Serge is a young boy in Congo who lost both his parents. He started living with his grandmother, but when Serge misbehaved, his grandmother accused him of being a sorcerer. He was kicked out and forced to live on the street.
Like nearly every organization in the world, the COVID pandemic forced the Congo Mission Network to adapt when it came time to hold their annual mission conference, but they didn’t just adapt, they grew and will likely never go back to the old way of doing things.
It is impossible not to be emotionally moved by the rows of crosses displayed on three sides of College Hill Community Church in Dayton, Ohio. The 20 crosses on display honor Black lives lost in senseless killings, the majority at the hands of police officers sworn to provide protection.
Ruth Patterson Phipps Metzel, a retired career mission worker with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), died at Sunnyside Presbyterian Community in Harrisonburg, Virginia on March 21. She was 93.
Like most recently released ex-offenders, Craig Rockenbach faced the challenge of reentering the workforce carrying the stigma of a criminal conviction.
San Gabriel Presbyterian Church in Georgetown, Texas, has long supported the work of mission co-workers Jeff and Christi Boyd in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But when the Boyds visited their church and they heard about Congolese children like Serge, they knew they could do more, even with limited resources.
The soup at Heritage Presbyterian Church in Glendale, Arizona, is a recipe for encouraging mission support. A Sunday school class composed of elementary and middle-school students generated mission interest earlier this year through a soup-making venture aimed at helping Presbyterian Mission. They assembled the ingredients, put them in jars they had labeled, and sold the mixture to the congregation. The children used the proceeds to give a pair of goats, a family of chickens, a piglet and six refugee food baskets through the Presbyterian Giving Catalog.
The humanitarian conditions in the conflict-ridden Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are rapidly deteriorating. There is a now a deepening hunger crisis and an estimated 3.2 million people are without reliable access to enough nutritious food.
For more than 17 years, the Presbyterian Hunger Program (PHP), through its Joining Hands initiative, has been tackling the root causes of hunger and poverty. PHP staff recently gathered with representatives from several countries to look at the progress and where to go from here.
During the past year, over one million people have fled their homes in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo because of military activities. As political unrest has spilled over into ethnic violence many villages were burned and health centers and schools were destroyed in the process.
