WCC NEWS: Creative minds are working on “Women Inspiring Justice” exhibition

Plans for an exhibition with the working title “Women Inspiring Justice: Ecumenical Responses to the 12 Critical Areas of the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action” are underway, sparking creative ideas and input into how we lift up women within the World Council of Churches (WCC) who have been trailblazers in many ways. Dr Agnes Abuom, former WCC Central Committee moderator, who passed away in May 2023 is an example of "women inspiring justice", Photo Albert Hillert/WCC 19 September 2024 In 2025, the global community will mark the 30th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women and adoption of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, which outlined 12 critical areas of concern, including poverty, health, violence against women, power and decision making, to realize all human rights and fundamental freedoms for women. Rev. Nicole Ashwood, WCC programme executive for Just Community of Women and Men, and her team got the idea of connecting an exhibit to the 12 areas. Then they started collecting names of women in the WCC, both living and passed, from all regions. “We are at 40 names and counting!” said Ashwood. “While there have been UN mechanisms and other platforms, no one has thought to lift up the work of myriads of religious women who have been actively engaged in this work.” The Beijing platform coincided with the WCC Decade of Churches in Solidarity With Women, held from 1988-98—a timespan that included the original launch of the Thursdays in Black campaign for a world free from rape and violence. “Without realizing it, we have had church women engaged in just about every one of the 12 critical areas,” said Ashwood. “There are women across the WCC’s 352 member churches within the eight WCC regions who have, one way or another, been involved in addressing engagement, agendas, and voices within these processes.” The list of women who will be featured in the exhibit is by no means exhaustive, Ashwood acknowledged. “But what we are hoping to do is foster a vision, and have member churches be a part of this and recognize the women in their contexts who have been instruments of change over the years,” she said. “We want this exhibition to inspire member churches to ask: Who has been part of the conversation? Who has been a mover and shaker for us? Who are the people in our neighborhoods who are peacemakers?” The exhibition itself will  take a hybrid form, first being released online, then in a physical form that is transported to WCC meetings and other ecumenical gatherings—even perhaps to the WCC central committee meeting in Beijing in 2025. “There may also be a publication and materials just for children as a way of bringing this into even more hands,” said Ashwood. The first exhibition panels will be released online in November, and the series will continue through 2025. Ashwood hopes it will touch many people on global, regional, and local levels. “I think this project is a gift that will keep on giving,” she said.     See more

The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 352 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 580 million Christians in over 120 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay from the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa.  Media contact: +41 79 507 6363; www.oikoumene.org/press Our visiting address is: World Council of Churches 150 route de Ferney Geneve 2 1211 Switzerland