Members of the PC(USA) national staff were transported in both space and time Wednesday when they watched a recording of the Rev. Paula Cooper, World Mission’s regional liaison for East Central Africa, preach a Pentecost sermon to the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian Synod of Zambia’s Kabwata congregation in Lusaka South, Zambia.
To honor Africa Day celebrated on Thursday and Pentecost on Sunday, World Mission’s Africa team led the Chapel service on Wednesday. Nearly 50 of the PC(USA)’s national staff joined the team for an informative and thoughtful online worship service.
The Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency, brought some Pentecost panache to her virtual pulpit Sunday, preaching via a recording to Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis on both a joyful and somber occasion: while Pentecost celebrates the birthday of the church, Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by former a former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. The crime, which helped spark a racial reckoning in communities across the nation, occurred about three miles south of the church.
Phyllis Tickle, the late author and founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, once wrote that every 500 years the church experiences a “massive upheaval,” where old ideas are rejected and new ones emerge. Tickle used the analogy of a “500-year rummage sale” to illustrate how the church enters into a period of cleaning house, deciding what to keep and what to toss in order to make way for the new thing God is doing.
It had been several weeks of selling glasses of lemonade in the fellowship hall after worship, but the children of Northminster Presbyterian Church in Endwell, New York, were determined to raise enough money to provide a garden well to a community in need.
