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Mission Yearbook
Five core tenets—intentional Christian community, simple living, cross-cultural mission, leadership development and vocational discernment—resonate with participants at each of the Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program’s 21 sites. To better show how YAVs engage in these principles, the YAV program has begun a series of Instagram account “takeovers,” where individual sites are allotted a 2-3-day period during which their images and stories will be featured at @yavprogram. This dedicated focus allows candidates, friends of the program and volunteers’ home communities to receive a moment-to-moment, day-to- day understanding of how YAVs live and work.
A Sierra Leone resident recently said that the drive from Kenema to the Liberian border is like riding six hours inside of a concrete mixer. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) delegates visiting the region agreed with this assessment after making the trip on the all-dirt road.
The Rev. Juan J. Sarmiento, associate director for mission with The Outreach Foundation, will preach opening worship and give the Tuesday morning plenary address at “Living, Dying, Rising,” the 2017 national gathering for 1001 New Worshiping Communities.
The joyful update came in the form of a YouTube video posted to Facebook. Jenna Heery, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) candidate for ordination as a teaching elder and family services coordinator for Finger Lakes Donor Recovery Network, and her husband, the Rev. Patrick Heery, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Auburn, New York, and former editor of Presbyterians Today, shared their pregnancy announcement on February 13. Titled “Our Infertility Journey to a Double Rainbow,” the video documents the couple’s struggle to achieve a full-term pregnancy after several losses.
Presbyterian Pan American School president Doug Dalglish remembers a trip he took in 2016 to Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary—when he experienced again how the school he serves is preparing young Christian leaders (grades 9-12) for the whole world.
The air is thick and humid on a typical day in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Driving along the streets of this seaside community, you’ll mostly find young people peddling their wares to the motorists as the temperatures hover in the mid-90s. They’re selling everything from fruit drinks and bananas to bicycle tires and shoes. Women balance trays of neatly stacked fruits, nuts and eggs as they make their way along the sidewalks dotted with small businesses. Everyone is seeking to make a living, side-by-side every day.
Rachel Kahindo’s calm demeanor concealed the distress in which she had left behind her family. Just 24 hours earlier, some 50 children, women and men had been hacked to death a mile up the road from where she lives in Beni, a rural town in the volatile East of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was the deadliest attack since the militia had stepped up its activity two years before. Despite the traumatic events, Rachel had traveled to the provincial capital of Goma to be trained as a facilitator for trauma-healing in children. The nine-day event, which included a camp for 50 youngsters age 8 to 18, was organized by the Protestant Council of Churches in Congo (ECC) in collaboration with the DRC Bible Alliance. Rachel, the coordinator of women’s ministries of the Baptist church in the Beni district, met up with 28 ECC women leaders and schoolteachers from five provincial synods, who together represented 12 ECC member denominations.
Vandalism in two Jewish cemeteries in February has caused concern not only in the Jewish community, but also among interfaith partners working to confront religious-based violence. Members of the Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy in St. Louis and the Presbytery of Philadelphia have come alongside Jewish partners to offer support.
April 17, 2017 Small-scale farmers—women and men—feed us all. Their labor keeps us alive. They care for the soil, the seeds, the land and the waters. They make up nearly… Read more »
The men were taken first, then the women and children were brutalized. Witnesses saw the Euphrates run red with blood, and women plunged into the river to escape the terrors of the desert march. Armenian villages throughout the Ottoman territories of 1915 were emptied in a systematic campaign to demean and destroy innocent victims. Although modern-day Turkey actively denies this genocide, historians have gathered undisputable evidence of at least a million Armenians killed and a million more dispersed from their ancient homeland.
