I wish I was home for Christmas. Home means eating cinnamon rolls made by my mom, playing with my nieces and nephews, meeting up with friends we haven’t seen all year. Home means getting to have cheese fries at my favorite restaurant and hugging my partner’s 80-year- old grandmother who I love like my own.
As a new year begins for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), synod and presbytery leaders share their resolutions for the church. Among those resolutions are challenging congregations to do something radically new without worrying about failure, lifting voices often ignored and widening the witness of being a Matthew 25 presence in the world.
A business plan for 2020 that lays out the work that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Administrative Services Group expects to complete next year and changes to the A Corp’s bylaws both received board approval on first reading during a video conference meeting held Friday.
In the wake of Wednesday’s House of Representatives impeachment of President Donald Trump, prolific Presbyterian hymn writer Carolyn Winfrey Gillette has penned new lyrics to the hymn “Lead On, O King Eternal!” (Hymn 269 in the hymnal “Glory to God”)
It seems that in today’s culture, the “bigger is better” philosophy is all around us. Supercenters, 75-inch flat-screen televisions and mega-sized smartphones have become the norm. The church is not immune to this growing trend (pun intended), as many communities are seeing the growth of the megachurch — churches with hundreds in worship, often across multiple campuses and varying service times. It is as if the larger the church membership becomes, the healthier the church is perceived to be, leaving smaller congregations often feeling inadequate. While megachurches may appear to be the new norm, statistics paint a different picture.
I received a text from a friend instructing me to “bring a yoga mat, blanket, pillow or whatever you’d like for resting comfortably on the floor.” I was going to be joining her at a nap ministry event.
As you travel on a patchwork section of Interstate 75 in Southwest Detroit and cross the River Rouge, this scene emerges before you: towers and tanks spreading out on both sides of the road, constituting a massive Marathon petroleum refinery.
¿Cómo utiliza su iglesia su espacio físico para integrarse con la comunidad a su alrededor? Ese es el enfoque del capítulo cuatro de la Iglesia Vecinal: Transformando a su Congregación en una potencia para la misión.
How does your church utilize its physical space to integrate with the community around it? That’s the focus of Chapter Four in the book, "Neighborhood Church: Transforming Your Congregation into a Powerhouse for Mission."
At its fall 2019 meeting, the Board of Trustees issued a mandate to Columbia Theological Seminary to embark on a process of institutional reckoning. Upon the recommendation of Dr. Marcia Riggs, J. Erskine Love Professor of Christian Ethics, the seminary will partner with Dr. David Hooker, Associate Professor of the Practice of Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding at the University of Notre Dame, to guide the community through his Transformative Community Conferencing process.