One of three featured workshops Friday night at the 2021 Moderators’ Conference focused on the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a tool being used by the national church and mid councils to increase individual and group cultural understanding and effectiveness.
Decolonizing worship means recovering practices and traditions of the Black church that have been “changed, altered, sometimes thrown away” for hundreds of years, the Rev. Dr. Lisa Allen-McLaurin said during the November broadcast of “Good Medicine,” hosted by the Rev. Gregory Bentley and Ruling Elder Elona Street-Stewart, Co-Moderators of the 224th General Assembly (2020).
The more than 130 present or soon-to-be mid council meetings learned how to set up and run purposeful meetings during a Friday webinar offered as part of the Moderators’ Conference, hosted by the Office of the General Assembly’s Mid Council Ministries.
The Rev. Dr. Mark Achtemeier, who a few years ago changed his view completely on whether to fully welcome LGBTQIA+ people into the life of Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) congregations and mid councils, including leadership, calls these Bible passages “The Clobber Texts."
If their repartee on Facebook is any indication, the current and former General Assembly co-moderators, moderators and vice moderators, quite frankly, miss each other.
내가 컬럼비아 신학교에서 가르칠 때, 졸업을 앞둔 모든 상급생은 마지막 해 봄학기 평일 예배에서 설교해야 했다. 많은 교수진이 반드시 그곳에 참석하곤 했다. 우리는 학생들을 지원하고 그들이 신학교를 떠날 준비를 하면서 말하고 싶어 하는 바를 듣고자 했다.
Cuando estaba enseñando en el Seminario de Columbia, se requería que cada uno de nuestros/as estudiantes de último año que se graduaran predicaran en un servicio de capilla entre semana, en el semestre de primavera de su último año. Varios miembros de la facultad lo hacian proidad estar allí. Queríamos apoyar a los estudiantes y escuchar lo que tenían que decir mientras se preparaban para dejar el seminario.
When I was teaching at Columbia Seminary, each of our graduating seniors was required to preach in a weekday chapel service in the spring semester of their final year. Many of the faculty made it a point to be there. We wanted to support the students and hear what they had to say as they were preparing to leave seminary.
For many of the participants at last week’s Shaping Our Story Conference, this was their first in-person gathering since the pandemic began 20 months ago.
As the manager of advocacy for the Office of the General Assembly’s Office of Immigration Issues, Amanda Craft knows a thing or two about accompanying people along a difficult journey.
Craft shared some of what she’s learned about accompaniment and about what might hold us back from that journey with participants in Friday evening’s Moderators’ Conference workshop called “The Image of God in Us All: Implicit Bias.”