Ash Wednesday — which falls this year on Feb. 14 — marks the beginning of the season of Lent, a 40-day period of prayer, fasting and self-examination which culminates in Holy Week and the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord at Easter.
An updated version of the PC(USA)’s Daily Prayer app is now available for Apple, Android and Amazon devices. The app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since its debut in 2012. This is the first significant update to the app, and it comes in response to requests to have the new version match the latest (2018) version of the Book of Common Worship.
Now that they’ve turned the corner on Advent and Christmas, preachers are, ready or not, turning their attention to Lent, which begins with Ash Wednesday on Feb. 14 and runs through Easter Sunday, March 31.
With crayons at the ready and voices lifted high, the PC(USA)’s chapel coordinating team called members of the national staff together for online worship Wednesday to celebrate the Epiphany of the Lord/Día de los Reyes (Day of the Three Kings), which is observed on Jan. 6.
This weekend, South Presbyterian Church in Rochester, New York, will celebrate the beginning of the second decade of selling its building and implementing its Acts of Faith community, a throwback to a first-century model of being the church.
“For more than 50 years, Call to Worship and its precursor journals have fostered deep dialogue among pastors, musicians, and scholars around the theology and practice of worship,” said the Rev. Dr. David Gambrell, associate for worship with the Presbyterian Mission Agency, who sees the new website as an opportunity to expand these conversations in digital spaces and draw in fresh perspectives.
Ahead of Sunday’s lectionary reading about the resourcefulness of Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, Presbyterian hymnwriter the Rev. Carolyn Winfrey Gillette offers free of charge to any faith community while worshiping “There Came a Time in Egypt,” a hymn to the tune of “The Church’s One Foundation” that also “relates the kindness that we should share with refugees and immigrants to the holy disobedience of the Egyptian midwives to the orders of Pharaoh,” as Gillette puts it.
Nearly 60 members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s national staff joined the Rev. Irvin Porter and Ruling Elder Carla Alexander of Brook Presbyterian Church in Hillburn, New York, Wednesday for an online chapel service celebrating the gifts of the world’s Indigenous population, estimated to be 476 million people living in 90 countries.
Concluding her week-long journey through biblical accounts starting with the letter “c” — Creation, crisis, covenant and Christ came before — the Rev. DeEtte Decker, the preacher during Synod School last week and the communications director for the Presbyterian Mission Agency, concluded worship on Friday with more alliteration: the church as co-creator.
