The Leadership Innovation Team formed to envision the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s size and structure in a changing world racked by racial reckoning and the pandemic is well into its work after 17 three-hour sessions, the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, PMA’s president and executive director, told the PMA Board Wednesday.
The Presbyterian Mental Health Network and the Presbyterian Mission Agency announced a formal partnership during Thursday’s online meeting of the PMA Board.
A nearly hour-long plenary to cap the second week of the Intercultural Transformation Workshops focused on the pain and trauma clergy and lay people alike have been carrying for the past six months during the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial injustice, including the killings of African Americans at the hands of police and Wednesday’s grand jury decision on the role of police in the killing of Breonna Taylor of Louisville, Kentucky, on March 13 in her apartment.
The Revs. Kate Murphy and Eulando Henton have been friends and colleagues in ministry in Charlotte, North Carolina, for more than a decade. They speak to one another each week about the joys and challenges of leading intercultural congregations — Murphy has for almost 12 years been pastor of The Grove Presbyterian Church and Henton was called three years ago to be the first African American pastor at a historically white congregation, Derita Church.
The Rev. Samuel Son, manager of diversity and reconciliation at the Presbyterian Mission Agency, recently held a roundtable discussion with three Presbyterian clergywomen to discuss the challenges and opportunities of leading a congregation during protests and pandemic.
With the same spirit of daring that led them to reinvent their once-dying church, members of The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, are embracing an experiment in fellowship, one relationship at a time.
