I am Veronica Soto-Feliciano, 37 years old, born and raised on a small island in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico. I come from a family that has been serving God in the PC(USA) for over 35 years. I’m one of three children in a family that loves to celebrate their happiness and failures with all the extended family.
This year Presbyterians celebrate the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. The theses, which criticized the sale of indulgences by church officials, are considered the opening salvo in the Protestant Reformation — a movement that emphasized individual relationships with God and salvation through faith alone.
“If you ask people, ‘What are your problems?’ they’ll immediately expect you’re going to come in and fix them,” Attahiru told me. Facing village expectations of handouts was his No. 1 concern in moving forward with Community Health Evangelism (CHE). Attahiru is from a village of 300 in Niger, where he is a lay pastor and youth leader. He recently finished the church’s regional CHE training, which introduced 25 pastors to how they can use the CHE strategy to help their communities increase overall health, development and exposure to the gospel.
Community Health Evangelism (CHE) is a multifaceted approach to ministry that addresses the needs of the whole person (physically, spiritually, emotionally and socially) through training and mentorship in disease prevention, community development, evangelism and discipleship.
When I ask women church leaders in Africa about important issues, the need for women to be able to support their families always comes up first. Closely tied to this concern is the need for education, as it is the surest way for people to be able to get ahead.
Education can take on many forms at different ages and stages.
During the past year, over 1 million people have had to flee their homes in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo because of militia and/or army activities. As political unrest has spilled over into ethnic violence, many villages have been burned, and health centers and schools have been destroyed in the process. Since 1892, the Kasai region has been the main area in Congo where Presbyterian mission work has been carried out with what is now the Presbyterian Church of Congo (CPC).
At the end of the Rwandan genocide in 1994, 16 Presbyterian pastors had been killed, many had been wounded and some had fled the country. The churches that remained were empty.
The president of the Presbyterian Church of Rwanda called his colleague Elisee Musemakweli to return from Belgium, where he was finishing his PhD. Together, with the help of German and Dutch partners, they restarted a two-year theological training course, with emphasis on peacebuilding and reconciliation.
Reconciliation is a sacred space where weary bodies are refreshed and troubled souls are soothed, where the roar of oppression is silenced and the calm of compassion resounds. The pathway to reconciliation is long and grueling with setbacks, detours and delays. Along the journey lie ambushes of criticism and alienation, yet those on the journey press on like flocks of birds surging through cold winds for warmer homes. Reconciliation is a distant place — far from the battlefields of South Sudan — yet not beyond reach.
I was in a morning Bible study when I received the phone call. It was from the father of one of my youth group teens who had called to let me know that his son “B.A.” had been shot. Hearing this news, I felt overcome by disbelief and sadness as I began asking a flurry of questions. Dad calmly replied, “Reverend, he is alive, he isOK; the gunshots were not fatal.” I was thankful and relieved that B.A. was still alive, but then another wave of sadness overtook me as I remembered that two weeks earlier, I had suspended B.A. from youth group activities because he, as a “prank,” had brought a BB gun there and threatened others with it. This happened the week following the massacre at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, so as one can imagine, I did not find his “prank” amusing.
Presbyterian mission co-workers Jeff and Christi Boyd developed a floor and board game several years ago to help U.S. Presbyterians appreciate the joint efforts of students, parents, communities and churches to improve education in Africa. The game also prompts players to ponder the plight of African children.
