For Nathan De Lee, going to church as a kid was an ordeal.
De Lee, a Unitarian Universalist, grew up in rural Kansas, where members of his faith were few and far between. Attending services meant an overnight trip to Kansas City, Mo., where the nearest Unitarian Universalist congregation was.
I recently joined 14 other denominational leaders in signing a letter to the U.S. Congress requesting an investigation into the matter of whether U.S. aid to Israel was in accord with U.S. law, given our commitment to human rights and the search for peace.
Two years ago, when the Rev. Nadia Ayoub came to this area near the Ukraine-Hungary border known as Carpath-Ukraine to serve as a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission worker with Roma people (sometimes called Gypsies), she says she was given three choices for doing her early childhood education ministry.
Editor’s note: Launched by the Presbyterian Mission Agency in fall 2009, For Such a Time as This was designed to renew and grow small churches and help them to become healthy, missional congregations. The program pairs small, underserved congregations in rural, small town, and urban settings with recent seminary graduates in a two-year pastoral-residency relationship, during which they are supported and guided by a cluster of pastor-mentors. Paul Snyder is one of six pastoral residents in the For Such a Time as This Class of 2012, serving Glencoe-Sloan Presbyterian Church, Bismarck, N.D., and First Presbyterian Church of Wilton, N.D. (Presbytery of the Northern Plains). — Presbyterian News Service
Sister Kateri Mitchell was born and raised on the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation along the St. Lawrence River. She grew up hearing stories about Kateri Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk woman who was declared a saint in the Roman Catholic Church Oct. 21.
Is General Assembly a council meeting or a family reunion?
That was the question put to the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) at its Oct. 16-18 meeting here. In a debriefing session on this summer’s 220th General Assembly, COGA members discussed evaluations of the Assembly and the need for discernment.
In fiscal year 2012 (Oct. 1, 2011-Sept. 30, 2012), Church World Service resettled 5,871 refugees toward a U.S. Refugee Admissions Program total of 58,238.
Sayed Mohammad Jawad Al-Qazwini was 12 years old when his family fled Iran and settled in Los Angeles. Now 28, he sat with some 70 Shiite Muslims at the Iman Islamic Center on a recent Friday night, preaching about the Mosque of the Trash Picker in Iran, and a Turkish mosque peculiarly named “As if I have eaten.”
Laura Keith often wonders how she wound up working as a fundraiser for a non-profit ― a religious non-profit at that ― in Russia’s capital city.
An established interfaith group is in danger of disintegrating as major American Jewish groups and prominent mainline Protestant churches differ over U.S. aid for Israel — a long-standing argument that the group was established, in part, to diffuse.