Please Pray for Our JTS Students, Who are Emotionally Affected by the Uncontrollable Crime and Violence in Jamaica!

A colleague of mine at the Jamaica Theological Seminary, Rev. Richard Beckford wrote to our JTS Alumni in our Wassup Group:

Greetings All,

PLEASE PRAY FOR OUR JTS STUDENTS. 

We just ended virtual chapel and it was quite emotional for me. Many of our students  are concerned about the  violence in our country. Our female students have been gravely affected by the recent attacks on our women as well. We also have students who are fully engaged on the frontline fighting crime in our nation while juggling school work and family. This is coupled with the lockdowns and their impact on the student body. We also have students who are frontline health care workers confronting the pandemic and they need our prayerful support. Let us keep our students prayed up and through the Student Affairs offer any tangible help we can.

The teaching component of the semester comes to an end April 30 and then final assessments the first two weeks of May. Let us pray that our students will finish well, mentally, emotionally, financially and academically. 

Blessings

I responded saying thank you for the update Richard and I will keep them in my prayers. But this violence has always been concerning and coupled with the pandemic and rising poverty, unemployment, the situation is becoming distressing. There has to be a solution to the chaos. Apart from praying and waiting and hoping, there’s this doing part which requires sacrifice, compromise, out of the box thinking and collaboration with other stakeholders, community, political, business and religious leaders (that’s not a photo-op at a national breakfast held at a hotel) that produce workable solutions. The current state of the human condition creates many of our problems in Jamaica. But with the issue of rising poverty, unemployment, and the pandemic it is not hard to see the correlation all effects on crime and violence. I have argued that we need a stimulus, a social safety net and an extended aid program to assist with mimimizing and mitigating some of the issues of crime and violence correlated by the other factors I raised. I wrote in an article submitted to the gleaner advocating for this and made the point that if Barbados can do it why can’t we? 

Jamaica Needs A Safety Net For It’s Most Vulnerable People And The Unemployed Especially During This Covid Pandemic https://renaldocmckenzie.blogspot.com. 

The next issue is the level of our people’s education, their abilities to think, analyze, process and communicate effectively and to discern appropriately. The competence levels of many of our people to make decisions that avoids crime and violence and engage in lucrative potentials is woefully lacking.

You May visit and donate to the Jamaica Theological Seminary by visiting their website at: https://www.jts.edu.jm/

The blog post/article was written by 

Rev. Renaldo McKenzie,

Doctoral Candidate at Georgetown University and Lecturer at the Jamaica Theological Seminary.

Renaldo is the author of the upcoming book: “Neoliberalism, Globalization, Income Inequality, Poverty and Resistance” available for purchase April 15, 2021.