Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister Jake Medcalf refuses to believe that the denomination should just go quietly into the night. “If we’re going to survive,” he says, “we have to trust God has more for us than Sunday morning worship and go make an impact in the neighborhood where we are.”
As a mission co-worker and cultural worker in the Philippines, sometimes I am utterly exhausted. There are periods that require quite a bit of travel related to meetings and theater-based trainings for children, youth, church workers, teachers, women and others. When I am in Dumaguete, days sometimes stretch into late evenings for rehearsals with our youth theater group or with Silliman University Divinity School students preparing for the annual church workers convocation. So a few years ago, when asked by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program if my husband, Cobbie, and I would consider reopening the Philippines YAV service site, we pondered, could we? Should we? Could we say no?
Speaking to attendees at the 2018 gathering of the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators (APCE), the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, II, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), assumed the role of cheerleader for educators.
I’ve always been stubborn. My mother has a picture of me as a child, with arms crossed and a determined squint that sums up most of my childhood and possibly my adult personality. Difficult, resistant, overly critical — I’ve been called many things throughout my life. Maybe that’s why I’ve always enjoyed Wendell Berry’s poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Throughout this piece, Berry eloquently encourages the reader to do things like: “… do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. … Ask the questions that have no answers.” Berry not only empowers us to be cantankerous, but indeed goes on to warn that if we are not, we are putting our individual and, ultimately, communal moral compass at risk. Finally, my “troublesome” traits are vindicated!
The Rev. Robert I. “Bob” Rasmussen, a mission co-worker in Malawi from January 1986 until his retirement in August 1992, passed away at his home in Michigan on Jan. 25 at age 90. After he retired, Rasmussen and his wife, Edith, returned to Malawi many times, sometimes for months at a time, to train pastors and to preach and teach.
Presbyterians do mission in partnership. For the Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program, now celebrating its 25th recruitment season, partners are at the heart of the program’s success.
When David Gambrell heard he was to be honored by Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary as a distinguished alumni on Jan. 31, he quipped, “I guess I’m going to have to get a haircut.”
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. — Matthew 22:37–40
A year of service, a lifetime of deeper questions. One of the many ways the Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program hopes to challenge participants is through the continual reshaping of the program’s own concepts about service. This is done best when young volunteers and local people of faith walk together to encourage, challenge and inspire one another.
It has been 10 years since I stepped off an Ethiopian Airlines flight and placed my feet on Kenyan soil. However, the impact of my Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) experience has left me feeling, at times, as if it were yesterday. I don’t remember how I came to know about the YAV program. I vaguely remember filling out an application. What I do remember is my interview with Phyllis Byrd and my excitement about the possibility of serving for a year on the continent of Africa. I vividly remember her stern and stoic demeanor and my desire to convey how much I needed this experience.
