The 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women kicked off Friday for delegates from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Presbyterian Women with an orientation session from the Church of the Covenant in New York City that set the stage for a nearly two-week gathering to empower women and girls.
Thousands of people from around the globe, including a contingent from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), are headed to New York City for the 67th Commission on the Status of Women, a gender equality gathering that will be celebrated by the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly of the PC(USA), both Co-Moderators of the 225th General Assembly, and the president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency.
For the first time in 500 years, an ecumenical peace pilgrimage was undertaken earlier this month to South Sudan by Catholic, Anglican and Protestant church leaders.
Calling herself a sometimes “reluctant pursuer of hearing God’s voice,” the Rev. Ruth Faith Santana-Grace nonetheless picked up the phone one day early in 2022 and “made a blind call to this dear sister and now friend,” the Rev. Shavon Starling-Louis, to discuss standing for the office of Co-Moderators. The rest is history, of course: in June 2022, commissioners to the 225th General Assembly elected the two as Co-Moderators, offices they hold right up until the 226th General Assembly, set to be held online and in-person in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 2024.
It was New Year’s Day 1773. The faithful in the English town of Olney, though, were not thinking about old acquaintances being forgotten. (It would be another 15 years before Robert Burns would write his poem that would forever become synonymous with New Year’s Eve revelry.) They were thinking about grace and all its amazingness.
The 12-member Commission to Unify the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency held its first meeting via Zoom on Saturday. Members — six of them pastors and the others ruling elders — discussed the scope of the task before them and some of the deadlines that will mark what could be a four-year journey together.
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.
Ian Hall, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, had mostly good news for the A Corp Board Friday while presenting a financial report comparing June 30, 2022, to June 30, 2021.
