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mission yearbook
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has affirmed since 2016 a commitment to mission and ministry as guided by Matthew 25. That commitment, to building vital congregations, dismantling structural racism, and eradicating systemic poverty, is meant to move us into deeper understandings of who we are called to be as followers of Jesus Christ and how we are called to love our neighbors.
“Finally!” was all my United Methodist friend had to text me when I asked how their General Conference was going. While I echo their relief, I know the recovery period for my LGBTQIA+ siblings is far from being final. Presbyterians stand as proof that the vote is sometimes the easiest part of change. As the leader of a ministry with over 90% LGBTQIA+-identifying members, I know a vote is one step of a long journey — one that began with fervent prayers for change. Not to change the Book of Order, but to change oneself. For every LGBTQIA+ person raised in the Christian faith, their journey of self-discovery includes years, often decades, of praying to God to change who they are.
Preachers ascending the pulpit in a polarized church can turn to the letter of 1 John for, say, inspiration — or even a preaching series.
“It’s not an easy time for the preacher, trying to navigate our own biases,” said the Rev. Dr. Janette Ok, “much less those of our congregation members.”
A Louisville pastor recently summed up the nation’s gun violence crisis with a three-word refrain: “Enough is enough.”
The Rev. Dr. Angela Johnson, pastor of Louisville’s Grace Hope Presbyterian Church, delivered a brief but powerful sermon during a morning chapel service for employees of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
One thing that the 20th-wealthiest county in the United States — a south-central Texas community — and a Boston neighborhood, Roxbury, which is riddled with violence and underemployment and is also the home of the R&B music group New Edition, have in common: Both are touched by the epidemic of mental illness.
This powerful understanding of God’s propensity toward helping and healing the least of these comes from the story of the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg. A movement of laywomen that arose in the 13th century, the beguines were contemplatives, mystics and healers. Mechthild posited that, “God is never closer than in the longing emptiness of the night.” From that emptiness, she received and shared “prophetic critiques of the religious leaders of her day for their lack of holiness and their hostility toward passionate spirituality.”
In a presentation that featured a Zoom conversation with three people on the ground in Ukraine, the Rev. Dr. Robert Gamble, executive director of This Child Here, recently spoke on the topic “The Lamentations of Ukraine” with clergy and members of churches in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery. Gamble and others illustrated ways that This Child Here, a ministry validated by the Presbytery of Western North Carolina, works with families, mostly women and children, displaced by the war in Ukraine.
“We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our processes,” says the Rev. Dr. Jason Whitehead, a pastor and social worker who has co-created the Daily Ripple app as a model for spiritual formation and the meeting space of a new worshiping community. “And so, if we can build a process around change and around incrementally getting better at something, then when we have those inevitable hiccups, we’re falling back on a place that’s much higher than we were before. And that really informed the idea of our new worshiping community.”
While men in Asian American congregations cite biblical beliefs as the main reason why fewer women are in leadership, women in these congregations say overrepresentation of men is the dominant reason.
“I was raised to see that faith and justice were completely linked, and so I just think it’s about living out one’s faith,” says the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, who talks with the Rev. Sara Hayden on the “New Way” podcast about being raised by an activist mother and where she is finding hope and challenge in her own activism and motherhood today.
