In 2011, Ruling Elder Anita Sue Wright Torres became the first woman to be elected moderator of the United Presbyterian Church of Brazil (IPU). In 2017, she became the first moderator in the IPU’s history to be elected twice.
When mission co-workers speak at churches around the country, they seek to educate. But sometimes they motivate, and that’s what happened to Nina Geist, a fourth-grader at Rogers Park Elementary, who attends First Presbyterian Church in Anchorage, Alaska.
According to a United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime 2016 Global Report, nearly 71 percent of human trafficking victims are women and girls, and one-third are children.
On Thursday, President Trump travels to the southern border of the U.S. to make his case for a $5 billion border wall to protect the country from an invasion of migrants. Mission co-worker Mark Adams has lived on the border since 1998. He believes that Christians are called to see the migrant issue very differently.
Global challenges can only be faced together, grounded in faith and prayer. That’s just one of the conclusions from the second World Mission global partner consultation in Berlin.
“The creation of God is not an historic fact but a continuous and permanent action,” the Rev. Jose Luis Casal, Director of Presbyterian World Mission (PWM), told representatives of the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s global partners in Africa at a two-day conference in Nairobi at the end of November. “God never tires of creating something new!”
Fall is beginning to chill the land here in Korea, and yet some extraordinary events are slowly thawing the Cold War atmosphere on the Korean peninsula.
“The dishwashing detergent is lost.” In Cuba, one would say, “El detergente de lavar platos está perdido.” That means that you will not find dishwashing detergent in the store these days. As we enter our fourth year as mission co-workers in Cuba, we realize how easy it is sometimes to forget that we are strangers living in a foreign land.
Back in 2013, I joined a German colleague of mine who was working in Ghana at the time on a visit to a rural health clinic run by the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. The clinic was in the community of Kwahu Praso, about three hours northwest of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and for several years, it had been receiving financial support from some German Protestant congregations. The visit was a chance to learn more about the place and see how it was doing.
Pastor Juan Rodas, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Honduras, loves to tell the story of how two remote churches, El Horno and El Sute, joined the denomination.
