The vision for the Matthew 25 invitation asks us to engage together in the three works of vitalizing congregations, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty. Though individual, these three works are inseparable. Can a congregation be vital without confronting racism? What is at stake when racism directs our congregational and community life?
Phyllis Tickle, the late author and founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, once wrote that every 500 years the church experiences a “massive upheaval,” where old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge. Tickle used the analogy of a “500-year rummage sale” to illustrate how the church enters into a period of cleaning house, deciding what to keep and what to toss in order to make way for the new thing God is doing.
In a normal year, Crestfield Camp & Conference Center would be the summer home for more than 600 youth campers and nearly 3,000 conference and retreat attendees. But 2020 was anything but normal. Christian camps throughout the country had to rely on outside-the-box thinking for survival through the summer. For Crestfield’s executive director, Gene Joiner, survival mode came head-on: He joined Crestfield in January 2020, and in mid-March the pandemic hit, effectively shutting down the facility.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s recent Week of Action concluded with a Day of Service on a Sunday that prompted youths and families from two churches in Buffalo, New York, to gather for a park cleanup.
The bold vision and invitation of Matthew 25:31-46 to be the hands and feet of Jesus, serving people who are hungry, oppressed, imprisoned or poor, is awakening compassionate faith to new possibilities in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In Matthew, Jesus tells the story of a landowner needing workers for his vineyard. Before dawn, he strikes a deal with some workers, promising to pay a full day’s wage for a full day’s work. Apparently needing more help, he finds more laborers midmorning, assuring them that they’ll also be paid fairly. By lunchtime, he’s returned for more help. He goes out again midafternoon for workers and then again, with only an hour before closing time. At dusk, the last to begin working are the first to get paid — and instead of receiving the rate for one hour, they receive enough for a full day. They are ecstatic! The only people happier are those early birds — the first workers of the day — whose imaginations go wild dreaming about what they might do with the pay they will be getting. They might also be thinking that they’ll never show up for work that early again. Their dreams crash when they get paid what they had agreed to at the breaking of dawn’s first light. They shout, “It’s not fair!”
Loveness is a 9-year-old child in Malawi who has a new friend in mission co-worker the Rev. Cheryl Barnes.
Barnes serves as an education facilitator for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), where she collaborates with the CCAP Education Department and the education departments of the five CCAP Synods — three in Malawi, one in Zambia and one in Zimbabwe — to improve the quality of primary school education in the many schools under the CCAP umbrella.
Providing and packing supplies like pens and pencils, making puppet kits during Sunday service for educational classes and holding events to raise awareness and funds.
Through these actions and more, Presbyterians are helping families and individuals who are hit hardest by the loss and struggles surrounding the spread of HIV and AIDS.
Presbyterians of a certain age can still sing — still do sing — the songs of Richard Avery and Don Marsh: “Every Morning is Easter Morning,” “Hey! Hey! Anybody Listening?” “We’re Here to be Happy,” “We are the Church,” and so many other songs, memorable for their catchy tunes and their lyrics embracing an authentic faith and calling for justice for all God’s children.
When the Rev. Dick Powell was tapped as a candidate for the job of president and CEO at Presbyterian Mo-Ranch Assembly, he had one demand: “If I can’t stay in the Board of Pensions plan, I’m not coming.” More than a decade later, Powell and every other full-time employee at the camp and conference center in the Texas Hill Country is a member of the Benefits Plan of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
