Preaching to an online congregation of about 85 people during the Chapel service held on Juneteenth, the Rev. Keion Jackson leaned on the account found in Deuteronomy 31:1-6, which depicts Moses, on the precipice of leading God’s people into the Promised Land, instead turning things over to his successor Joshua, at God’s command, and instructing the people to be strong and bold.
Many may recall the Queen of Sheba, who, according to 1 Kings 10, caravanned from East Africa to visit King Solomon of the Israelites, a monarch deemed wiser than all the sages of Egypt and the Middle East.
On Monday the Presbyterian Writers Guild celebrated the work of three authors during an awards presentation all too familiar over the past 2½ years: via Zoom, rather than the in-person General Assembly venue that members much prefer.
Ever since discovering their church was built a century ago partly through funds donated “for the white race only,” the 1,200 or so members and the leadership of Knox Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, have worked hard not to duck the church’s history, but to learn from it and to, in tangible ways, reach out and make connections that make it clear where the church is headed during the next 100 years: ending the sin of systemic racism.
Honored through many miles of social distance earlier this year for their selections by the Presbyterian Writers Guild as the David Steele Distinguished Writer Award winner and Best First Book winner, Jane Kurtz and Caroline Kurtz have responded with an audio thank-you card that connects growing up as missionary kids with the literacy and other work to which they’ve been devoted as adults.
The Rev. Sharon Stewart of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Rev. Dr. Melodie Jones Pointon, senior pastor and head of staff at Eastridge Presbyterian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, recently served as co-conveners of one of the first virtual mission network meetings.
Caroline Kurtz, a missionary kid who from age 5 grew up in Ethiopia with her parents and siblings, has been named winner of the Presbyterian Writers Guild’s biennial Best First Book Award for the best first book by a Presbyterian author written during 2018-2019. The Best First Book Award is co-sponsored by the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation and comes with a $500 cash prize.
Ed Pollock, the son of longtime Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker Ted Pollock, is a man on a mission.
Since 2017, Pollock and members of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Mount Airy, Maryland, have worked tirelessly to collect enough books and Bibles to build a theological reference library for seminary students in Gambella, Ethiopia.
Caroline Kurtz felt exiled to a foreign country — not when she traveled with her parents and sisters to Ethiopia, but when she returned to the United States to attend college in Illinois.
