It is not hard for visitors from the mainland United States to draw comparisons between Campamento El Guacio and Presbyterian camps back home. “You can just imagine kids there in the summertime,” says Bryce Wiebe, director of
Special Offerings for the Presbyterian Mission Agency, reflecting on the facility with the requisite dorms, dining hall and fields you expect at a summer camp.
Online giving is steadily growing at “Decatur’s oldest church with the newest ideas,” according to the Rev. Dr. Todd Speed. He’s the senior pastor at Decatur Presbyterian Church, an 800-member multi-generational church in the east Atlanta metro area that has used services from the Presbyterian Foundation to collect online donations since 2012.
Every year, the first Sunday in Lent is designated “Wear your blue T-shirt to church Sunday” as a testament of one of the ways that One Great Hour of Sharing makes a difference.
When mission co-workers speak at churches around the country, they seek to educate. But sometimes they motivate, and that’s what happened to Nina Geist, a fourth-grader at Rogers Park Elementary, who attends First Presbyterian Church in Anchorage, Alaska.
Young Presbyterians who enjoy camping and love spending time with friends in their church youth group have an opportunity during 2019 to do both — and help people who are living in poverty while they’re at it.
Compassion fatigue — that malady that many pastors, first responders and others in helping professions suffer that can leave them feeling isolated, tired, trapped or worse — can be overcome, and there’s help for those who, as the Rev. Dr. Dana Sutton put it, “are healing the world and need to heal themselves.”
I told that to myself many times as I took three arduous 2 ½-hour tests, as well as a black belt practice test, all leading up to a final exam. This was over and above four years of rigorous classes, color belt tests and a binder full of requirements toward the rank of “1st dan,” the first-degree black belt in tae kwon do, a Korean martial art that emphasizes kicking techniques.
If Luis Ramos Salgado had tried to ride the storm out in his home, he wouldn’t be able to walk down his street today.
“I’d be dead,” he says through a translator, standing in the kitchen of the only home he’s ever known in San Juan’s Caño Martín Peña area.
Saying “Christ is a God of peace,” the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Korea says he finds reasons for hope in the most recent inter-Korean summit.
“The dishwashing detergent is lost.” In Cuba, one would say, “El detergente de lavar platos está perdido.” That means that you will not find dishwashing detergent in the store these days. As we enter our fourth year as mission co-workers in Cuba, we realize how easy it is sometimes to forget that we are strangers living in a foreign land. We still remember many embarrassing instances when we called household items a different name from what residents called them. Yes, we have spoken Spanish since childhood, and day-to-day conversations are easy. But regional nuances in the way people in Cuba talk to each other provide learning experiences for people like us.
