As many as 57 families in a small Alabama town are still trying to pick up the pieces of their lives after a tornado swept through their community on February 2. The twister struck the town of Aliceville (population 2,500), leveling a number of homes. Authorities report up to 35 people lost their homes and have no insurance coverage to rebuild.
Following morning worship, the first full day of the NEXT Church National Gathering continued with keynote presentations, testimonies and workshops aimed at giving Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) leaders new skills and partnerships for ministry.
Atlanta urban development pioneer Bob Lupton spoke on the church’s urban engagement. The ministry he founded 40 years ago, Focused Community Strategies, has led the way in re-developing neighborhoods as justice-oriented, sustainable, mixed income and racially diverse communities. Having worked with local and national partners, including churches and faith-based groups, Lupton said the first step in beginning similar work is “recognizing dignity” in the people and in the community.
Caz Minter has been through many assessments with leaders who have started, or are considering starting, new worshiping communities. But he’s never quite experienced what he felt at a recent Discerning Missional Leadership Assessment in Los Angeles.
A new book from beloved author J. Ellsworth Kalas shows readers how to connect with God in everyday acts. In The Pleasure of God: Finding Grace in the Ordinary, Kalas looks at the most common elements of our daily lives: eating, sleeping, waiting in line, bathing, getting dressed, sitting in traffic, and more. He reveals that it is possible to live with such joy and gladness of hearts that we find our ordinary lives graced by the pleasure of God.
Nearly 600 participants from across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) have gathered at First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, Ga., to find inspiration and innovation for ministry at the NEXT Church National Gathering. Meeting February 22–24, the conference is themed “Faith at the Crossroads,” inviting participants to “engage questions that invite us into the transformative power of reconciliation and inspire us by the stories of those witnesses who go before us.”
The Rev. Dr. Carlos Emilio Ham-Stanard visited Grace Presbytery in Irving, Texas, in January as part of a whirlwind tour of seven stops in 14 days in the United States. He is the president of Matanzas Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cuba and was making personal visits so he could get to know the seminary’s partners better.
On any given afternoon, the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Wash., is abuzz with young people talking math, science or reading a good book. It’s not uncommon to find fifth graders sitting with kindergarteners, helping them with their homework.
The PC(USA) Office of Public Witness has released workshop titles and descriptions for Compassion, Peace Justice (CPJ) Training Day, held annually in Washington D.C. The 2016 training date is Friday, April 15. Attending Presbyterians can then join the larger ecumenical community for the next two days in plenaries, worship and discussion as part of Ecumenical Advocacy Days (EAD), which brings together more than a 1,000 people within the Christian community for its annual national gathering.
Are Presbyterians “just so stuck on our government that we can’t get focused on Christ’s call to the church”? With just such provocative contentions, the Rev. Dr. Charles Wiley III opens the paper he wrote for the Theological Conversations series.
To the Rev. Jon Brown the congregation he serves, which is about ten minutes away from the World Trade Center, is like “a treasure hidden in a field.” He arrived in Jersey City at Old Bergen Church in 2010. Two years into his leadership the state’s oldest religious congregation—Old Bergen, established in 1660—was in transition. Their school, which had been the center of church activity for 15 years, was in the process of closing.