There needs to be a fundamental shift in the CWM approach to promoting gender equality, writes CWM executive secretary for mission education Elizabeth Joy.
Concern over gender issues has been for a long time considered as a discipline in vogue that came from the outside. It was considered as an optional, trivial addition or appendix.
Gender mainstreaming is the process of assessing the implications for women and men in any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes.
Thus it should not be just the work of a women's desk or other special units but part and parcel of every desk or unit.
CWM is struggling towards gender equality.
Gender mainstreaming is a critical corrective. It focuses on ensuring women's empowerment and participation right from envisioning to implementation and assessment. It also keeps a vigil that it does not marginalise men in this process but works together with them, supporting boys and girls, men and women as they define and restructure their roles within a new community that ensures no one is left behind.
Mainstreaming gender in CWM should result in gender equality in our budgets, proposals, projects and the constitution of our various decision-making bodies.
While there is a special unit for gender concerns in CWM, it should not be this unit's responsibility alone to raise issues and concerns on gender sensitivity, gender participation or making gender equality a reality within CWM churches. It should be the conscious and spontaneous responsibility of every person to ensure that what we plan and do expresses our commitment to gender justice.
Within our educational institutions, seminaries and theological colleges, it is not enough to have an optional course on women's studies, there should be a required course within the curriculum.
Gender inequality discredits our nonnegotiable biblical and theological confession that men and women are created equally in the image of God.
This calls for gender mainstreaming. If our faith is rooted in God who created us equally in God's image, we have no choice.