The Disaster Recovery Commission (DRC) of South Alabama Presbytery has offered to match contributions to Haiti earthquake relief by its member congregations up to $10,000.
“The DRC has decided to challenge our churches to give generously to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance,” said South Alabama Executive Samford Turner.
In a letter to South Alabama churches, Turner wrote: “The DRC encourages each church to give directly to PDA and then apprise the DRC of its giving and the DRC will match that gift until the $10,000 (committed to the challenge) has been gifted to PDA.”
PDA Coordinator Randy Ackley responded: “We in …
This Sunday (Jan. 24), Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) missionary to Honduras Mark Wright will teach a Sunday school class at Second Presbyterian Church of Carlisle, Pa.
Without leaving his home in Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras.
According to Vicki Lantz, director of Christian education at Second Church. Wright will be at his home computer in Tegucigalpa, connected via audio and video to his “class” in Carlisle by Skype, the free Internet-based communication tool.
He has titled his presentation “Where Do We Start?” because, he says, “that’s the first thing I asked myself about this class.”
Wright and his wife, …
A memorial service was held Jan. 9 at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church here remembering the life and ministry of the Rev. Arabella Meadows-Rogers.
Meadows-Rogers, 60, who retired as executive presbyter for New York City Presbytery last summer, died from the effects of pancreatic cancer on Dec. 17. Her husband, Rob, and her sister, Louisa, were by her bedside.
“Arabella was a strong witness among us,” said the Rev. J. Oscar McCloud, acting executive presbyter for the Presbytery of New York City, shortly after her death. “She was someone whose faith was deep and whose commitment to Christ sincere. Her witness …
It started out as a loud rumble, as if a semi truck were driving next to our building.
Then came the shaking: solid concrete rippling like water under our feet and all around us.
As we looked at one another in pure shock, students across the walkway screamed — and suddenly we were running in a great mass, scampering down the stairs, seeking the safety of the courtyard below.
On Jan. 12 I was on the island of La Gonave in Haiti, in the bay outside Port au Prince, as part of an 11-person mission team from three churches in …
Hôpital Sainte Croix (Holy Cross Hospital) in Leogane, Haiti, an (Episcopal) Diocesan ministry that for decades has been a major focus of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission in Haiti, received serious damage in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Earlier reports indicated that the hospital had collapsed, but more recent information indicates that the building is still standing. However, a guesthouse and an apartment owned by the hospital were destroyed. Hospital officials believe that all hospital staff survived the earthquake.
Less than a mile away, a nursing school owned by the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti — the PC(USA)’s partner church in the island …
Following up on its well-attended 2009 event, the Presbyterian Writers Guild has announced that the Presbyterian Writers Conference for 2010 will be held April 28-29, at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tenn.
The conference, which is aimed at helping writers produce marketable articles or books, develop a freelance career, and “impact the world with their words,” will again feature prolific Presbyterian author, Cecil Murphey.
Murphey’s most recent book, written with Don Piper, is 90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death & Life. It spent nearly three years on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list.
Registration …
Margaret Montgomery, who devoted much of her life to the Presbyterian Church’s refugee resettlement ministry, died of cancer Jan. 11 at her Decatur, Ga., home. She was 88.
A native of LaGrange, Ill., Montgomery grew up in Texas, graduating from the University of Texas and then the Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Va. She served as a Christian educator in churches in Texas before marrying J. Howard Montgomery in 1949. She then served for 10 years as director of alumni relations, communications and public relations at PSCE for 10 years.
In 1974, she became director of refugee …
With the death toll from the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti mounting and chaos threatening in the capital city of Port au Prince because of fractured infrastructure that is making relief efforts difficult at best, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has staff on the ground in Haiti and has already issued $209,000 to provide immediate emergency support to earthquake survivors, including food, water, sanitation equipment, and supplies.
The Associated Press reported today (Jan. 19) that as many as 200,000 may have died in the 7.3-magnitude quake.
By the Martin Luther King holiday weekend, Presbyterians had contributed …
The Oregon farm kid whose biggest dream as a child was traveling to Salem to see the Oregon state capitol building first-hand probably would have been surprised — but shouldn’t have been — to see hundreds of Presbyterians turn out for his memorial service.
But turn out they did January 9 at Westminster Presbyterian Church here to pay tribute to and remember, with much laughter and more than a few tears, the extraordinary life of the Rev. Harold Kurtz, whose journeys from that childhood farm near Adrian, Ore. — “a town too small to have a church” — took him …
Marj Carpenter, former General Assembly moderator and former director of the Presbyterian News Service, is recovering in a Big Spring, Texas, hospital from a Dec. 31 fall in her home that resulted in a broken hip.
Originally a stress fracture that went undiagnosed, Carpenter’s injury worsened after she walked around on it for two weeks. “It just kept hurting more and more,” she told the Presbyterian News Service by phone on Jan. 19, “so I went back and they said it was busted up pretty good.”
Carpenter, arguably the best-known Presbyterian in the denomination because of her tireless speaking schedule …