PASCH 2011 Conference

Emerging from the Shadows: the Church and Justice

          Our upcoming conference, be held May 12-15, 2011 in the Vancouver area, will explore innovative approaches to particular concerns of our PASCH membership: care for children who have witnessed or experienced domestic violence, evaluation of faith-based batterer intervention, and implementing global outreach to prevent violence against women.

          Dealing with the first of these will be Juan Carlos Arean, senior program director of the Family Violence Prevention Fund.  He has been a prime mover of Fathering After Violence (FAV), a national initiative to enhance the safety and well-being of women and children by motivating men to renounce their violence and become better fathers (or father figures) and more supportive parenting partners. FAV is a conceptual framework to help end violence against women by using fatherhood as a leading approach.

Mr. Arean has been influential in developing a program that provides supervised visitation services across the United States and has also worked as a sexual assault prevention specialist at Harvard University. He is co-author of various articles and educational tools for men, including Breaking the Cycle: Fathering After Violence, and an on-line tool-kit for engaging men and boys in violence prevention.

Juan Carlos is an active trainer who has led hundreds of workshops and presentations throughout the United States, as well as in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Russia, Sweden, Austria, and at the United Nations.

The second plenary presentation will divulge the information which we have so long awaited: what has been learned from intensive research into faith-based batterer intervention groups. For years sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark (chair of the department of sociology at the University of New Brunswick) along with her talented team of researchers, has been reviewing closed files, interviewing individual participants every six months, observing actual sessions, discussing perceived results with members of the outside community. Led by Nancy herself, the team will share their findings and present some of the conclusions in the form of a docu-drama.

There will be opportunity to discuss considerations such as: how do the faith-based projects differ from community-based programs, how effective are they, what can be learned from them, where is there room for improvement, where is there the most evident success? What relevance do the findings have to the Gospel insistence that God can change sinful conduct?

Dr. Nancy Nason-Clark is a social scientist by profession who has a very important story to tell. For over 20 years, she has been writing about what happens when abuse strikes families of faith. Through her books, her international speaking engagements, the workshops she conducts and the articles she writes, the message is clear: there is a holy hush hovering over most religious congregations when it comes to talking about abuse. Nancy’s creation of the RAVE Project is based on her desire to shatter that silence NOW! By combining the language of the spirit (religious-based resources) with the language of contemporary culture (community-based resources), every pastor and every congregation can be part of the solution to abuse. Nancy served as the editor of the Journal of Sociology and Religion and is author of numerous books on domestic abuse, such as The Battered Wife and No Place for Abuse..

A decade ago, at the international General Assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship in Vancouver, an African woman stood at the podium and asked “when will this Assembly address the issue of violence against women? There are men in this very chamber who are abusing their wives!” That woman was Eva Sanderson, and she received a standing ovation. Out of that challenge, the Women’s Task Force on Violence against Women of the World Evangelical Fellowship was born.  Now she is to return to Vancouver, again to issue another challenge.

Eva is one of the many unsung heroes of Africa who has confronted the problem of AIDS in her country officially and non-officially. She has served as Chairperson for the Board of the Pan Africa Christian Women's Alliance (PACWA), is a member of the International Council of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), is Chairperson of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and is Honorary Co-Chairperson of the AD2000 & Beyond Movement. A 63 year old black Zambian, Eva is very involved in politics at every level, including a term as a member of Parliament..

A nurse by profession, she was working in a clinic in Zambia when the AIDS epidemic surfaced. Today, along with practical and spiritual solutions,  she uses her influence at policy-making levels, practical levels and personal levels to seek to free her world from the scourge of the pestilence that comes, including AIDS.. Eva Sanderson is very passionate about helping small scale farmers in Zambia move forward. She has now turned her amazing energy to agriculture, motivating small farmers in the Kitwe area to begin farming with more sustainable and profitable methods. We expect Eva to make us look with new eyes at the potential of the Gospel in its many world-wide aspects.