The woman from Iraq was dressed completely in black.
It was the first time she had been to Refugee Family Literacy at Memorial Drive Ministries in Stone Mountain, Georgia in two weeks. When Jennifer Green, director of the program, asked what had happened, she learned the woman’s brother had been killed by a car bomb in Iraq.
Green gave the woman a hug, told her she was sad for her, and took her to class, explaining to her teacher what had happened. It was an English-as-a-second-language class for mothers of children in the program’s preschool.
Preachers, educators and worship planners who want to attend to the three themes of being a Matthew 25 church — building congregational vitality, eradicating systemic poverty and dismantling structural racism — have a new resource beginning with Dec. 1, the start of the new liturgical year, and carrying them through Pentecost on May 31, 2020.
I still visualize the words etched into a granite slab on a wall of Elmina, a stately castle on the coast of Ghana, constructed in 1482 by the Portuguese:
As world leaders converge on New York City for the annual United Nations General Assembly, the Presbyterian Ministry at the United Nations (PMUN) is actively involved representing the church on a variety of issues.
Melissa Pearson didn’t hear what she was expecting at the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People’s grant workshop Thursday night at the Dunbar Recreation Center, which was a pleasant surprise.
A Catholic priest, a charismatic layperson and a Presbyterian pastor met with the patrol officer in charge of the Douglas border patrol station to discuss possible responses to the increased number of people dying while migrating in Sulphur Springs Valley, the valley in which Douglas, Arizona, and Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, sit. The “prevention through deterrence” border policy instituted by the Clinton administration, the economic boom of the 1990s and the devastation of the Mexican economy had turned our sleepy and isolated valley into the primary crossing point for unauthorized migration into the U.S. As a nation, we chose deserts and mountains as deadly deterrents to migration. Our policy is intentionally lethal.
On World Communion Sunday (Oct. 6), members of Temple Terrace Presbyterian Church (TTPC) in Florida will lift a loaf of bread from a country where they have lived and recite the words of institution in the language of that country — Arabic, German, Spanish, Greek, Tamil and others.
Refugees and migrants are at the heart of the mission and calling of Protestant churches in Italy. The geopolitical position of Italy in the Mediterranean Sea has made it one of the European countries most involved in the dynamics of migration.
The root causes of migration are many. The answers are sometimes elusive. But Presbyterian World Mission, its mission co-workers and global partners are working together to find those answers.
