Just like those wise pilgrims from the East who followed the star to Bethlehem only to return home by another way, Carla Louca and Susannah LeMay took some unexpected detours to find purpose and meaning.
“I like to refer to us as church adjacent,” said Gina Brown, founder of the new worshiping community The Faith Studio, describing how people respond when she outlines the three tenets of the community as “connect, inspire and explore.”
When leaders at First Presbyterian Church of Mt. Pleasant first heard about the Matthew 25 initiative, they thought it was “a good challenge” to think about how their faith guides them to serve their community. The church has engaged in outreach to people who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community, who have immigrated to the United States and their community, and many others in this small Midwestern town. We caught up with the church as it was celebrating its embrace of the Matthew 25 initiative to hear how it has impacted it as a faith community and individuals.
Presbyterian Disaster Assistance is helping the church to understand healthy volunteerism through training that it also calls “decolonizing volunteerism.”
By describing each slide as she displayed it, Dr. Rebecca F. Spurrier recently practiced what she preached while delivering the Caldwell Lecture to a roomful of people at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and online.
During the pandemic, the Rev. Bethany Peerbolte was making phone calls to members of the youth group she led as a way of checking in while remaining socially distant. The youth started using terms like “lukewarm Christian,” which struck Peerbolte as “not very Presbyterian,” so she started searching online for their source.
In the midst of the Covid pandemic, when the efficacy of new vaccines was still unknown and many churches were not back to worshiping inside, the Rev. Aisha Brooks-Johnson, executive presbyter of the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, issued an invitation for congregations to join the Vital Congregations Initiative (VCI). The Rev. Katie Day, having accepted her call to Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church in Duluth, Georgia, during the pandemic, remembers that her congregation was still worshiping in a parking lot and conducting meetings on Zoom.
The national staff of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) recently heard a sermon by one of the church’s most committed and innovative practitioners of the Matthew 25 movement, the Rev. Heidi Worthen Gamble.
The Damayan Migrant Workers Association Baklas project is an organized effort to rescue Filipina women from labor trafficking and involuntary servitude. The Damayan group consists of about 800 Filipina women. They experienced labor trafficking upon immigrating to the U.S. and they wanted to help themselves and other women like them. The organization was founded in 2002 and has grown since then. The Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People awarded Damayan $85,000 for three years in 2002. In 2003, Damayan (a Filipino word that means “helping each other”) became a grassroots nonprofit organization.
Together with the Rev. Dr. Ellen Davis, her colleague at the Duke Divinity School, the Rev. Dr. Jerusha Matsen Neal, who teaches homiletics there, has been teaching a class that requires students to preach a sermon on the climate crisis to any congregation in North Carolina. “My congregation is too politicized, too distrustful, too poor or too rich, too white or too Black, too rural or scientifically illiterate. They’re theologically conservative or progressively smug. They’re lectionary bound or they’re despairing or they’re afraid,” the students tell their professors early on in class.
