Due to the ongoing financial impact of COVID-19, the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) is further reducing operations at Stony Point Center (SPC), which will serve as a small retreat center moving forward. In order to reduce expenses and allow time for transition, the small-group retreat model will utilize only the Gilmor Sloane and Allison houses. The main campus will be maintained but will not house guests as the PMA begins a period of prayerful discernment on SPC’s future and explores long-term viability, both missionally and financially.
The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour avant-garde film wasn’t well-received back in 1967. But its iconic status and concept proved stunningly successful in the middle of a 2020 pandemic.
This year’s global pandemic canceled conferences all across the globe, but the most creative and inventive groups figured out ways to turn those gatherings virtual.
In a normal year Crestfield Camp & Conference Center would be the summer home for more than 600 youth campers and nearly 3,000 conference and retreat attendees.
But 2020 has been anything but normal.
Monday’s final installment of “Awakening to Structural Racism” provided the more than 200 online participants with a tangible tool: a method for forming a concrete first step that individuals and congregations can take to dismantle systemic racism even as recent news reports indicate those first steps are sorely needed.
When the Rev. Dick Powell was tapped as a candidate for the job of President and CEO at Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, he had one demand: “If I can’t stay in the Board of Pensions plan, I’m not coming.” More than a decade later, Powell and every other full-time employee at the camp and conference center in the Texas Hill Country is a member of the Benefits Plan of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Stony Point Center and Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary, at the request of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, are teaming up to develop online and eventually in-person curriculum to support the Matthew 25 vision. Courses center on the three focuses of the vision: nurturing vital congregations and communities of faith, dismantling structural racism and working to end systemic poverty.
Maria Shupe thought the day when she would be able to pay off Highlands Presbyterian Camp & Retreat Center’s mortgage “might never come.” Before she arrived as executive director, the camp near Boulder, Colorado, had borrowed millions of dollars to build a lodge and retreat center.
Nearly 50 mask-wearing, health-screened, socially-distanced friends, board members and staff of Cedar Ridge Camp, a ministry of Mid-Kentucky Presbytery, gathered Wednesday to celebrate groundbreaking for the 60-year-old camp’s new chapel.
