Liturgy, faith and sexual and reproductive health rights : a study of liturgical reframing in the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.
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Date
2017
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Abstract
Despite our excellent gender equality legislation, most women and gender
nonconforming individuals in South Africa continue to suffer disproportionately from
the effects of HIV, gender based violence and cultural and religious oppressions.
Considering that in South Africa church membership exceeds eighty percent (the vast
majority of whom are women), it is vital to better understand how churches influence
some of the key drivers of these challenges, such as gender inequality and destructive
perceptions about sexuality and women’s bodies. As an Anglican lay minister and
gender activist, I have situated my research in the Anglican Church in Southern Africa
as a postcolonial church grappling to shake off vestiges of its patriarchal colonial
legacy, while remaining rooted in its liturgical inheritance.
Apart from regulating worship, liturgy as a social act constructs theological concepts
and relationships within dynamic social and institutional contexts that are deeply
influenced by intersectional power dynamics. Employing a postcolonial African
feminist theological lens, this study analyses some creative liturgical samples, inserted
into the standardised An Anglican Prayer Book. It has sought to understand how
liturgical language and discourse tools are employed to reconfigure social and religious
assumptions about normal gender power relations, health and sexuality in ways that
contribute to improved sexual and reproductive health. The findings describe how
transformative liturgy employs liturgical, language and discourse tools intentionally in
three strategic ways: creating a liminal space where human dignity, health and wellness
can flourish, breaking the silence by addressing sexual and reproductive health rights
directly in worship, and preparing worshippers to become a transformative presence in
the world.
A discussion about barriers to liturgical creativity in a clergy focus group conversation
held, highlighted that authentic transformative liturgical praxis requires a church culture
that is open to learning from the periphery.
The research has identified some crucial theoretical gaps: liturgical studies are
dominated by largely gender-blind, late-modernist approaches; while postcolonial and
African feminist scholarship barely touches on liturgy, thus missing a crucial strategic opportunity to achieve its transformative objective. Hence, the conclusion offers some
preliminary proposals towards what might, through further research, potentially
become a postcolonial African feminist liturgical theology.
Description
Master of Art in Religion. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2017.
Keywords
Feminist praxis., African women theologians., Anglican Church., Liturgy., Sexual Reproductive Health Rights