mission yearbook

Minute for Mission: Day of Pentecost/Pentecost Offering

As Christians around the world celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, may you sense anew the Spirit’s presence in your life on this Pentecost Sunday. The same Spirit whose coming gave birth to the church and empowered the lives of the earliest believers continues to transform Christ’s disciples today.

Speak up and share your faith

We rarely talk about evangelism, let alone evangelism that is intentional and authentic. But there is a great passage for pondering it. Take a minute to read Romans 10:8b–13 — and continue to verse 17 for extra credit.

Hebron is a community important to Christians, Muslims and Jews

Osama (last name withheld) is a licensed Palestinian tour guide. He recently stood with one of his tour groups in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron with his head bowed and his expression troubled as a group of Israeli Jewish tourists walked through. The last person in line was an Israeli guard carrying a machine gun. It is a traditional sign of respect for visitors of any faith to remove their shoes and for women to cover their heads. This group had done neither. “No respect,” he said quietly. “No respect.”

Report: Faith-based groups have contributed more than $211M in Hurricane Harvey recovery

A new report by the Texas Interfaith Center for Public Policy finds that faith-based organizations are playing a key role in the ongoing recovery from 2017’s Hurricane Harvey — and that state emergency management leaders, specifically those in Texas, should bring more faith-based disaster response organizations into the state’s emergency planning process before the next disaster strikes.

God is healing children’s hearts at refugee camps

Squeezed together with girls about her same age, Mary sat on a bamboo pew in the sanctuary. It was the first morning of a three-day children’s trauma healing workshop. The list of things written in her new notebook included: too much housework, loss of my parents and missing school.

PDA recovery efforts help Haitians thrive in new communities

The 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti and changed it forever also set Andral Estes’ life on a different course. Estes lost his home and career in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital city, and moved to a rural community on Haiti’s Central Plateau. He now makes his living as a small-scale farmer, a far cry from his former occupation in the insurance industry.

Minute for Mission: Intercultural Church Sunday

The 223rd General Assembly (2018) approved the initiative to “Declare an Imperative for the Reformation of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) in being a Transformative Church in This Intercultural Era.” The 223rd General Assembly also declared the period from 2020 to 2030 as the “Decade of Intercultural Transformation” by focusing on transformative priorities and initiatives across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

Minute for Mission: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Ben Ferencz was only 27 when he stood before the judges at the Nuremberg Military Tribunal as the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trial. The defendants were 24 high-ranking SS officers responsible for the deaths of over 1 million innocent people. Ben had never tried a case before. He was barely 5 feet tall and was dwarfed by the podium, which came up to his chest. And yet photos from the trial show a composed young man. When the trial ended, the defendants were found guilty on all counts.

Minute for Mission: Presbyterian Heritage

Soon after Congress passed the 13th Amendment in 1865, officially ending slavery in the United States, the chaplain of Congress asked the Rev. Henry Highland Garnet to preach before the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill. In many ways, Garnet was a logical choice for the Sunday worship service. The 50-year-old pastor of Washington, D.C.’s Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church had escaped slavery as a child and grown up to become a leading abolitionist and orator. And yet Garnet was also an ardent and dedicated political activist who did not hold back when speaking out against injustice — no matter the audience.