“Sea of joys and turmoil in
shared Parish ministry as a migrant husband and wife team”
Rev Don
Ikitoelagi (Director of Cross Cultural Mission
and Ministry-Synod of Victoria and Tasmania)
[this was a paper that I prepared and presented at the "TALANOA" conference (Sydney) while I was working as the Director of Cross Cultural Mission and Ministry with thw Uniting Church in Australia]
“The
sea of joys and turmoil in shared ministry.”
Introduction
and setting the context to this paper.
Brief
comments of subjects namely Rev Ere Talagi-Ikitoelagi & Rev Don Ikitoelagi.
- Sense of Call – Personal and Communal
- Family commitments: 8 Children with the eldest being 34 and the
baby 6 years old
- Strong traditional background. (Niuean/Samoan ; Niuean)
- Personalities: Very strong personalities with often opposing
views on matters.
- Feminist movement within the Church at the time (extremely
militant)
Strength: wide diverse subject in the varied disciplines of study; often we
don’t do the same subjects. Provide a
good base for shared resources in ministry.
Weakness:
Shared ministry invariably gets influenced by
personality and domestic relationships. When the home front is experiencing a
storm, the ministry gets affected.
What
happens when two individuals with all the above personal traits begin the task
of mapping how to minister cross culturally with three Anglo Congregations; given the sea of change, turmoil, challenges
that surrounded them.
I began my journey into training for
ordained ministry when candidates were still fighting for a place in ministry..
In the year I was assessed, there were 26 candidates for six places as
determined by the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa NZ.
The process was gruelling and foreign for
me and a few other non-Anglo candidates. Questions were asked of MY sense of
CALL when I carried within me a sense of a communal approach to a CALL (I was
nurtured to this by my father, mother and the whole community) “ Response from
the Assessor: “…. So you are here because your family pushed you to this ministry… and so
you do not have a clear sense of call from God for this ministry?” big issues that needs some unpacking.
Upon arrival at the Knox Theological
College, I found myself
struggling with issues of God; particularly in the engaging with the concepts
of “WHO GOD IS” I felt that I was really in the wrong place. Such approaches to
God were blaspheming at the very least. The disciplines of exegesis was cutting
through to the core values of who I was and my belief. Systematic was sounding
more like a joke with all its jargon and foreign concepts.
There were no certainties in theology and
this really troubled me.…. As long as you offer supported answers from ideas
and remedies offered by the many theologians pre-selected as reading material, one
will pass the assignment. Having an accounting background where answers
were definitely clear and remedies often prescribed gave me such a feeling of
inadequacy at this early stage.
There were women candidates that were
acting in such a militant fashion within the college. Any miss statement of God
as him
or father
was highlighted with a mass walkout from worship or placards flashed around the
square. Mother god? Even brother Jesus doesn’t sit right
with me at the time.
Without any pre-warning, I was thrown into a sea of
uncertainty and confusion. Nothing was at all certain.
Ere on the other hand, as I thought was
revelling in all of this. She had betrayed my trust (as I thought at the time)
when instead of studying accountancy as agreed was taking 4 papers in Theology.
Instead of offering to feed me and our 6 children she was disappearing at the
same time to her own classes.
Don
wake up son and smell the coffee!
What happens if I failed because I wasn’t
cared for at home? Really, what a baby!
Who would wash, clean and fend for the 6 children.
Get a life Don!
How dare she undermine what was my call, our community send me to train… not her. The community, the society, the culture had
really made an impression on you son!
As I was busying myself in my self-pity,
Ere was engaging with her own struggles.
She struggled for acceptance by her own
family, husband community and Niuean ministers. She was also fending off all
the feminist candidates at the time by laying claims of her rights to bring
about the debate among her own people without being pushed to a big us and them
Church debate at the time. Woman of
great inner strength.
Getting to become a candidate was also a
heart wrenching moment in her life, when her own community were not able to
offer support and that she needed to be sent by the Anglo (palagi) Parish that
we were worshipping with at the time.
By this time, I believed that I had in many
ways turned my life around, undid many of the cultural conditions, gender
issues, and supported Ere in the journey of testing her sense of call into
ordained ministry. Hurray Don, there is
a God after all!!
While studying, there was the issue about
her resuming of her maiden name as Talagi. Little changes that were life
changing for me at the time.
What was an attempt in Ere’s part, to carve
a life in study for herself, that she didn’t have to operate under my shadow
had been for me a challenge to my whole being and my family traditions. (Although
I knew taking ones husband’s was really a convention rather than the law it
being a legal requirement that one need to comply, it didn’t make any
difference to me… she was just being pigheaded about all these feminist
outbursts.)
For a time I contemplated adding her maiden
name to mine so that she can be seen as my wife, sharing at least one name even
if it was hyphenated.. Don really, you
are real piece of work, just when one feels that you have changed you come up
trumps again!!!!
It was hell at the time to also be
struggling with what I considered core pointers to our identity.
Ere after completing her study (without any
prompting) changed her name once more to be a hyphenated name
Talagi-Ikitoelagi. By then I had learned to respect things that were important
to her. I would not have asked her to, yet families, the community were not
going to rest until Don become a real man and get his silly wife to resume his
family name… how dare she…)
When we were both called to our first
Parish (Wanganui West United) I though that we were seasoned, that we had
sorted out all there was to shared ministry. (I was in particular feeling quite
chuffed that I felt I have changed enough to manage shared ministry) Was I wrong! People started to address
me as the minister and Ere as the assistant.
There were moment in our ministry that I
felt a strong need to protect her and fight off all those who dared to question
her. What a champion Don, wow!!!
mmmm….
I learned the hard way that she needed to challenge
these issues and fight her own battles.
On the other hand, I learned that this does not mean for me to abandon
my support of her. Offering support after she had made her call is where I
found safety. (But leading up to this
moment of truth, I felt that I was dammed if I did and dammed if I didn’t)
Our strengths were clearly identifies as we
worked together, that we were complimenting each others skills. Our openness to
choose what area of Parish life that we could pick up the task was usually strength.
I said usually, because there were some
specific areas that our personalities and domestic arrangements caused strain
on our relationship.
Weddings, Baptisms and Funerals were areas
that we agreed, for whoever takes the call will follow through and conduct the
said activity. Instead I found myself doing ALL of the funerals and Ere
attended to all Baptisms and Weddings. As it was Ere’s decision that the two
she was attending to were areas that only she could do justice to them because
of her skills as a woman and her understanding as a mother.
In frustration one day I spurted out, for
goodness sakes Ere, I also want to do the celebrating evens and you need to get
your hands dirty with the deaths and the dying. Was that an introduction to a
domestic flare-up?
Personalities, being extravert while the
other is introvert can be the cause of both domestic and ministry debates. “I
should know Don” is always a starter for Ere when she believes she is going to
be involved in something that calls for a feminine touch as she puts it.
“I should know that weddings and baptisms
are my department, because I am a mother and also I am a woman.”
HOW CAN YOU ARGUE WITH THAT?
A response that often leaves my lips was
“and what has that got to do with the price of fish?”
Let me recap what I have listed:
Ministry is about one’s sense of call:
In many instances, when you come out of
communal background, one also includes into this sense of call an element of
the call being encouraged by family and friends.
Men are generally accepted as those in which
God selects to enter ministry and wives as supporters to the shared (ordained/lay)
ministry.
Such calling is celebrated by family and
community. You are often given a send off with all the glory and the gifts
fitting for celebrity and ministers.
When one is called, one takes with one the family and extended family. One tends
also to lose ones identity and assumes an identity and the attributes of a Holy
man of God that will serve God endlessly and faithfully. (faceless)
There is both celebration and a sense of
loss at this instance; for the
acceptance of the call is regarded as a gift to God from the family, but a call
is also a moment in life that one leaves behind all that one has build up in
wealth and status both in the community and in the home and family.
When a woman feels the sense of call, I
believe she starts off with sorrow and great pain for her credibility is often
taken from her husbands or fathers’ standing in the community. Only when she
feel that some recognition of her worth from those she loves and trust, that
she begins to enjoy the sense of call that she feels strongly to be a gift form
God.
Ere has become a much respected minister
within the Niuean circles, and the whole of the PCANZ. Her skill and her
abilities have led her to many crucial roles within the life of the PCANZ.
These roles spans from National, Presbytery and Parish.
Her final hurdle I suppose was getting the
confidence to apply for a position in the inner-city Parish of Auckland with a
component of Niueans within the Palagi
Church.
It is fare to say that many of the Pacific Island
women ministers both in NZ and in the Island
homes are still experiencing difficulty in accessing congregations as
Ministers. They land themselves appointments to Chaplaincy work, not that this
was not an achievement in itself. Traditionalists in churches still consider
ordained parish ministry is the domain only for men. (The process was
interesting, as the Niueans in this congregation were dragging their feet while
the few Palagi members made the decision to call Ere even if it is against the
will of the Niuean elders. What a
wonderful God we have!
Shared ministry in a multicultural church.
While Ere was ministering to the Niuean and
Palagi congregation, I continued to support her by performing some of the
minister’s wife’s role.
I was often manhandled out of the kitchen
by women who think that it is not becoming of a minister (man) to do cooking or
even cleaning.
I
must confess that I had a lot to relearn, in terms of the role that men and
women play in the family and in the community. Both Ere and I are still
learning.
Un-conditioning ones mind is a necessary
process. Society and what is considered normal do change, however it is often
necessary to encourage such changes to occur.
The Palagi was obviously leading the debate
of women being equal in every aspect of life to men. The ethnic in this case
Niueans, what was an understanding of role play was mistakenly understood as
men being superior and women being subordinated to a supportive role only.
The Church of Aotearoa NZ
was clearly supportive of the equality debate for it legislated against
prejudice against women in all of its positions in the church..
Having
made special mentioned of the frustration of shared ministry, let me for a
moment touch on the Joys of shared ministries.
Reaching past the immediate issues of
change, I can recall the joy of embracing the richness of the joy of knowledge.
To engage in a river of change, when TABU
issues were opening up to critique.
The joys of identifying each others
strengths and building on the attributed of partnership.
Having a different perspective to an issue
was something that we found coloured by our own intellect and gender makings.
The joy however was still there embraced by our love for each other.
We had a large family of 7 at the time,
which added both joy and anxiety,
because of the needed discipline to run a tight ship given our busy
lives.
Our personal and ministry relationships
would have failed if we did not take seriously the need to communicate
effectively with each other and with the children. We learned the art of having
conversations in the manner and the excitement of two people who had only just
started out in love. (maybe that was also contributory to our family being
large as it is.)
Often the difficult issues in our shared
ministry get a hearing in our personal relationships. As hard as it was to
engage with respect for each other as people of the cloth, the domestic flavour
sometime win hands down. We often need to both calm ourselves with reason and
logic, even a bit of pacific humour to begin weaving back the issues to where
we started with.
The winner was definitely the Parish, for
there was no sick leave in our watch. I couldn’t recall us both being sick at
the same time, and we always filled in for each other in our half time ministry
count. There was clearly a benefit to the Parish of having two ministers for
the price of one.
Being Pacific Islanders in a Palagi Parish
also had its moments. We both got away with many necessary changes to the
Parish Council because we sense the members saying “they
don’t understand our ways”
In conclusion this paper is my journey;
reporting what I perceived to have been the path to our ministry as two Pacific
Island Ministers in a Palagi Parish. Joys and concerns swim in the same river of Change. We both benefited from it. We
both made personal sacrifices from the experiences. We both enjoyed the growth
around us when the Spirit of God kicks in and work the power-plant of the
GOSPEL.
(NOTE)
Reading material to be read prior to the
elective.
The following (power-point) presentation
will be used to draw open discussions.
Rev Don
Ikitoelagi
(Director of Cross Cultural Mission and Ministry)
Synod of Victoria
and Tasmania
UCA
