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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.
At age 16, Kalief Browder found himself on New York’s Rikers Island, awaiting trial for a crime he said he didn’t commit. Returning from a party in the Bronx, Browder was accused of stealing a backpack holding a credit card, an iPod Touch, a camera and $700. At his arraignment, he was charged with second-degree robbery. Bail was set at$3,000. Browder didn’t have the ability to “bond out” — pay the fee. He would spend the next three years in jail before being released, with his charges dropped.
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was delivering an impromptu sermon at the end of a long, hot day riding around Western Kentucky on a bumpy bus when she turned to the story of a leper who approached Jesus. “The leper said, ‘If you choose, you can heal me,’” Theoharis said. “‘If you choose, you can heal me.’
Recent University of Minnesota graduate Lauren Holly hopes to write children’s books about multiracial and multicultural identity, as well as books for teens and young adults to help them discover their identity and who they are as children of God.
“Buckle your seat belts, Louisville Seminary,” the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), told the crowd in a packed Caldwell Chapel during the inauguration of the seminary’s 10th president, the Rev. Dr. Alton B. Pollard III. “A new day is coming to this institution, a new day that has been ordained by God. Praise be to God for what God has in store for this work of ministry and faith.”
Heritage Presbyterian Church in Muskego, Wisconsin, has a resurrection story to tell.
At the beginning it might sound familiar to many Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations. The membership was graying and in decline. Of the 100 members on the rolls, only 30 to 40 came to worship.
“Your story is our story.”
That’s what a group of visitors from global partners Nile Theological College (NTC) and RECONCILE (Resource Center for Civil Leadership) in South Sudan told members of the staff at Protestant Institute of Arts and Social Sciences (PIASS) when they visited Rwanda recently. Rwanda had just marked the 25th anniversary of the 1994 genocide that killed more than 800,000 Tutsi at the hands of the majority Hutu population.
When I was in middle school, my neighbor joined the Shaun Cassidy Fan Club. She got a great poster that looked like it had been signed by the pop star to hang on her wall. We swooned as we stared at it, sitting on her bed and listening to mix tapes. I wondered, as I stared and swooned, what it would be like to be such an insider, to be an actual member of the fan club and get special perks.
The 114th New Wilmington Mission Conference (NWMC), regarded as the oldest annual mission conference in the U.S., will be held July 19–26 on the campus of Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
Many individuals and families are just one paycheck away from homelessness, explained Rachel Eliser, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) serving with Safe Parking LA, a nonprofit committed to providing a safe and secure place for vehicle dwellers to sleep. The Safe Parking LA program is modeled after programs in other cities in California, including Santa Barbara, San Diego and San Jose, as well as communities in Washington state and Oregon.
