The Office of Christian Formation’s webinar on Thursday designed to explore some at-home resources that families can use this summer also included time for Christian educators to share their challenges and triumphs as churches and worshiping communities emerge from the pandemic.
Asked Wednesday about the work that’s making her come alive, the Rev. Gini Norris-Lane, executive director of UKirk Campus Ministries in the Presbyterian Mission Agency, said it’s that “there are college students on campuses around the country that are craving community.”
“Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered, as a matter of course, just one kind word to another person,” the Rev. Fred Rogers, known to millions as Mister Rogers, once mused while reminding his audience as he often did that there are many ways to say, “I love you,” from greeting someone to feeding a hungry neighbor or cleaning up common spaces.
For the past decade, the Presbyterian Giving Catalog has offered individuals, churches, and communities ways to contribute to causes across the globe according to their unique interests and passions. For one school in California — and the church that surrounds it — this past year’s Giving Catalog offered a whole new way to make Christmas meaningful.
“How many people are out of power?” was the opening question in a Tuesday night call between Christian formation leaders hosted by the Office of Christian Formation of the Presbyterian Mission Agency. Mission associate Miatta Wilson welcomed a group of a dozen church leaders, saying, “It’s great to have people who are from various different parts of the country and time zones.”
A special one-time grant program from the Office of Christian Formation suggests that rest may be the hardest thing to learn when practicing what you preach.
Birmingham’s history of civil rights set the stage for the Association of Partners in Christian Education (APCE)’s Annual Event, held in the city Jan. 25–28, with pre- and post-event touring and learning opportunities around Birmingham and Alabama available to participants.
Last week as part of the Association of Partners in Christian Education’s annual event, it fell to the Rev. Elizabeth Boulware Landes to lead the workshop “The Language of Grace.”
“We never outgrow fear,” John Pavlovitz said in his second plenary at last week’s annual event of the Association of Partners in Christian Education. “As we get older, we just trade in our terror for more age-appropriate models.” Pavlovitz, a pastor, writer and activist from North Carolina, then described the two responses we have at any age to the storms that scare us: “We become frozen or frantic.”
