The General Assembly Mission Council (GAMC) is honoring presbyteries large and small across the country for their generous support of Presbyterian mission in 2010.
“Presbyterians feel passionate about mission on a local, national and global scale,” said Linda B. Valentine, executive director of the GAMC. “The money gived by presbyteries each year means together we can continue to engage in mission and ministry across the country and around the world.”
Support from presbyteries in 2010 helped Presbyterian Disaster Assistance respond quickly to the earthquake in Haiti and flooding throughout the Midwest; it helped nearly 400 Presbyterians participate in national new church development and transformation conferences; it helped the Pathways program provide theological and practical training for youth and collegians and their leaders, challenging them to explore who God is calling them to be; and it helped hundreds of Presbyterians, congregations, presbyteries, mission co-workers and partner churches share resources and best practices through forty international mission networks in order to grow Christ’s church around the world.
Sixty-eight young people will gather at Stony Point Conference Center later this month for orientation as Young Adult Volunteers (YAVs) for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Once their weeklong preparation is completed ― Aug. 22-29 ― they will deploy to YAV sites in eight U.S. cities and in five countries on four continents around the world. There they will spend one year in supervised volunteer ministry on behalf of the church.
Domestic volunteers will serve in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Hollywood, Miami, Nashville, New Orleans and San Antonio. International YAVs will serve in Guatemala, India, Kenya, Korea, Northern Ireland and Peru.
Two young representatives of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who were part of an international ecumenical delegation to the Hungarian Reformed Youth Festival in Tata, Hungary, have written reflections on their experience.
Krissy Moehling of Pittsburgh and Allison Tirone of Wheaton, Ill., attended “Csillagpont” (“StarPoint”), which drew more than 3,300 young people from 30 countries from July 17-23.
Their participation was funded by the Department of Ecumenical and Agency Relations of the Office of the General Assembly and the Youth Ministry office of the General Assembly Mission Council. The Reformed Church in Hungary (RCH) is a partner denomination of the PC(USA).
Religious leaders say they are exploring short and long term strategies for communities to end reliance on food aid in Africa, as relief organizations continue to minister to thousands suffering from drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.
The worst drought in 60 years is affecting more than 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Its epicenter is Somalia, where tens of thousands are fleeing to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.
“We would not only want to work on the immediate needs, but we are thinking, because this is becoming a chronic problem, we have got to see the root causes and fight it,” Archbishop Ian Ernest of the Indian Ocean Province and the chairman of the Council of Anglican Province of Africa told a news conference on Aug. 10 in Nairobi after a meeting of Anglican archbishops.
Americans want their presidents to be religious, but many have trouble identifying the faiths of President Obama and leading GOP contenders Mitt Romney and Rep. Michele Bachmann, according to a new poll released July 25.
A majority of Americans (56 percent) say it’s important for a candidate to have strong beliefs, even if those beliefs differ from their own, according to the poll conducted by Public Religion Research Institute in partnership with Religion News Service.
For Christians, there should be no greater joy in life than to see others come to know and trust in God, said Dan Kimball, speaking at the New Church Development/Engage conferences here Aug. 10.
Kimball, a pastor at Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, CA, has also written several books, including They Like Jesus but Not the Church.
Three Presbyterians have composed worship resources for use by churches to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
The resources ― produced for the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC) include a new hymn written by renowned Presbyterian hymn-writer the Rev. Carolyn Winfrey Gillette and a liturgy prepared by the Rev. Eileen Lindner and the Rev. Jon Brown.
Campus Crusade for Christ is out. “Cru” is in.
The 60-year-old evangelical ministry announced its new name at a staff conference in Fort Collins, CO, on July 19, saying the old name had become problematic.
Yae Neesima, the wife of Doshisha University founder Joseph Hardy Neesima and one of the first Protestant women in Japan, as well as decorated war nurse, will be portrayed in a forthcoming television series to air in Japan in 2013.
“What the world’s people can learn from Yae would be that she did what they cannot do today,” said Yasuhiro Motoi, professor of the history of Christianity in modern Japan at Doshisha University’s School of Theology in Kyoto.
Some classes just teach themselves. Or so it seems.
Dean Seal, who taught “Church and Stage” at the Synod of Lakes and Prairies’ Synod School this year, described his class as “open-minded and interested in making something happen.”
For one class period during the week-long event at Buena Vista University here, participants in the class did just that ― made something happen.