It’s been only a few months since Covenant Presbyterian Church in Fort Myers, Florida, worked with a professional beekeeper to relocate a couple of well-established bee colonies from an old rotten tree on the property. The bees were successfully moved to side-by-side hives in the church’s Together We Grow Mission Garden.
In a year like no other, five faith communities in southeastern Minnesota have worked together to clear more than $2 million in medical debt for 1,057 households in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
A Presbyterian church in northern California is distributing locally-grown produce as part of Sunday worship to bring healthy food options to their community.
tony Point Center (SPC) and Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary (JCSTS) have once again teamed up to develop and offer an online curriculum to support the Matthew 25 vision. This second course is titled “Underpinnings of Systemic Poverty” and gives participants a lens through which they can better understand the underlying forces at work in communities that are disproportionately poor.
The vision for the Matthew 25 invitation asks us to engage together in the three works of vitalizing congregations, dismantling structural racism and eradicating systemic poverty. Though individual, these three works are inseparable. Can a congregation be vital without confronting racism? What is at stake when racism directs our congregational and community life?
The third event in an ongoing series around the Matthew 25 vision is scheduled for 3 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, Sept. 16. This online event will address eradicating systemic poverty, one of the three focuses of the Matthew 25 vision along with building congregational vitality and dismantling structural racism.
As the Rev. Brian Heron was preparing pastoral leaders and clerks of session in the Presbytery of the Cascades for their first presbytery-wide meeting in eight months, federal agents deployed to the city of Portland, Oregon, by the Department of Homeland Security were starting to show up.
Proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel and making known to others the teachings of Jesus has been integral to the church since its earliest days. We may ask, why does the church share its faith in Jesus Christ this way? The simple answer: We do it because Jesus commands us to do it (Matthew 28:19–20).
It is said, “When America gets a cold, the African American community gets pneumonia.”
The COVID-19 pandemic is proving that to be true. As the virus spreads across the country, it appears that it is impacting African Americans at a disproportionally high rate. In hot spots like New York, Detroit, New Orleans and Chicago, blacks are dying at alarmingly high rates.
