Each year as May 5 approaches, which is the National Day of Awareness & Action for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls & Two-Spirit People, Madison McKinney feels what she called on Wednesday “a heavy burden in my heart.”
The Rev. Jeromey Howard, who serves First Presbyterian Church in Montgomery, New York, started the third and final day of Presbyterian Mission Agency Board meetings Friday with a brief devotion taken from Micah 6:8.
Thursday was mostly a teach-in day for the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board as members took in Matthew 25 presentations on militarism from mission co-workers in Colombia and Guatemala and climate change from Jessica Maudlin, Associate for Sustainable Living and Earth Care concerns in the Presbyterian Hunger Program.
Sandwiched between two brief but effective worship services, the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board met via Zoom Thursday to learn more about the work of innovation, repair, Matthew 25, the grant process and professional development and diversity training that’s ongoing among PMA staff.
The three recipients of this year’s Women of Faith Awards were honored Thursday in a virtual ceremony hosted by Racial Equity and Women’s Intercultural Ministries and Presbyterian Women. Watch the 44-minute ceremony here.
In addition to approving the Women of Faith awards for 2022 (see that story here) the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board concluded its three-day meeting at Stony Point Center Friday by hearing reports by corresponding members, approving reports from its three newly formed teams and, as it always does, worshiping the God who guides the work.
In the first paragraph of his new book “What Kind of Christianity: A History of Slavery and Anti-Black Racism in the Presbyterian Church,” Dr. William Yoo includes this question first raised by the Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon: “Where was the Church and the Christian believers when Black women and Black men, Black boys and Black girls, were being raped, sexually abused, lynched, assassinated, castrated and physically oppressed? What kind of Christianity allowed white Christians to deny basic human rights and simple dignity to Blacks, these same rights which have been given to others without question?”
The Presbyterian Mission Agency Board spent the first day of its three-day meeting Wednesday on orientation, worship and a tour of the beautiful and peaceful grounds of Stony Point Center in the Hudson River Valley.
Meeting via Zoom Monday, the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly joined with the boards for the Presbyterian Mission Agency and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation, to approve proposed unified budgets for 2023-24.
The Presbyterian Mission Agency Board took care of a bit of business Friday. But mostly board members stuck to the important business of telling those members rotating off the board after years of faithful and sometimes difficult service how much their hard work has meant to the Agency, the Church and God’s kin-dom.
