The Rev. Cheryl Barnes was at her computer getting ready to go teach Bible school when the Lord sent an email.
Of course, it wasn’t actually the Lord. The email was from World Mission about a mission co-worker position with a strong focus on education. She went down the list. It was as though it had been written for her. Then she saw the location. It was in Malawi. She shut down her computer and went to church determined to forget all about it.
The Colegio Americano, an educational ministry of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC), celebrated its 150th anniversary this month. The school, older than the National University of Colombia, began in 1869 when Presbyterian mission worker Kate MacFerren began to teach English classes to a group of 18 girls in Bogotá.
Doris Ellyn Anderson Reeves, a Presbyterian missionary who taught at the same elementary school in Cameroon that she had once attended, died Dec. 30 at age 89.
About 25 Taiwanese pastors and several Guatemalan pastors would be arriving the next day to live together in a big old house at the PC(USA) conference center Montreat in Western North Carolina. I had visited the house shortly after the male collegiate summer staff had vacated. It looked pretty grim, with mildew in the bathrooms and carpets that had seen better days.
So, when I went back to see how the house looked on Sunday afternoon, I was delighted that two folks were just beginning to clean the house.
It was dark; our only illumination came from the stars and the faint light of electric candles. Frogs and crickets serenaded us, and it struck me as a beautiful and holy space. The labyrinth was in a small clearing, surrounded by trees, under the open sky, so I stopped and looked up at the stars every so often as I walked.
Saying “Christ is a God of peace,” the general secretary of the National Council of Churches in Korea says he finds reasons for hope in the most recent inter-Korean summit.
The church in Davydovo, Russia, was a thriving community of 1,000 members from five surrounding villages before the revolution. It was abruptly closed by the Communist authorities in 1936. People pulled down the cupolas and crosses with a tractor. The building was used for storage and then as a club but was neglected for 70 years. The roof collapsed around 1960, and there was nothing left but the shell of a building — only walls.
The Rev. Paula Cooper describes her leadership style as one that “deliberately works toward developing a culture that values a collaboration of God’s people and their gifts for ministry.” And now she has answered God’s call to help the people of East Central Africa do just that.
On Thursday, President Trump travels to the southern border of the U.S. to make his case for a $5 billion border wall to protect the country from an invasion of migrants. Mission co-worker Mark Adams has lived on the border since 1998. He believes that Christians are called to see the migrant issue very differently.
In Rwanda, “this present age” means living in a post-genocide world, where everything is colored by the brutality and betrayal of neighbor killing neighbor with machetes and clubs in the horror of 100 days in 1994.
To say “no” to the worldly passions that surround these memories is no easy task. The fear of “the other” and the desire for retaliation, even after all these years, is strong.
