Brenton Stacey
Public relations officer
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
Presenters at the fifth Women and the Word Conference examined the negative then positive as they explored the relationship between chaos and trust in God.
Delegates at the fifth annual Women and the Word Conference signed a banner pledging their support of a worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church campaign to raise awareness and advocate for the end of violence against women. Credit: Tamera Gosling
Clinical psychologist Deanna Pitchford examined the subject of power and the problems it creates within social structures, specifically within male and female relationships. “The discrimination against the female image of God is so widespread to be ubiquitous and is the backdrop against which the issue of the power differential between male and female must be seen,” she said. Deanna noted in her conclusion how “the chaotic potential power is released when power is abused.” She then referred to another option. The Psalms describes God as power and God as love, she said. This is a power that creates.
Harwood Lockton, international program director for the Adventist Development and Relief Agency Australia, described geography and gender as “global lotteries” because they determine “how well we live or indeed whether we live.” “If men face a chaotic world, most women live in a chaotic world,” he said. Harwood gave examples of the chaos of illiteracy, of food insecurity and of poverty before noting the “pervasiveness” of the phrase “widows, orphans and aliens” in the Bible. He referred to texts in the Bible illustrating God’s concern for these groups, His denunciation of those who did not care for or took advantage of these groups, and His injunctions to care and seek justice for these groups. His last word? “Pray none of us will withhold justice from an alien, an orphan or a widow.”
Dr Barry Oliver, the president of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific, opened the conference. Credit: Tamera Gosling
Dr Drene Somasundram, chaplain on Avondale’s Sydney campus, examined the biblical story of Tamar, a woman “betrayed, widowed, abandoned, unloved and left to one side” but who with “daring initiative . . . affects a new order and moves it toward its exalted end in Jesus Christ.” She described the story as “made for the theatre” before telling it in four acts: the chaotic circumstances; the claiming of Levirate rights; the veiled promiscuity; and the blessed heritage. “Tamar manipulates the religious, social and legal customs of her world,” said Drene, “and God blesses her action.”
In a personal reflection, the final presenter, Pr Gilda Dholah-Roddy, director of Adventist women’s ministries for the Adventist Church in Sydney, used water as a recurring theme. She reminded delegates of the Bible’s description of water in the story of creation as being like chaos but then noted, “We’re more Greek than Hebrew: we accept confusion but not the notion of limbo or a void, trackless waste. We don’t like chaos, and we can even argue it is only part of our biblical cultural heritage.” Gilda acknowledged the other water-as-life stories in the Bible. Water is present to both chaos and creation, she said, but we tend to emphasise the latter more than the former. Her challenge? “We need to wrestle with chaos a bit, recover our faith and then recognize. . . . For us to stay away from the water would be for us to abandon the whole life-giving dimension of our story.”
The conference, held at Sydney Adventist Hospital on April 24, is presented annually by Avondale College and the Adventist Women’s Ministries Department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific.