Two college students who participated in a border ministry event in 2o19 found that the biggest impact came within themselves, and they responded by dedicating their lives to serving others.
The vision for the Matthew 25 invitation asks us to engage together in the three works of vitalizing congregations, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty. Though individual, these three works are inseparable. Can a congregation be vital without confronting racism? What is at stake when racism directs our congregational and community life?
With unanimous approval from Olympia Presbytery, Longview Presbyterian Church in Longview, Washington, is donating a 2-acre vacant lot adjacent to the church property to Housing Opportunities of Southwest Washington (HOSWWA). The land will provide space for 48 affordable housing units, about half of which will be reserved for people transitioning from homelessness.
Phyllis Tickle, the late author and founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, once wrote that every 500 years the church experiences a “massive upheaval,” where old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge. Tickle used the analogy of a “500-year rummage sale” to illustrate how the church enters into a period of cleaning house, deciding what to keep and what to toss in order to make way for the new thing God is doing.
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 was anything but normal. Christian camps throughout the country had to rely on outside-the-box thinking for survival through the summer. For Crestfield’s executive director, Gene Joiner, survival mode came head-on: He joined Crestfield in January 2020, and in mid-March the pandemic hit, effectively shutting down the facility.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s recent Week of Action concluded with a Day of Service on a Sunday that prompted youths and families from two churches in Buffalo, New York, to gather for a park cleanup.
The bold vision and invitation of Matthew 25:31-46 to be the hands and feet of Jesus, serving people who are hungry, oppressed, imprisoned or poor, is awakening compassionate faith to new possibilities in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In Matthew, Jesus tells the story of a landowner needing workers for his vineyard. Before dawn, he strikes a deal with some workers, promising to pay a full day’s wage for a full day’s work. Apparently needing more help, he finds more laborers midmorning, assuring them that they’ll also be paid fairly. By lunchtime, he’s returned for more help. He goes out again midafternoon for workers and then again, with only an hour before closing time. At dusk, the last to begin working are the first to get paid — and instead of receiving the rate for one hour, they receive enough for a full day. They are ecstatic! The only people happier are those early birds — the first workers of the day — whose imaginations go wild dreaming about what they might do with the pay they will be getting. They might also be thinking that they’ll never show up for work that early again. Their dreams crash when they get paid what they had agreed to at the breaking of dawn’s first light. They shout, “It’s not fair!”
Loveness is a 9-year-old child in Malawi who has a new friend in mission co-worker the Rev. Cheryl Barnes.
Barnes serves as an education facilitator for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), where she collaborates with the CCAP Education Department and the education departments of the five CCAP Synods — three in Malawi, one in Zambia and one in Zimbabwe — to improve the quality of primary school education in the many schools under the CCAP umbrella.
Providing and packing supplies like pens and pencils, making puppet kits during Sunday service for educational classes and holding events to raise awareness and funds.
Through these actions and more, Presbyterians are helping families and individuals who are hit hardest by the loss and struggles surrounding the spread of HIV and AIDS.
