After discussing the proposed 2023-2024 Mission Work Plan in both small groups and all together Thursday, the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board will vote Friday on the plan that will guide much of the mission agency’s work as it seeks to take on additional areas of concentration while maintaining and expanding efforts regarding the three foci of the Matthew 25 invitation: building congregational vitality, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty.
The Rev. Mark Adams, a mission co-worker at the U.S.-Mexico border, tells an unsettling story about Jaciel, a six-year-old boy at Frontera de Cristo’s New Hope Community Center.
By way of photo submission, Presbyterians are invited to tell the world the ways their church, worshiping community, mid council or organization is carrying out the Matthew 25 invitation.
To accompany congregations on their missional journey, mission co-workers periodically return to the U.S. to travel around the country for interpretation assignment.
Bethel Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia is an African American congregation of about 45 members that’s doing the work of a congregation 10 times its size. Bethel is described as a little church with a big heart for mission. The congregation accepted the Matthew 25 invitation in 2019, but it was already doing the work the gospel requires.
“Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said during his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, capping the March on Washington.
Almost six decades later it’s well past time. But two leaders engaged mightily in the struggle said during Monday’s online forum “God and Division” hosted by the Katie Geneva Cannon Center for Womanist Leadership at Union Presbyterian Seminary said religion has a significant place in the battle.
“Being Matthew 25,” a monthly interactive livestream series designed to inspire congregations, mid councils and groups to help care for the least of these, debuted Thursday with a look at the work of Central Presbyterian Church in Princeton, Kentucky, a church that’s been a blessing for people dealing with the December 2021 tornadoes that struck Western Kentucky, killing 77 people.
With the exception of how the term “militarism” is understood, the proposed 2023-2024 Mission Work Plan received a warm reception Thursday by the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board’s Coordinating Committee.
