Make A Donation
Click Here >
mission crossroads
“Stewardship” is one of those strange church-y words that we rarely use outside church and that can carry with it obtuse meanings.
Next month, we will be gathered again in General Assembly, this time in Salt Lake City, discerning, according to our ecclesiology, the leading of the Spirit for our times as we consider how we organize our life and witness as the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
It is an unbelievable paradox that in the recent years, Poland was ruled by a political party with “justice” (and “law”) in its name. Meanwhile, these years brought no justice to many marginalized groups in Poland, and since there was no justice, many spheres of life lacked peace.
In Colombia, the Protestant evangelical churches and Christian organizations that are part of the Inter-Church Dialogue for Peace — DiPaz — have been organizing for about 10 years, working to overcome violence and achieve peace through dialogue based on an understanding of the gospel that calls us to commit to nonviolence and antimilitarism, the search for truth and justice that make reconciliation possible in our country.
Tomas (not his real name) is a church minister in Manipur, Northeast India. He had teary eyes when he recalled what happened on May 3, 2023.
“I have never seen such violence in my lifetime,” he said. “They systematically ransacked our places. That first night, they burnt down a church nearby. The sky turned red by flames.”
A few months later, it was reported that 250 churches of different denominations had been burnt. For several weeks, the manhunt continued.
Over 100 people died. The trauma is unimaginable, especially among women and children.
According to the population and housing census of 2021, more than 71% of the people in Ghana identify as Christians in various church denominations.
The pictures of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza being forced by the Israeli military to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip heading south evoked old memories of the 1948 Nakba. In 1948, Jewish Israeli terror groups destroyed and erased over 500 Palestinian villages and displaced nearly 800,000 Palestinians,¹ including more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians who had to flee, thus becoming refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.
As a fundamental pillar of our Christian experience and testimony, justice is inseparable from peace and a fulfilling life for every human being as proclaimed by the good news of the Kingdom of God. Currently, there is a grave deficit of both justice and peace in many countries around the world, particularly in Central America.
Christians are minorities in Asia and the Pacific. The area is known to be home to the most Buddhists in the world, with a projection of 476 million followers in 2050. Nonetheless, the Christian population may rise by about 33% and reach 381 million in 2050. The highest growth in church membership occurred between 1970–2020. In countries like China, the phenomenon of house churches continues to grow, which is in direct contrast with the global North, where church membership is declining.
For Pastor Helivao Poget, the situation was familiar. Poget is the director of the National Chaplaincy Program for the 6-million-member Church of Jesus Christ in Madagascar, a PC(USA) global partner, which goes by its Malagasy acronym, FJKM. A social worker and a missiology lecturer at one of FJKM’s theological seminaries, much of Poget’s ministry has been with marginalized people, including those exploited by labor traffickers and Madagascar’s sex tourism industry.
