Make A Donation
Click Here >
theology formation & evangelism
“If you’re a leader expect sabotage, because sabotage is the experience of every leader trying to bring change. If you’re trying to lead a vital congregation and you haven’t experienced the sabotage of your own people — you will.”
Describing the Israelites’ passage through the wilderness in Exodus and Numbers as a metaphor for challenges the church faces today, Dr. William P. Brownn took 160 people participating in the 2020 Vital Congregations Virtual Gathering on a journey into a place of great danger and extremes — a place where they can encounter God.
On day one of the 2020 Virtual Vital Congregations Gathering on Tuesday, four panelists from Trinity Presbytery described how beginning the two-year VC initiative in January — and its Seven Marks of a Vital Congregation — helped prepare them as church leaders for the pandemic.
As churches shifted to digital worship due to the pandemic this past spring, it was clear to the Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow that he wasn’t going to try to replicate what happened each Sunday during in-person worship.
Church and worshiping community leaders, are you looking for ways to support families in faith formation at home during a time of pandemic? Would you like your community to have access to a children’s Bible, hymnal and prayers in their home?
The registration deadline is Monday for the 2020 Vital Congregations annual gathering, being held via Zoom August 18-20.
When Jaime Lázaro was looking for Commissioned Ruling Elder (CRE) education in Spanish so that he could become a commissioned new worshiping community leader in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), he couldn’t find the polity course he needed for ordination. Knowing it was a need for several candidates in Southern California — and in all likelihood around the country — he and Martín García believed that God was calling them to do something about it.
The fact that the 2020 Presbyterian Association of Musicians Worship & Music Conference, which is being held online this week with live broadcasts from Montreat Conference Center, is happening at all is “kind of a miracle,” said conference co-director Eric Wall.
Worried about how mainline churches are communicating to the youngest and oldest in their congregations during a time of online worship, Karen DeBoer, creative resource developer for the Christian Reformed Church in North America, recently surveyed a landscape of churches.
The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, recent attacks and ridicule of people of Asian descent during the pandemic and many other horrifying examples all point out why the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) must be a Matthew 25 church, even as the coronavirus still keeps many Christians from worshiping and doing ministry in person.
