Twin Cities area Circles of Names event
honors seven mentors of faith

Minneapolis, November 25, 2011 -- Ninety persons squeezed into the parsonage of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church here November 17 to honor seven women from diverse backgrounds as mentors of faith.
 
The Twin Cities Area Circles of Names Gathering was one of several local events sponsored by the National Council of Churches Circles of Names campaign, a project of the NCC to create a circle of support for women's ministries by asking a thousand persons to give $100 in the name of a woman who helped shape their faith.
 
In so doing, the campaign lifts up the stories of a thousand women as sources of inspiration and empowerment of the churches' witness for gender justice.
 
In addition to scores of mentoring women who were named to the circles as a part of the Twin Cities area gathering, seven special mentors were honored:

Dorothea Burns, an active Evangelical Lutheran Church in America laywoman and community center leader; the Rev. Sarah Campbell, team lead minister of Mayflower Community Congregational United Church of Christ in Minneapolis; Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first woman ordained as a Conservative rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a leader in interfaith dialogue; the Rev. Alika P. Galloway, co-pastor of Kwanzaa Community Church in Minneapolis (Presbyterian), a womanist theologian and Spiritual Director; Dr. Josie Robinson Johnson, a Roman Catholic laywoman and long-time civil rights leader; Dr. Fatma Reda, a psychiatrist with a doctorate in religious philosophy, a Muslim and an interfaith leader in the Twin Cities area; and Elona Street-Stewart, a Presbyterian elder, chair of the Saint Paul, Minn. School Board, and the first Native American to serve on an urban school board in Minnesota.

Presiding over the event was Lori Sturdevant, a nationally known journalist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and other media, and a member of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church.
 
Several of the honored women expressed hope that the Circles of Name campaign will make visible thousands of women of faith who toiled in the background of many movements - such as the "sandwich women," said Alika Galloway, who provided essential support for the movement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but are lost to history.
 
Galloway said she accepted the award "on behalf of women who would never be named but worked behind the scenes, the women praying, the women suffering domestic violence, or living with HIV/AIDS, the mothers, because all of the women who will not be named are leaders in our community."
 
Elona Street-Stewart, a member of the Delaware Nanticoke nation, said the Thanksgiving holiday reminded her "how some of my friends sometimes ask me, 'have people ever said I'm sorry for what we did to the Native American people, that we killed your people and stole your land?'"
 
Native American people have offered so much in leadership and spirituality but they are often made to feel invisible in the culture that surrounds them, Street-Stewart suggested. She quoted from the Prophet Jeremiah. As Native Americans, she said, “we were expected to persevere,” despite the challenges. She said wryly that when she told friends that she is a Native American, they replied, “You can’t be an Indian – there are no Indians anymore.”

Dr. Fatma Reda, a psychiatrist and a Muslim, said she had been raised "as a feminist, basically." That may be contrary to the prevailing image of Islamic women, but she quoted the Prophet Mohammed as saying that when people pontificate around you, put that aside and "consult your heart."

Dr. Reda said she was motivated to become active in interfaith relations outreach because of her need as a mother to protect her children from the racism they encountered when when her family first moved to the United States. She felt the necessity to help others learn about who she was, who they were as a family and what they believed in order to help break down the barriers and misconceptions about Muslims – and to make her neighborhood a safer environment for her children, she said.
 
Rabbi Amy Ellberg told of how her life was changed when she went on a trip to Israel and when she came back she felt called to devote herself to the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. She laughed and recalled her reaction to God: "Really?"
 
Josie Robinson Johnson, 81, has been active in civil rights all her life. She said her favorite bible passage is from Esther.

"My mother lived the biblical Esther story," she said. "That’s been my role all my life. Esther means more to me every day, because she is about people called 'for a time such as this,'" she said.

The Circles of Names campaign seeks to build a foundation towards long-term sustainability of women's ministries and gender justice in the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC, the 37 member communions of the NCC, and its ecumenical partners).

Participants are invited to give or pledge $100 in the name of a woman who was or is important in his or her faith. The names will be added to the ever-growing circle of names; (see http://circlesofnames.org/who-has-been-named/), incorporated in a work of art commissioned for the campaign, and listed on a plaque in the NCC offices in The Interchurch Center.

The circles campaign has increased in urgency since it was started, said the Rev. Ann Tiemeyer, Director for Women's Ministries for the National Council of Churches.

"The future of women's ministries programs and gender justice work is at stake in many of our denominations," Tiemeyer said. "The activities that support women's ministries -- women's desks, commissions and programs - are being severely reduced or eliminated as NCC member communions face economic challenges. In this context, funding the NCC Women's Ministries program has never been more important."
 
The four current NCC priorities in gender justice ministries are: human trafficking, domestic violence, inclusive and expansive language, and poverty among women and girls. 

Since its founding in 1950, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA has been the leading force for shared ecumenical witness among Christians in the United States. The NCC's 37 member communions -- from a wide spectrum of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, Evangelical, historic African American and Living Peace churches -- include 45 million persons in more than 100,000 local congregations in communities across the nation.

NCC News contact:  Philip E. Jenks, 212-870-2228 (office), 646-853-4212 (cell), pjenks@ncccusa.org