Make A Donation
Click Here >
Mission Yearbook
A book set for publication this fall invites us to join the church movement reshaping our neighborhoods — embracing love and creating community to house our neighbors and recognize our shared humanity.
The Rev. Sharyl Dixon, a teaching elder commissioner from the Presbytery of the Coastlands, came prepared when she arrived at Salt Lake City for the 226th General Assembly. She was equipped with a “snackle” box and over 100 “little Jesuses.”
Sarah Mibulano had a little problem.
The 19-year-old Young Adult Advisory Delegate from the Presbytery of Nevada — who emigrated to the U.S. from Congo with her family in 2015 — had her citizenship interview back in February and still hadn’t heard a word.
September marks the beginning of our yearly Season of Peace. Every fall, the Presbyterian Church’s Peacemaking Program extends an invitation to join with people of faith from around the country and the world for A Season of Peace, a monthlong pilgrimage designed to deepen the pursuit of peace for congregations, small groups, families and individuals. This season is a time of growth, encouragement, challenge, inspiration and education that leads the way to World Communion Sunday by inviting you to consider your own relationship to peacemaking and justice.
When one usually thinks of the state of Utah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints often comes to mind. But Presbyterians and other faith groups have been in the state for decades and have found ways to collaborate on important challenges such as hunger and poverty. In the fifth and final part of our series on Utah’s Presbyterian ministry, church leaders share their experiences of partnership with the LDS church.
If anything can succeed in generating a solid crowd at 6:45 a.m. during the already rigorous demands of a General Assembly, it’s the promise that God is doing a new thing.
And, just maybe, a speaker like the Rev. Mark Elsdon.
The Women of Faith Awards were established in 1986 to honor women members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) whose lives exemplify their Christian commitments. Nominations are received from throughout the church, and honorees are selected by a committee of representatives from groups related to Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries and Presbyterian Women. Awards are presented at the Women of Faith Breakfast during the General Assembly.
“Kairos is an ancient Greek word, describing a time of great change when the old ways of the world are dying and new ones are struggling to be born,” said Pauline Pisano, organizer for the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice. “It’s clear we are living through exactly such a time today.” Pisano called this time “full of grave danger and rare opportunity” and described the work of the center in lifting up leaders and activists to take bold, prophetic and imaginative action to break free from the “intolerable conditions of poverty, systemic racism, militarism, ecological devastation and more.”
One of this year’s Synod School preachers, the Rev. Katie Styrt, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Milan, Illinois, called John’s account of the wedding at Cana “the kind of miracle that doesn’t line up with good stewardship policies. I don’t know of any church recently that has given away 180 gallons of wine. That’s about 908 bottles. That’s not in anybody’s budget.”
The common good is rarely a “trending” topic. Across various platforms, the latest guffaw by a politician or celebrity inevitably outperforms reflections on this concept, as do spectacles of spending and images photoshopped to perfection. Perhaps the challenge to locate threads dedicated to, let alone acting from, the common good has to do with the complexity of its component parts. In a society marked by polarities, how do we even begin to determine what is “common” or what is “good”?
