If “Zoom fatigue” is really a thing, the nearly 200 participants in the second day of the Mid Council Financial Network’s (MCFN) virtual conference showed no traces of this pandemic phenomenon.
In a year of unforeseen changes and challenges, the Matthew 25 vision to actively engage congregations in the world and community around them has taken on new meaning. Launched in April 2019, the Matthew 25 invitation has received its 700th congregation to make the commitment to radical and fearless discipleship.
You may be startled to learn that 25% of children under 6 now live in poverty, nearly 23% of the American population can’t afford a medication they need and 17 out of every 10,000 people in the United States were experiencing homelessness on a single night. The Presbyterian Mission Agency has created a short video designed to raise awareness of the systemic poverty facing people in all walks of life, especially with the additional impact of the pandemic. The video is available to download and share across social media and websites.
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.
The four-week Matthew 25 course “Civil Initiative and the Engaged Church” concluded Monday with a presentation on being more aware of and reducing the destructive damage done by hate groups and the intolerance they help to foster.
The Coordinating Table, established just before General Assembly by the then-Moving Forward Implementation Commission (now a special committee), held its initial meeting Monday to learn what’s expected of its work and how that work can best be accomplished.
While tummies are still full from Thanksgiving and hearts have just begun to glow with the first candlelight of Advent, the secular calendar offers yet another important observance — #GivingTuesday.
On Monday Margo Cowan took the 50 or so people engaged in the four-week Matthew 25 study “Civil Initiative and the Engaged Church” into the work that the nonprofit Keep Tucson Together is doing to prevent the breakup and deportation of immigrant families.
The year was 2009, the place was Yei in what is now South Sudan, the newest country in the world. I was a mission co-worker serving as the first principal of RECONCILE Peace Institute, and our first class of students had arrived. The student body included about 45 church and community leaders from a dozen or more ethnic groups on opposing sides of a two- decades-long civil war. They had come to Yei to take courses in community-based trauma healing, peace studies and conflict transformation.
