As a young teenager, Monika Ruiz made a life-altering decision. The village she’d grown up in, San Fernando in the state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, was being destroyed by drug wars that included killings, violence and corruption.
When seventh grader La Brandon Spillman heard the news he was going to be able to go to Menaul School (grades 6-12), he was overjoyed. His mother, Ella Spillman, started crying.
A recent breakdown of the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study ranked Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) members fourth in its percentage of members who earn more than $100,000 annually.
Alex Pappas, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ministerial inquirer under the care of Grace Presbytery, has received the Grace Presbytery Fellowship to fund her full seminary costs as she pursues a Master of Divinity degree at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.
Melissa Wiginton remembers the first thing she did after being hired by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. “We had to come up with a title when I started in 2011,” she says. “We wanted to make a statement about the seminary’s commitment to education with people who weren’t going to school here every da
St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco wanted to grow. So it hired the Rev. Theresa Cho as an associate pastor with the idea that her presence would help attract young Chinese families who were settling in the neighborhood. After three years, however, growth hadn’t happened in the way some people expected.
Members of Third Presbyterian Church of Rochester, New York believe more needs to be done to improve education in their city and they’ve launched an initiative to do just that.
The Rev. Dr. José Irizarry says he was a pew child. “I learned how to crawl and walk in the pews of the church,” he said. “It was home for me.” Becoming a minister, he said, was just one step in his development, which began in those pews in his small church in Puerto Rico. “I feel called by that community,” said Irizarry, who was recently named Vice President, Education at The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “That community nurtured me into leadership.”
In West Louisville, Westwood Presbyterian Church came up with a creative way to address what generations of African Americans have come to believe—“that life is cheap, and the cheapest of all are black lives.” By hosting a drama camp for African American kids earlier this year, Westwood took them back to a time when African American culture was thriving.
