WARC New President Pledges to Transform the Church and World

As the 24th World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) General Council draws to a close this weekend, the council has been refreshed by the election of the new executive committee on Monday 9th August.

This year’s election procedure was much improved after the experience of the two previous general councils. The slate of nominees was put together from a pool of names proposed by member churches and regional meetings. The nominations committee wanted to achieve at least four sets of balances - between women and men, youth and older members, lay and ordained, and between regions.

The new executive committee has been expanded by eight members, and now consists of 40 members to improve the balance between the regions. About two-thirds of the committee members are ordained clergy. Eighteen of them are men and eight are women. Ten of the lay members are women and four are men.

The 40-member committee is the Alliance’s highest decision-making body between general council meetings. The committee’s officers - the president and six vice-presidents - are drawn from each of the Alliance’s seven regions.

American Clifton Kirkpatrick, ordained clergy, the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA, was elected president. Among the other six vice-presidents, four of them are ordained clergy as well; they are Lilia Rafalimanana of Madagascar, Henriette Hutabarat-Lebang of Indonesia, Ofelia Ortega of Cuba and Gottfried Locher of Switzerland. The two lay people among the officers are Helis Hernán Barraza Díaz of Colombia and Marcelle Joy Mafi of New Zealand.

Setri Nyomi, from Ghana, was elected as the Alliance’s general secretary.

One side-effect of the election is that two of the three global church organisations based in Geneva, Switzerland, will both be headed by a US clergyman as president and an African clergyman as general secretary.

Kirkpatrick who has been elected as the president, and is going to serve the council for the next seven years said, “I’m taking this on with a serious degree of humility.”

Kirkpatrick drew the attention of the general council to the fact that “the driving sources of the growing economic and political and military divide in the world are from the US, though not all them.”

Kirkpatrick comes from the Presbyterian Church USA, which is a leading church in North America, which is working to create a different kind of world. It has been outspoken against economic injustices and against the US war on Iraq. Kirkpatrick interpreted his success in the election as a sign of support of WARC members to the church.

“We are called to transform the world and that’s why we want to transform the church. We want to overcome empires of control and domination to build a world where five or 10 per cent of the population doesn’t control so much of the world’s wealth,” he said.

“The church is a missionary society. In some sense we are chosen by God to be God’s agents to transform the world. It’s at the core of who we are as a people.”

According to Kirkpatrick, “transforming the church, transforming WARC and transforming the world” would be the three major challenges for the 75 million-member worldwide fellowship of reformed churches.