How can we measure who is worshiping with us?
If your online worship uses Zoom, you can simply count the faces on your screen. But if you are streaming your worship to Facebook, YouTube or through your website, interpreting the metrics is trickier.
The Rev. Jimmie Hawkins and the Office of Public Witness in Washington, D.C. — together with National Capital Presbytery — recently hosted two women of faith who regaled a Zoom audience with stories of the decades they’ve spent advocating for and ministering to God’s people.
When we gather with friends and family at Christmas, we celebrate the many gifts that we have both given and received. Looking toward the Star of Bethlehem, we give thanks for the blessings of the past year and anticipate a future filled with hope and possibility. We live in hope that the Christmas gift we offer is exactly what that special person has been hoping for. Yet for those of us celebrating Advent’s expectation, we know that the only perfect gift ever given is the one we receive in Jesus Christ.
I still remember the furrowed brows of saints in my rural church when I suggested that rather than ask for donations to feed the children for an upcoming event, we should pay local food purveyors to cater the meal instead.
For the greater part of a decade, Gloria Klomsten has been traveling to the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota to spread love to Native American communities while working hand-in-hand with mission partners, such as Southminster Presbyterian Church in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
With the goal to help preachers explore biblical texts rather than explain them during their sermons, the Rev. Dr. Sally A. Brown, the Elizabeth M. Engle Professor of Preaching and Worship Emerita at Princeton Theological Seminary, was the guest recently on the Synod of the Covenant’s Equipping Preachers series. Watch Brown’s engaging talk, hosted by the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick, the synod executive, here.
At its recent meeting, the Presbytery of Boise invited congregations and denominational partners to display their mission activities in a presbytery-wide mission fair. To add some fun and competition, meeting participants were given a scavenger hunt list to track down answers that could be found only on the tables or by asking the mission fair participants. The first person to return a correct answer sheet won $100 to donate to one of the mission activities being displayed.
The Rev. Laura Sias-Lee has always been open to the Spirit leading her to do things differently, like successfully introducing an unorthodox way for her Sashabaw Presbyterian Church congregation to gather for worship.
One of the best-loved people at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, is Danny Miller, who’s now in his mid-30s and has been attending the church with his mother, Nancy Wilson, since he was 5 — three years after being diagnosed with autism.
Fortune tellers read palms. Ancient Etruscans read the livers of sheep. I’ve been reading sidewalks.
Dark purple splatters? Evidence of a mulberry tree nearby. BB-sized rounds crunching under foot? Choke cherry pits. And that gray, leaf-shaped stain, like the shadow of an object vaporized by a space alien’s destructo-beam? The calling card of a silver maple tree.
