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presbyterian giving catalog
As the familiar strains of “Holy, Holy, Holy!” filled the small sanctuary of the Hayesville (N.C.) Presbyterian Church on Trinity Sunday, May 30, the church’s music leader, Rhonda Lents, abruptly stopped playing the piano as she stood and faced the congregation.
Some might say that the Rev. Clay Macaulay built his own “Field of Dreams.”
Jenn Chow, a hospice nurse, ruling elder and member of the worship team at Living Hope Church in Port Hueneme, California, and her husband, Sean, associate for training and leadership cohorts for the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s 1001 New Worshiping Communities, know their way around new church plants and their leaders. And they really like them.
When the Presbyterian Giving Catalog first started arriving in 8-year-old Nathaniel’s mailbox, he had just one simple wish. A chicken.
With nearly all of her trips to see family and friends temporarily on hold during the pandemic, Lucy Janjigian simply lets her fingers — and her imagination — do the walking, straight through every colorful page of the Presbyterian Giving Catalog.
“Mama do.”
For at least a year, if my memory can be trusted, that singular refrain punctuated our daughter’s every sentence. “Mama do.”
Once, during a rare visit to our North Carolina home from my family in New York, the precocious toddler’s words even coaxed a laugh from my usually stern father, who wondered aloud how I ever managed to get anything done.
When a 12-year-old Jesus escaped his parents’ watchful eye during the family’s annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the anxious couple returned to find him at long last in the temple, “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”
If even a llama loves its mama, as the children’s saying goes, what about a baby goat? Or a chick for that matter?
Sharing food is one of my great joys. I know, I know … that isn’t altogether unique, and definitely not unique for Presbyterians I know. We gather around tables for myriad reasons, and in lots of different ways. But the act of sharing food can remind us of other things we share: namely a need for food — hunger — and the interdependence it takes to make a meal possible.
That onetime staple in every youth pastor’s toolkit — the Polaroid scavenger hunt — is getting a makeover and making a comeback.
And during a pandemic, no less.
