists have been reluctant to challenge many of these restrictive practices such as “head scarves, face veils, the chador, arranged marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies or female genital mutilation” for fear of appearing “‘imperialist’ or ‘crusade-ist.’” [Footnote 2] Conservative Christian teachings on male dominance and female submission, blindly imposed on unindustrialized economics, maintain the relative powerlessness of women and cultural belief in their inferiority.  In many countries for example, the biblical designation of woman as a “help suitable” for the man is broadly understood to cast her role as little more than a housemaid, subordinate sex partner, and child bearer.

Christianity as a Solution

          The combination of rapid socio-economic change and growth of Christianity puts these countries at a crossroad.  This is a critical time to reach out to them with biblically accurate teaching on gender and family.  Such teachings can have powerful impact on the lives of men, women, and children.  Christian teachings transformed the pagan patriarchal family of the Roman culture in which Christianity first arose.  It led to the outlawing of infanticide, polygamy, child marriage, forced marriage, and prostitution.  Christianity discouraged divorce; allowed widows to remain single; insisted that chastity was for both sexes; and eventually eliminated slavery, which was an integral part of the Roman family and economy. [Footnote 3]  

Most recently, studies of the impact of Protestant Christianity in Latin America show that it frees men from the burden of acquiring and maintaining worldly status that is the male gender burden.  Elimination of “machismo” has significant benefits for both the men and their families. [Footnote 4]  Maintaining social status in such cultures often requires heavy drinking with neighborhood and business associates, [Footnote 5] and legitimizes extra-marital sexual liaisons – to the point that it is not uncommon for a man to maintain two families at the same time, or to abandon his legal family in favor of a paramour when he grows bored with his wife sexually.[Footnote 6]  As a result, men in such cultures typically spend most of their income on alcohol, tobacco, gambling, status clothing, visiting prostitutes, or supporting a second family. Religious encouragement to give up such behaviors result in a decline in drunkenness, extra-marital liaisons, domestic violence; in better nutrition for the family (as men spend less money on alcohol and contribute to the household food budget) and in general a greater flow of resources to the family itself as the husband take on his wife’s concern for the well-being of their children. [Footnote 7]   Anthropologist Elizabeth Brusco writes, “The machismo role and the male role defined by evangelicalism are almost diametrical opposites.  Aggression, violence, pride, self-indulgence, and an individualistic orientation in the public sphere are replaced by peace seeking, humility, self-restraint, and a collective orientation and identity with the church and the home.” [Footnote 8]  In fact, in such cultures Brusco sees these changes in male behavior as having greater impact in advancing the feminine agenda than more aggressive programs promoting women’s rights. [Footnote 9]

Although “machismo” is a Spanish word generally applied in Latin cultures, the general pattern it describes – high rates of male drunkenness, incidents of domestic violence, paternal disengagement from childrearing, withholding money from family for personal consumption, and a strong sexual “double-standard” in which wives are unable to control their husbands’ sexual behavior – is typical male behavior in patriarchal cultures from the ancient Greeks to contemporary Africa, Russia, and Asia.

 Other studies of conservative Christian groups in Latin America suggest that despite their teachings on wifely submission, they affirm that women are men’s moral equals.  Such teachings give women the confidence “quietly but firmly to challenge her husband’s conduct.” [Footnote 10] Evangelical teachings promote belief in women’s basic competence and worth, “... fostering a more egalitarian model of household politics.” [Footnote 11] Miles makes a similar observation that conservative Christian attitudes towards family hierarchy in the U.S. has become progressively more egalitarian, with 87% of practicing evangelicals agreeing that “marriage is a partnership of equals.” [Footnote 12]  EIM’s teachings on mutual submission in marriage (Eph.5:21) encourages husband and wives alike to opt out of the struggle for power over each other and learn to conduct their family life in self-sacrificing Christian love.

Footnotes:

[1] Philip Jenkins, The Next Chrisindom:  The Coming of Global Christianity, 2002.

[2] Suzanne Fields, quoting Phyllis Chesler, “Failing women of the Third World:  How the ‘soft’ feminists betray their highest ideals,” Washington Times, March 13, 2006, p A19.

[3] Carrie A. Miles, The Redemption of Love:  Rescuing Marriage and Sexuality from the Economics of a Fallen World.  Grand Rapids, MI:  Brazos Press, 2006, 110-111.

[4] Elizabeth E. Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo:  Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin, TX:  University of Texas Press, 1995, 120.

[5] Brusco, 128.

[6] Separate articles I read some years ago recounted how Chinese and Brazilian women spent a considerable portion of their incomes on sexy lingerie, in the hopes of keeping their husbands interested in them. 

[7] Brusco, 5, 6.

[8] Brusco, 137.

[9] Brusco, 138, 140.

[10] John Burdick, Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Arena.  Berkeley University of California Press.  1993: 112.

[11] Myrna Van den Eykel, “A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Activism of New Religious Groups in Columbia.”  Ph.D. Dissertation, George Washington University, 1986/. 327-331.  Cited in Timonthy J. Steigenga and David A. Smilde, “Wrapped in the Holly Shawl:  The Strange Case of Conservative Christians and Gender Equality in Latin America,” Latin American Religion in Motion.  Christian Smith and Joshua Prokopy, (eds.), NY:  Routledge 1999, 173-186.