Two South Dakota churches yoked for the past century are set to celebrate their hundred years of ministry on Sunday with worship, food, fun and festivities.
The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is embarking on the next generation of Benefits Plan redesign — an exploration focused on flexibility, choice, and cost control for local churches.
The Rev. Michiko Bown-Kai, a pastor in the United Church of Canada, discussed during “A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast” last week how people who feel they don’t belong in religious spaces can indeed feel that sense of belonging.
“Did you agree to be dirt?” the Rev. CeCe Armstrong asked commissioners of Charleston Atlantic Presbytery and members of a newly chartered church in Charleston, South Carolina. The members of Parkside Church in Charleston, in accordance with G-1.0201 in the Book of Order, signed a charter that read in response to the grace of God, “We promise and covenant to live together in unity and to work together in ministry as disciples of Jesus Christ, bound to him and to one another as a part of the body of Christ in this place according to the principles of faith, mission, and order of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).” As a result, the presbytery convened at St. Barnabas Lutheran Church, which is Parkside Church’s place of worship, for a chartering service on Jan. 29 to commission the church, ordain and install elders and fully install their organizing pastor, the Rev. Colin Kerr.
“On Sunday, March 10, 1822, four men and six women swore an oath together in district school #1 on the corner of Concord and Adams Street in the village of Brooklyn,” reads Collette Foster, a member of First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, New York, in a video series celebrating the congregation’s bicentennial. “Their idea,” Foster continues, “was to organize a house of worship and to found the only Presbyterian church in their settlement of 7,000 people.”
Five months after Hurricane Ian destroyed a seaside Florida church, its members will gather beside the storm-ravaged building on Sunday, Feb. 19, for a service that’s being called a Celebration of Healing and Hope.
A book published last month by Westminster John Knox Press, “Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma,” offers help to preachers and community leaders who are called to speak and respond to mass trauma.
The tenor of Lent is one of “complicated joy,” according to the Rev. Carlton Johnson, Associate Director for Theology, Formation & Evangelism for the Presbyterian Mission Agency.
For more than 140 years, Magnolia Presbyterian Church in Riverside, California, has been providing ministry in this Southern California community. The city recognized it as a historic landmark in 1973. Members cite the church’s many outreaches into the community, across the country and around the world.
