Articles - Miscellaneous

Women's World Day of Prayer - a man's perspective

Work commitments prevented me from getting to one of the daytime services on 3rd March, so I decided to go to the 6pm service at Holy Trinity Church, Boar Lane, on my way home from work in Leeds.

This year's service was prepared by the Christian women of South Africa and I found it a joyful and moving time of worship, prayer and reflection.

We started the service by greeting each other in 4 of the 11 languages spoken in South Africa:

Hello (English)
Molweni - Mol-we-nee (Xhosa)
Dumelang - Doom-e-lung (Southern Sotho)
Goeiedag - Ghoi-e-dagh (Afrikaans)

Then we sang a South African prayer of praise and later prayers were offered for the suffering people of that country: the unemployed, the poor, street children, those struggling to cope with violence and crime, and those living with HIV/AIDS.

There are 2 other things which I especially remember about the service. Firstly, a woman who had gone out to South Africa to help with the first democratic elections in 1994, gave a most interesting and moving talk about her experiences.

Her job was to train local people to manage the election and to control the polling stations. It became immediately apparent that this was a near impossible task because she had thousands of people to train across the county. With only a small team and a very basic office from which to organise things, she soon got into the exhausting routine of working 16 hours a day.

However, the election process and the movement toward democracy were underpinned by a huge wave of prayer and there was a great feeling of goodwill. On the day of the election itself, although there was some understandable tension, there was great joy among many of the people and in some instances, black and white people travelled cheerfully together to vote - even if they had to queue for ages when they got to the polling stations! Many people felt that God's hand was on South Africa at that time.

The other thing which I remember is that, instead of exchanging the peace in the way that we have become familiar with, we made the sign of the cross on the palm of the hand of the person sitting next to us. This was to symbolise that we are signs of hope, love and joy in our world. (Perhaps we could do this at St Edmund's sometime).

The Women's World Day of Prayer service was held in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, North, Central and South America and the Pacific. It served to remind me that we are all part of a worldwide church. Whether we are young or old, poor or rich, rural or urban, we are all following and serving the same Lord.

I look forward to next year's service, which will be prepared by the Christian women of Paraguay.

Geoffrey Barker

29 March, 2006