Moderator seeks consensus

 

Lu Yueh Wen from Taiwan has been the youth member of CCA’s
Presidium for the past five years. She doesn’t want to be known
as the “youth president”; rather, she sees herself as president on
behalf of those who are under 30.

Ms Lu said the past five years had been a very rich journey
together with friends. “It is amazing to see and witness how
churches respond to events and suffering in their own countries
and in others,” she said. “It shows a spirit of solidarity.”

The five years of being president have sometimes been painful for
her. She has had to negotiate the obligations and responsibilities
of being an officer of CCA with her job as a product manager for
a company in Taiwan.

Her role in the Assembly’s hot seat has not always been easy.
Moderating plenaries could make her nervous at times, she said,
but it was interesting to see people’s responses to questions and
discussions.

Even being a good English speaker, she still needed help sometimes understanding what people were talking about. But being in such a position was how young people learned, she said.

Ms Lu said would really like to see CCA adopt the consensus model of decision making because it created a friendlier opportunity for newcomers to express their opinions. She was nurtured in the consensus model by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and sometimes found moderating in CCA’s parliamentary style confronting.

Ms Lu had dedicated one of the most valuable periods of her life to the church and hoped and appealed to church leaders to understand that, as a young woman, she didn’t want to carry so many “categories”. She said, “It is not fair for a young person and a woman. I know there are category requirements to meet but, if
we are serious about gender and age justice, this is not the way to reconcile them.”

Ms Lu regards being a member of the Presidium a privilege because not many young people received that amount of trust from their church. She is very grateful to the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan for trusting and supporting her.

Stephen Webb

~ Berita Terkini CCA 2010 April 19