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For the past 15 years, members and friends of Shawnee Presbyterian Church and Harvey Browne Presbyterian Church in Louisville have been working together to bridge the racial divide by forming a collaborative they call “The Beloved Community.”
Over 14,000 Presbyterians gathered at the World Congress Center in Atlanta the evening of June 10, 1983, to hear the Declaration of Reunion and celebrate communion. After 122 years of separation, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) and United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (UPCUSA) came together again in 1983 to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In what he described as “a welcome convergence of my vocational journey as well as my personal and family journey,” the Rev. Dr. John Wilkinson began work as the director of the Ministry Engagement and Support team on May 8.
The headquarters for the Tres Rios Presbytery Border Ministry Foundation is located in El Paso, Texas — about 50 feet, through an imposing iron “fence” — from Juarez, Mexico.
Whenever they step into their pulpits to preach, the Rev. Erika Rembert Smith, pastor of Washington Shores Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Florida; the Rev. Dr. Alice Ridgill, previously the pastor of New Faith Presbyterian Church, the first and only African American Presbyterian Church in Greenwood, South Carolina, and now the associate general presbyter for the Presbytery of Charlotte in North Carolina; and the Rev. Amantha Barbee, formerly pastor of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, and now the pastor of Quail Hollow Presbyterian Church in Charlotte are challenging calcified notions about women in ministry.
With so much love and joy — and even grief — that pets bring to people, more Presbyterian churches are beginning to offer a Blessing of the Animals service. Traditionally held in early fall to coincide with the Oct. 4 feast day of St. Francis, these services invite members of the congregation to bring their pets to the church to be blessed.
As the Rev. Brent Raska finishes up another order from customers in the states he distributes beer to, he remembers how he felt on Dec. 31, 2017. How he wept after preaching a final sermon at the small church he’d served for five years, which was down to 12 people. “I couldn’t help but think I was a failure,” he said, “even though I knew I wasn’t.”
Mahmoud Darkish once said, “Whenever they find the reality that doesn’t suit them, they alter it with a bulldozer.” It is the reality of the Palestinians facing the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. You know, the Nabka didn’t happen only in 1948; it has been happening since 1948, as the leveling of villages is still occurring. House demolitions are on the rise, confiscation of lands is still ongoing, children, young adults, and others continue to be imprisoned, ethnic cleansing still occurs and unemployment is skyrocketing. It was a shocking war of 1948, a war which led to “independence for Israel” but a Nakba for the Palestinian Arabs in which 750,000 at least were forced to leave their country, and where 600 villages were destroyed.
I keep thinking about the mother of the disciples James and John, you know her as the wife of Zebedee.
Her name was Salome, which means peace. She may have been the sister of Jesus’ mother, which would have made her Jesus’ aunt, and James and John, Jesus’ cousins. Jesus gave them the name Boanerges, which means “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17, Luke 9:54).
Jesus fed the hungry and told his disciples to do the same. Yet, we know that hunger is an extremely complex phenomenon with economic, political and social causes. The Presbyterian Hunger Program does root cause work that addresses the underlying questions of why people are hungry in order to reduce ongoing hunger. That work includes accompanying Presbyterians in questioning our economic lives as we move beyond what our dollars do in the offering plate, to considering what our dollars do in the marketplace.
