SERMON to Celebrate SDOP Sunday By Rev. Rebecca Barnes Coordinator, Presbyterian Hunger Program
The Self-Development of People (SDOP) Sunday Worship Resource will serve as a guide for you, mid-councils and congregations to become better familiar with the ways that the SDOP National and Mid-Council committees engage in their work through the church and in communities. It includes a sample sermon, hymns, liturgical materials, stories about SDOP-funded community partners in communities locally, nationally, and internationally. Also included is other helpful material for congregations to celebrate this special Sunday. We are hopeful that this resource inspires you to support this ongoing work through the One Great Hour of Sharing collected on Easter Sunday. Please complete …
This is a companion resource to the Bending the Moral Arc Manual and contains Courageous Conversations about race sample sessions and a January 2022 updated resources list.
This report focuses on the role that religion plays in relationship to violence, most specifically the form of violence used to attack important centers and symbols of American power on September 11, 2001. It also examines actions that have been, or can be, mounted to counter such violence and the role religion plays in supporting or challenging those counter terrorist actions.
This report, approved by the 219th General Assembly (2010),challenges our society’s fatalism and numbness in accepting the highest gun death rates in the world, reviews past church positions and proposes a new “spiritual awakening” approach: a church-related, community-based strategy inspired by “Heeding God’s Call” in Philadelphia, with similar groups in Richmond, Virginia and central New Jersey. The report looks at our culture of violence-acceptance, with its undercurrents of fear and desperation.
A central question of political ethics is: 'Why ought one to obey the state?' A Christian political ethic puts a different question: 'How can we love God in serving our neighbors through politics?' The purpose of humanity is to love God and to help our neighbor know the love of God. Therefore, Christian political ethics cannot be autonomous; that I, Christians cannot think of the state as an order independent of God that they are free either to remold or to rebel against apart from God. Christian political ethics are not heteronomous; that is, the laws of the state are …
For two hundred years, General Assemblies of the Presbyterian Church have been concerned with religious liberty and the relationship of church and state. The first General Assembly might well have heard the echo of Hanover Presbytery's mighty Memorial to the Virginia legislature: "We ask no ecclesiastical establishments for ourselves; neither can we approve of them when granted to others." Since 1788, our basic Principles of Church Order have placed in the first position the powerful commitment of our Reformed faith to religious liberty: "God alone is Lord of the conscience.... We do not even wish to see any religious constitution …
Religious Freedom Without Discrimination and the shorter related resolution, The Boundaries of Religious Liberty, draw on the Historic Principles of Church Order (1788) to affirm that religious freedom should be “equal and common to all.” They thus build on the long policy statement, God Alone is Lord of the Conscience (1988), to provide contemporary Reformed interpretation of the First Amendment that is both practical and theological. Religious liberty can thus not be claimed to justify “discrimination in the provision of secular employment or benefits, healthcare, public or commercial services or goods, or parental rights to persons based on race, ethnicity, …
Painfully aware that the conflicts in the Middle East have exacted a terrible toll in human suffering and exacerbated international and interreligious tensions for more than half a century, and taking account of both the accomplishments so far and the challenges ahead, the 209th General Assembly (1997) believes that the peace process started in Madrid and cosponsored by the United States still holds the promise of achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace, and that the United States needs to continue to play an active role of mediating peace and, in some instances, to take initiatives for reconciliation and restoration of …
Opposition to the military action against Iraq based on just war principles and other principles of conscience, while not unanimous among Presbyterians, has been sufficiently widespread to indicate much concern. From the beginning, it has been the judgment of many church leaders, both in the United States and elsewhere, that?an invasion of Iraq has been unwise, immoral, and illegal.