Dozens of old friends and former directors of the Stony Point Center gathered here Oct. 17-18 for a 60th anniversary and homecoming celebration of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)-related conference facility.
But the weekend gathering wasn’t all about looking back.
Co-directors Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase — who arrived at the financially troubled center in August 2008 — outlined plans for the “fifth generation” of Stony Point, designed to revitalize the storied center just north of New York City.
A centerpiece of the new Stony Point is the Community of Living Traditions — an interfaith intentional community dedicated to nonviolence and peacemaking. …
Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of stories about the more than 50 Presbyterian mission workers and international peacemakers who are speaking in more than 150 presbyteries in the coming month as part of World Mission Challenge. — Jerry L. Van Marter
DENISON, Iowa – From the outside, Sri Lanka is beautiful.
The tear-drop shaped island nation, about the size of West Virginia and located off the southeast coast of India, is a wonderful place, with its mostly tropical climate, beautiful beaches and national parks, an array of wildlife and a diverse landscape that ranges …
Just as the Carondelet-Markham Memorial Presbyterian Church here was experiencing its own rebirth by welcoming the gifts of Liberian refugees into the life of the congregation, one young member was at the same time undergoing his own personal and spiritual transformation.
David Zweh, who had lived as a Liberian refugee in an Ivory Coast refugee camp for 14 years, had joined a wave of 15 Liberian immigrant families in 2005 to make Carondelet-Markham his church home. “I love the members of the church and they love me,” Zweh said. “We are in Christ and will remain in Christ for the …
A top U.N. expert on human rights law called last week for governments to match their words with deeds and make good on promises to respect indigenous communities’ right to live as they wish.
“The indigenous peoples are suffering everywhere,” James Anaya, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights of indigenous peoples, told a news conference after submitting a comprehensive report to the General Assembly.
Anaya, a law professor who teaches at Harvard University and the University of Arizona, said many governments were failing to abide by the principles laid out in the historic — though non-binding …
More than 700 mission-minded Presbyterians gathered here Oct. 22 to celebrate Presbyterian world mission in all its variety.
The three-day event, Mission Celebration ’09, culminates a month-long effort, Mission Challenge ’09, to connect Presbyterians around the denomination with PC(USA) mission workers around the world.
Since Oct. 1, in an effort billed, more than 50 PC(USA) mission workers and international peacemakers — leaders from partner churches in trouble spots around the world — have been itinerating in more than 150 of the denomination’s 173 presbyteries seeking prayer, spiritual and moral support for the church’s global mission work.
“Take a …
When it comes to congregation-to-congregation relationships between the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and international partners, money is no object.
Meaning: money is not the object, leaders of a number of denominational congregational partnership efforts told workshop participants on the subject today (Oct. 23) at World Mission Celebration ’09, which caps World Mission Challenge ’09 — a month-long effort to connect Presbyterians around the country with their mission workers around the world.
“The most important resources we have are not in our checkbooks,” said Ellen Smith, director of the Presbyterian Twinning Project in Moscow, Russia, that brings together Russian and …
A dissident Cuban blogger cannot go to New York to receive a top journalism prize, after government authorities upheld a ban on her travel abroad.
Yoani Sanchez, 34, won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for “Generación Y,” a blog critical of Cuba’s one-party Communist government. The prize is the oldest international award in journalism.
It is given by Columbia University to journalists who have furthered inter-American understanding.
“The immigration office just informed me that the ban remains on my leaving the country,” Ms. Sanchez said on Monday via the social networking website Twitter, where she has 6,638 followers.
“I am …
The Rev. Glenn Dixon’s road to mission partnership in Cuba began in March 1997 with a trip to Florida’s death row in the state penitentiary in Starkville.
“I was asked to minister to Pedro Medina in the five hours before he was executed,” Dixon, former pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Gainesville, told the Cuba Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) here Oct. 21. “After Pedro was killed — it was the most gruesome thing I’d ever seen in my life — I went to visit his sister in New York and she asked me if I’d go visit …
For Mrs. Tout Tou Bounthapanya, the Rev. Khampheng Mitpasa, and the Rev. Sharon Stanley, clean water is deeply personal. Three of a team preparing for a Living Waters for the World (LWW) clean water system installation in Laos, they each know what it is for life to depend upon clean water.
The three are attending LWW’s inaugural Clean Water U West, at Calvin Crest Conferences in Oakhurst, Calif.
Clean Water U is the training program of Living Waters for the World — a ministry of the Synod of Living Waters — “where volunteers learn to be trainers to teach people …
Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of stories about the more than 50 Presbyterian mission workers and international peacemakers who are speaking in more than 150 presbyteries in the coming month as part of Mission Challenge ’09. — Jerry L. Van Marter
What do you do when you show up to speak at a breakfast, see tables set for 40, and wind up with eight men (from four churches) in attendance?
You do the best you can to deliver the message that we need more contact between church people and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionaries. “I was …