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Jesus was asked, “… And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)
America’s history with Indigenous peoples hasn’t always been neighborly. In the past five years, the General Assembly has taken actions to change that legacy, and to be neighbors, not conquerors.
A longstanding practice at Synod School is to offer a talk-back session with the convocation speaker each evening. At the start of his talk, Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall, this year’s convocation speaker, shared some of what he learned during the previous evening’s talk-back.
Few Synod School convocation speakers can get away with birthing new words on the spot the way Dr. Corey Schlosser-Hall did.
The word was “shalomify,” as in the way God asks us to build places of shalom, justice, peace and well-being in the places where we live and work and worship. “You can have projects of shalomification,” Schlosser-Hall, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s deputy executive director of Vision, Innovation and Rebuilding, told those attending Synod School, which is offered each year by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa.
Synod School, put on each year by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, turned 70 this year, and so who else would leaders ask to preach during opening worship than Elona Street-Stewart, a septuagenarian who’s the synod’s executive and Co-Moderator of the 224th General Assembly (2020).
1001 New Worshiping Communities hosted a conversation for online and hybrid church leaders at the Wild Goose Festival in mid-July. Started in 2011, the four-day spirit, justice, music and arts festival took place at VanHoy Farms Family Campground in Union Grove, North Carolina.
Rola Al Ashkar is a Presbyterian Christian from Lebanon. She grew up in a nonreligious family, in a culture drenched in religion. Her parents took her and her brothers to church and Sunday school on occasions. When she had her confirmation class, she received her first Bible, and even as a teenager, she read the Bible with critical eyes, questioning parts of it and searching for answers. Her curiosity led her to regularly attend Sunday services, youth meetings and church summer camps, and through those experiences her faith grew, and she found a community in the Presbyterian Synod of Syria and Lebanon.
The International Day of Peace is a day set aside originally by the United Nations. They hoped that by focusing our attention on peace on this day, we would have a yearly opportunity to stop and educate ourselves on issues of contemporary concern, to mobilize ourselves to address these domestic and global conflicts, and to memorialize and celebrate hard-won peaceable achievements. This is a timely reminder for us Presbyterians, one we would do well to take a minute to reflect on today.
More than 30 members of the PC(USA)’s national staff were recently privileged to hear a sermon during their online Chapel Service by the Rev. Dr. Robert Ngugi, Secretary General of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, as well as musical offerings from Kenyan choirs.
As one of two PC(USA) churches recently honored as Cool Congregations by Interfaith Power & Light, Warner Memorial Presbyterian Church in Kensington, Maryland, relishes telling the story of how it covered its roof in solar panels to provide all the electricity it needs, as well as filling some of the needs of its neighbors, including very low income adults in mental health recovery.
Kaya Oakes’ new book “Not So Sorry: Abusers, False Apologies, and the Limits of Forgiveness,” which was published by Broadleaf Books, made her the logical choice to recently appear on “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” to talk about forgiveness in faith communities.
