Orange-based Empower International Ministries works with existing ministries in Africa and Haiti to bring family peace through a Bible-based program promoting mutual respect, gender equality and family love. Empower held a St. Patrick’s Day concert featuring Scott Bartchy, a jazz pianist whose “day job” as a history professor at UCLA provides the biblical scholarship on which Empower’s life changing work is based. Also featured were vocals by Kristina Sachs.

Click here to link to an online photo album of the evening.

S. Scott Bartchy, professor of Christian Origins at UCLA, is a biblical scholar deeply committed to gender and racial justice. He is also a great jazz pianist who, with his quartet, will perform this fund-raising concert in support of the ministry that uses his insights to help heal families in Africa and Haiti.

“In economically-developing countries, ideas about marriage are very different than what we take for granted in the United States,” says Carrie Miles, executive director of Empower. In these societies, neither husband nor wife expects marriage to be about romantic love or companionship. Rather, men expect their wives to give them children, food/labor, and sex. Furthermore, a wife’s obligations are very real: A woman who does not bear children, or who has only girls, may be divorced or supplanted by another wife. A woman who refuses sex may be beaten, even if she is ill or he is infected with HIV.

“Professor Bartchy’s insights into Jesus’ teachings on women have a huge impact in the countries where we work,” says Miles. Jesus affirmed women’s value as individuals made in the image of God and encouraged them to step beyond societal limitations. In the Empower seminar, men come to view women as more than mere baby producers, “work donkeys”, and sex objects. In Rwanda, seminar graduates now confront men who beat their wives, persuading them that although culture may allow abuse when the women don’t meet their husbands’ expectations, the Bible does not.

As for the women, Miles warns, “You can’t underestimate how much they themselves absorb these anti-woman attitudes. In the seminar we recently conducted in Haiti, the women came in looking so low and shy.” But a more-accurate biblical understanding changes that: “By the end of the program, the women were smiling, alert, laughing and cheering, and held their heads high.”

The ministry seeks to empower men as well as women. Miles relates that when Empower seminar leaders talk with groups about how Jesus raises up women, both men and women smile and cheer. “But when we start talking about the burdens on men and how the Bible values even low-status and poor men, the whole room goes quiet.” The work men traditionally did, such as clear land and hunt, has become obsolete, but for many men this work not been replaced with opportunities for paid employment. At the same time, “men still get the message that they should be respected, should have money, should be a big man lording it over other men. But many men today struggle even to support their families. So they feel shamed, and cheated at the same time.” The resulting despair and hopelessness leads to alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and to a toxic envy that fuels violent quarrels, war, and genocide. Bartchy’s explanations of Jesus’ teachings that true manhood seeks to serve rather than be served provides a powerful antidote to this sense of what Miles calls “unempowered entitlement.”

African and Haitian leaders are looking for tools to help deal with rapidly growing family disintegration, and with increasing the welfare of women, but are wary of finding them in secular aid agencies, which Christian leaders often perceive to be hostile to the family or to men. “The Bible is taken very seriously in sub-Saharan Africa, and turns out to be an effective way to communicate there,” says Miles. “But paradoxically, for the Bible to provide solutions to these problems, you have to understand what Jesus said in his own cultural context. That’s where Professor Bartchy’s insights prove so valuable. That he is also a world-class jazz pianist is a great bonus."

Photographs by Jeffrey Vanden Berge