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Mission Yearbook
Communicating with the congregation is one of the most important things we do. Doing it effectively increases awareness and engagement. For most organizations, email remains a primary vehicle for communicating en masse. It is gradually being supplanted by text messaging, but judging by the number of emails I receive, it remains the medium of choice. The problem, though, is that most emails are ignored without ever being opened. I will discuss a couple of the most important factors that will determine whether a recipient decides to open your email.
Indigenous communities have been struck by the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit people (MMIW) for decades. This epidemic is a systemic failure where Indigenous women are going missing and being murdered at alarmingly high rates with minimal justice. Within the past several years, the MMIW movement has brought awareness of this violence to the public’s attention. Still, there is much work to be done.
I have never used the praying hands emoji as much as I have the past two years. I serve as a chaplain in a city trauma center, so I pray a lot. But the COVID-19 pandemic provoked more need for prayer than I have ever felt before; thus, the use of the praying hands emoji increased as the pandemic continued.
Gardening began for me as a personal spiritual practice. Something about having my hands in the dirt grounded me. As I began getting more serious about it, I began seeing how food intersects many of the areas of justice, from race and immigration to ecology and wealth inequality. I saw that growing food was a way to effect change on a local level as well as a place to start conversations about larger systemic changes. When done well, gardening can be both a means of connecting to the Creator and to our neighbors.
More than 750 people were present online for the daylong Mental Health and Asian Americans Conference recently put on by the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Movie theaters and concert venues have reopened, and my social life has become colorful again. After experiencing pandemic social distancing, I can mingle in a crowd and exchange appreciative comments and nods. As social animals, we are driven to connect and congregate. Yet the Christian faith also makes a strong case for the spiritual practice of solitude: If you want to find your life, you need to lose it by stepping back from the crowd, by doing less and by doing with less.
To celebrate the first 50 years of the National Caucus of Korean Presbyterian Churches (NCKPC), the organization held its Jubilee Symposium, “This Is Our Story,” last fall.
Like thousands of other Palestinians, my parents experienced dispossession and became refugees because of the Nakba (disaster) that befell the Palestinian people and society on May 15, 1948. Becoming refugees and seeing the disintegration of all that you used to love is a very difficult transition. Spiritual guidance and comfort are a resource that I witnessed both my father and mother use to recoup and go on.
May Friendship Day, a Church Women United initiative, is most often celebrated on the first Friday of the month of May around a theme of shared concern for Christian women and their communities. The predecessor to May Friendship Day, May Fellowship Day, began in 1933 after two Christian women’s groups planned gatherings based on similar concerns: child health and children of migrant families.
War is neither necessary nor romantic. The deaths that come from war are needless and tragic. Those who give their lives in war may be remembered and honored for their selfless sacrifice, but the wars which brought their deaths are not glorious adventures. Our entry into war may at times be unavoidable but must never be sought. We mourn those killed in war on Memorial Day as we grieve the pain of loss and deprivation.
