On Frances Adeney's Christian Women in Indonesia - A Sketch

Women in Mission

May 4, 2005

A Sketch on Frances Adeney’s Christian Women in Indonesia: a Narrative Study of Gender and Religion

This book consists of two sections: part one, on the narratives of Indonesian women as a context “to analyze feminist concerns and their interaction with Christian institutions and gender ideologies in Indonesia” (ix), and part two, on the theory and method that Adeney employs in her research.

Adeney is trying to show the possibilities as well as the limitations of feminist theory and advocacy in Indonesia. Her research on the role of Christian women in Indonesia who used religion as “a form of gender resistance and moral agency” (4) reveals “a religion-identified resistance” (5) as a characteristic of “a third wave of the global women’s movement that centers on spirituality” (3). The subjects of her research were Indonesian women who “chose religious leadership as a career” (6). They work as pastors of local congregation, working as educators, or living a monastic life (ibid). She then looks at the university and theological seminaries as the immediate social location of her research which consequently signifies her research question of the role of (higher) education in shaping as well as challenging the leadership ability of Christian women in Indonesia (see pp 53-75).

In her research Adeney discovers the common practices used by the women: “practicing hospitality, creating beauty, and honoring relationships” (7). These practices reveal the ambiguity of Indonesian Christian women in pursuing the leadership role both in Christian institutions/religious communities as well as in society. She describes such ambiguity as “deterrent” and “link” (107-116).

In the context of the interconnection between the political and cultural-based gender ideologies, which provide both the challenges and the possibilities for the women’s struggle for equality, Adeney identifies a strong sense of calling in the women she interviewed (cf, pp 77 and 82) as she states “[a] sense of individual agency, combined with a religious calling and a conviction about the justice of women’s equality, served to strengthen the women’s resolve to choose a path that many saw as strange” (6-7). Such perceived strangeness exemplified in the women’s narratives that show the ways the women live out the tension between women’s domestic and public roles, between the religious/cultural and political definitions of women, and the competing self-definitions of being Christian women and Indonesian women.

The sense of calling and the persistence to pursue higher education becomes a natural strategy of resistance for the women to integrate their religious calling with their career at the institutional structures, as Adeney identifies. By utilizing the idea of ‘calling,’ a concept fraught with notions of divine power, the women gained entrance to the leadership track usually reserved for males… By speaking out about their sense of calling to leadership work in the church, the women resisted the religious authority that supported the confinement of their roles in society and in the church… The women also called upon their experience as a source of authority in their lives… [they] drew on their subjective experience of God as a source of their conviction that they should embark on a road to leadership”(77-78, 79).

After describing the complexity and the multiplicity of the reality of Indonesian Christian women as a mirror of the multiple layer of the pluralistic Indonesian society, Adeney reflects on a significant personal question of her research: what does it mean to be a North American feminist researcher and professor cross-culturally? She presents her dilemma as an American feminist living in a predominantly Javanese community. Her immediate encounter with such a different cultural worldview provides her with an understanding of the dilemma of communicating and integrating one’s own perspective into a different locality. Here is where a “hermeneutical approach” becomes very important in her way of integrating her feminist theory and practice of liberation in Indonesia (cf. 185-189). She argues that a cross-cultural encounter demands a thorough and honest conversation between the cultures involved, as she states:

Conversation across the two cultures becomes extremely important. As I periodically return to Indonesia, I continue to teach what I believe about the importance of gender equality. Yet, as time goes on, I do more and more listening. I try to understand if this value is accepted by my Indonesian students. Rather than attempt to interpret their experiences, I invite them to take center stage so that they may tell their own stories…” (185).

Question for Reflection:

Based on Adeney’s findings of the three common practices of the Indonesian women leaders (practicing hospitality, creating beauty, and honoring relationships), can these be an authentic resource for defining an Indonesian women’s practice of mission? What will happen to women if these practices are developed as a contextual mission practice of the church in Indonesia?