The COVID-19 era “is going to radically push what the church is in the future,” the Rev. Dr. Jason Brian Santos recently told the Synod of Lakes and Prairies’ Synod School.
On this Health Awareness and Day of Prayer for Healing and Wholeness, it seems clear that most people who read this will have been acutely aware of their own health and that of their loved ones and indeed, perfect strangers, as we have navigated the COVID-19 pandemic in the past 11 months. The challenges posed by the restrictions and practices we have followed have brought far-reaching and long-lasting changes to nearly every aspect of our individual and communal lives. Issues of racial and economic injustice have demanded our attention and action. As a result, we have been lifting up prayers for healing and wholeness for a world that has known trauma and loss as we seek to carry on and support one another in the midst of this time of heartache and brokenness.
Over the past year amid a pandemic, protests and politics, I often heard many pastors, elders and mid council staff say that they are having a particularly hard time making ends meet. People aren’t giving the way they used to give.
Inspired by their grandchildren, three friends and members of Sunnyvale Presbyterian Church in Sunnyvale, California, have created a new children’s book, “God is With Us Always Even in a Pandemic.”
Accepting a first call to ministry and moving during a pandemic may not be ideal, but one thing is certain: the Rev. Katheryn McGinnis is following in the footsteps of a long line of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) pastors, including her grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great grandfather and great-great-great grandfather.
Applications from interested presbyteries are now being accepted for the third wave of the Vital Congregations Initiative. And for the first time since the initiative began with a pilot program in 2017, individual churches may also apply — if they have the blessing of their presbytery.
Though she’s the reentry pastor of Hagar’s Community Church, the Rev. Riley Pickett has never been inside the Washington Corrections Center for Women. That’s because Pickett’s ministry begins when residents of the largest women’s prison in the state of Washington are released.
In the fall of 2018, youth at Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center (BAJCC) in Chesterfield County, Virginia, asked to start a gospel choir. The request reached the Rev. Lauren Ramseur and the Rev. Ashley Diaz Mejias who, along with friends, collaborated to support the initiative. Ramseur and Mejias soon discovered that they were “doing church” — gathering twice a month at the correctional center for a community of worship. The group named themselves the Voices of Jubilee.
As dark December transitions into nearly-as-dark January and February, preachers in need of resources can serve both God and their hearers by preaching the psalms of lamentation.
