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Communication
On Saturday the Unification Commission, which is working to unify the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency, unanimously approved a 2025-26 Unified Budget Process that features the development of key unified priorities to help lead development, beginning in 2025, of a unified budget among the PMA, OGA and the Administrative Services Group.
Following an 8 p.m. dismissal on Thursday evening — which was the first day of what will be a three-day meeting of the Unification Commission at the Presbyterian Center — commissioners reconvened on Friday in closed session to continue their discussion around personnel and budget matters, on which no action was taken Friday morning.
“Defining what constitutes mission and how mission is funded and who has fiscal authority are fundamental questions that are beginning to arise for us,” said the Rev. Scott Lumsden, a member of the Finance Work Group within the Unification Commission, which seeks to combine the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency.
There’s something about holding a pilsner glass full of one’s favorite beer and singing praises to God with more than 100 fellow conference-goers singing right along.
With help from Hartmut Rosa’s book “Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World,” the Rev. Dr. Wes Avram, the senior pastor at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, and the director of the church’s Center for Faith and Life spoke Wednesday as part of the Synod of the Covenant’s Equipping Preachers series.
Last year, commissioners to the 225th General Assembly approved a recommendation by the Family Leave Policy Task Force — later ratified by the presbyteries — to provide ministers a minimum of 12 weeks of paid family medical leave. The Advocacy Committee for Women and Gender Justice has published the resource below to help congregations — especially smaller congregations — with ideas for seeking out worship leadership during each of those 12 weeks.
As is their custom, members of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation Board of Directors launched day two of their meeting Friday by reporting to one another the progress of the various PC(USA) boards and commissions on which they sit.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), A Corporation Board attended a film premiere of sorts Thursday afternoon.
When a Korean-American church celebrates its 70th year anniversary by opening with a Native American (Elona Street-Stewart, the Co-Moderator of the 224th General Assembly) telling the story of her people in Turtle Island thousands of year before it became United States, the destruction that came with Christian mission in Turtle Island, and the impossible gospel-bloom from the dust (the storyteller is a Christian Native American!), at first it’s difficult for your brain to adjust. It all seems darker, but it’s not.
I’ve been thinking lately about glasses. Not the drinking kind, more like the seeing kind. Yet not the ones we use to improve our vision, but those we wear that color our perception. What I’ve come to learn after taking 60 trips around the sun is that we all wear these kinds of glasses, no exceptions — well, maybe other than God — I imagine that God sees purely, no glasses required; we humans, not so much.
