Roceni Bakian has a front-row seat to the human rights challenges facing women and children every day. As a full-time pastor with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, she is working with the Regional Ecumenical Council of Churches in the Cordillera region to address the issue and work for change.
A group of Presbyterian clergy and members, including Co-Moderator Denise Anderson, has wrapped up the Mosaic of Peace Conference to Israel/Palestine. The conference, sponsored by the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program, included visits to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Galilee, meeting with Palestinian and Israeli leaders working on justice and peace issues, as well as touring holy and historic sites.
The Presbytery of East Virginia hopes to generate conversation around the issue of racism at its upcoming meeting this month. The Racial Dialogue Team of the presbytery’s Peacemaking Committee is inviting local churches and interested parties to the presbytery meeting on Saturday, January 27, at Providence Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach.
It’s been a good year for hate. Melanie Rodenbough, a lifelong Presbyterian, lives in North Carolina. In early 2017, she learned from the news that the FBI was beginning an investigation after an audio recording of a meeting of conservative activists near Winston-Salem revealed death threats against Muslims living in the area.
Mission co- worker Douglas Dicks has gone home. Not to his boyhood home in Virginia but to his spiritual home in Israel/Palestine.
Last month Dicks began serving as an associate for ecumenical partnerships at the invitation of St. Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church in Jerusalem, working with churches in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land. However, neither the job nor the region is new to him. He was commissioned by his home church, Buckton Presbyterian, to go to Jerusalem in September 1995 for two years. He stayed 18 years and finished his term in 2013 to return to Virginia to care for his aging mother.
Lydia Cordero Cabrera tiene un trabajo difícil. Es directora general de un centro de crisis, que trabaja a diario con las mujeres que se enfrentan a situaciones de la vida / muerte en sus hogares en México.
An international peacemaker from Palestine recently found her invitation to speak at two Nebraska high schools revoked. Nora Carmi, a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem, was scheduled to speak at two schools in Omaha, when school district authorities cancelled the appearances. Millard Public School officials say the decision was made after being contacted by some parents.
Reconciliation is a sacred space where weary bodies are refreshed and troubled souls are soothed, where the roar of oppression is silenced and the calm of compassion resounds.
Lydia Cordero Cabrera has a difficult job. As general director for a crisis center in Mexico, she works daily with women who are facing life/death situations in their homes. The center, Casa Amiga Centro de Crisis, is located in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, across the border from El Paso, Texas.
You might think raising 10 adopted children as a single parent would be its own full-time job. For most it would be, but not for Mphasto Nguluwe. A nurse by profession, she somehow balances her prodigious parental duties with being Director for the Church of Central Africa, Presbyterian (CCAP) Livingstonia Synod Aids Program (LISAP). LISAP implements initiatives that promote quality of life for children living with HIV and whose goal is to ensure an HIV-free generation. As director, she heads three hospitals and 12 health facilities in the Synod’s catchment area. It includes working with a staff of more than 600 who serve about one million Malawians in remote locations. Nguluwe will speak to U.S. congregations and organizations this fall as part of the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program’s 2017 International Peacemakers series.
