Young Women Enabling Holidays

The Council for World Mission, a curiously misnamed organisation to which many of our Congregational churches contribute, is seeking volunteers. To share the good news of sin forgiven? No. To feed the 25,000 who starve to death each day? No. To teach English or maths in areas too poor to staff schools? Alas, no. Rather, their Young Women Enabling Transformation Programme is seeking 18-30-year-old women to stay in Jamaica for a month, all expenses paid. While there, they shall be ‘doing critical and creative resistance towards patriarchy as well as contribut[ing] towards constructive alternatives’. The event ‘is specifically directed towards the building of a collective of young feminist women in our churches.’

Great, this is just what we need right now. But if you’re not persuaded, the patter continues:

‘Through this Programme, the women participants will be able to have a safe and secure space to articulate their oppressions and aspirations; will be provided with the tools of social analysis that would enable them to critically discern the structures of patriarchy’.

So among the tropical beaches of a Caribbean paradise, young women from some of the world’s wealthiest countries can devise new ways of telling everyone how oppressed they are.

I appreciate that as a man, I’ve not had to suffer wolf whistles from dirty old men in white vans, nor has my career been interrupted by that God-given function of reproduction. But if you want liberation from oppression, seek Jesus Himself, who raises the poor and humbles the mighty. And if you feel like telling everyone how badly off you are, you’ll find the sands of Mablethorpe or Morecambe as convivial as the lovely beaches of Jamaica, but a great deal cheaper for the Council’s coffers.

Image by dpatdfci from Pixabay