Living My Best Ecumenical Life

One thing that is a predictable outcome of quitting my regular full time job, is that I now have to field many more questions about what I am 'doing' now. Since full time work isn't really my jam these days, that means that there aren't any quick answers to this question. But sometimes, instead of giving the more accurate, nuanced, complicated answer about how I am taking some time to figure out my life right now while working many little jobs to make some money, I decide to just name one of the many things I am 'doing' these days. Most frequently, the one I choose is my current part time job as the Program Assistant for the Working Group on Sexual Exploitation of the Canadian Council of Churches (yes, I have actually managed to get myself an even longer job title for my 7 hr/week job, I am awesome).

I have been in this position now since the beginning of March and have been getting looped into the work of this part of the CCC. It has been pretty exciting to get to know the other staff of the Council as well as members of various Council bodies including the Working Group on Sexual Exploitation and the Commission on Justice and Peace (Yay, new people!). The Canadian Council of Churches is a pretty bare bones operation in terms of staff and it is the contributions of people from all the member Churches that really allow us to get anything done. That becomes all the more impressive when I look through all the different resources that have been released by the CCC. (Click here to check them out, One of my favourites is "Cracking Open White Identity Towards Transformation: Canadian Ecumenical Anti-Racism Network Examines White Identity, Power and Privilege").

But being staff support for a Working Group that deals with issues I care about a lot has also been a learning experience for me. It can be really challenging to figure out the line between what to contribute to discussions when I am not there on behalf of my Church, but rather as staff to serve the needs of the Working Group. This working group deals with issues of sexual exploitation, but of course different people have different views of what constitutes sexual exploitation. Questions around free will, consent, conscience, oppression, human sexuality, etc. all come to bear in these discussions, but often are so foundational, they operate more as underlying assumptions that overt statements.

One of the ways that this often manifests in Church discussions is the perception that if we talk about gender identity, sexual orientation, human trafficking, pornography and sex workers, we are 'talking about sex a lot'. Certainly these conversations are influenced about by our underlying assumptions about healthy human sexuality, but talking about them doesn't constitute actually talking about sex - and when dealing with questions of sexual exploitation, we do need to unpack in more detail than many people are comfortable with, what healthy human sexualities can look like and involve. So sometimes I end up being the person who asks questions that lead to these sorts of discussions - more often at this point I end up wishing I had the courage to do so and nudging others on the Working Group who might have the same inclination.

One of the coolest things about how the bodies of the Canadian Council of Churches work is the forum principle. The idea is that each member Church, regardless of membership numbers or their financial support of the CCC, has equal voice in decision making which is done by finding consensus rather than through any voting system. Given this approach, the CCC "represents the broadest and deepest cooperative ecumenical coalition in the world, bringing together the five great streams of Christianity, the Anglican, Evangelical and Free Church, the historic Reform, the Orthodox and the Roman Catholic." You can read more about the forum concept on the Canadian Council of Churches' website. If you are at all interested in ecumenism or processes of collective decision-making I highly recommend it.