There’s a worshiping community near Detroit where the average age is around 85, with many who attend pushing 90 and then some. It sounds like a congregation, like many others across the country, that is struggling and will likely fold in a few years, right? Wrong. This church body is bustling and growing steadily with no hint of slowing down.
Representatives from among the PC(USA)’s most diverse and innovative faith gatherings — its 1001 New Worshiping Communities — joined virtually Thursday during the “Being Matthew 25” monthly broadcast to celebrate the 10th year of the initiative. Watch the 42-minute conversation here.
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance’s Story Productions, which has presented award-winning documentaries such as “Flint: The Poisoning of an American City” and “Trigger: The Ripple Effect of Gun Violence,” is at work on a new film looking at the impacts of industrial pollution and environmental racism.
On the latest edition of Everyday God-talk, the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, discusses the church’s Matthew 25 vision and those who influenced her theologically to become an agent of change.
From celebrating World Wetlands Day and engaging in community advocacy to raising their own butterflies and growing their own herbs and spices, Dorchester Presbyterian Church in Summerville, South Carolina, shows love for God’s Creation.
The Presbyterian Mission Agency Board spent the first day of its three-day meeting Wednesday on orientation, worship and a tour of the beautiful and peaceful grounds of Stony Point Center in the Hudson River Valley.
Beginning with Advent, preachers, music leaders and the people who hear them each week will enter a year with Matthew’s gospel, thanks to the Revised Common Lectionary, which turns the focus to Year A beginning Nov. 27.
A new webinar from the Presbyterian Mission Agency will help preachers, church musicians and other worship leaders connect Scriptures from the Gospel of Matthew with the PC(USA)’s work on building congregational vitality, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty.
According to a 2020 count, Los Angeles County had 66,433 homeless residents, about the same population as two of California’s college towns, Palo Alto and Davis. Churches including First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and its indominable director of Urban Mission and Community Outreach, Amie Quigley, became “the model for how church-based homeless ministries work in collaboration with city, county and private agencies,” said the Rev. Heidi Worthen Gamble, Mission Catalyst for the Presbytery of the Pacific.
Churches in the Presbytery of Denver are reaching out to their neighbors without homes in traditional and even system-altering ways, including a successful effort to get the Aurora City Council to alter zoning on a tract of land to permit development of much-needed affordable housing in what’s become the seventh most expensive place in the nation to own or rent a home.
