Make A Donation
Click Here >
Mission Yearbook
In a single month, Elizabeth Little vacationed, all expenses paid, at Westin’s resort in Los Cabos, Mexico, as a top sales leader; oversaw a $150,000 bar mitzvah at The Westin Charlotte in North Carolina, as senior catering manager; and took a mission trip to Mexico’s Yucatan, where she slept in a hammock in a village where no child had access to middle school.
On The Way Church, a Spanish-speaking multicultural 1001 new worshiping community in Atlanta, held a “Pray for Venezuela” day in June for those impacted by that country’s worsening economic and political crisis.
Just steps away from the Reformed University campus where he teaches, Presbyterian mission co-worker César Carhuachin comes face to face with some of Colombia’s most marginalized people.
He encounters Venezuelan refugees who seek to survive by selling candy on the streets. Earlier this year, the United Nations estimated that 3.4 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland, where political repression has created severe economic hardship and pervasive shortages of food and medicine.
Sherrill’s Ford Presbyterian Church has a tenacious grip on the good that a sure-footed creature can bring to impoverished communities overseas.
This 99-member congregation in rural North Carolina collected $12,104 for 68 pairs of goats this spring through the Presbyterian Giving Catalog. Every March the congregation observes “Goat Month” and highlights how goats improve people’s lives in the developing world.
As we look ahead to the final weeks of summer, we’re reminded that a seasonal shift is upon us. Our Sunday newspapers are littered with ads that boast the best “back-to-school” sales, as our grocery stores beckon us to stock up for “one last summer BBQ.” With cooler, less humid days on the horizon, we prepare to say goodbye to summer and to welcome autumn and all that it brings.
Why are 20 veterans a day taking their own lives? That’s the question the Rev. Tom Davis has been asking since August
2015, when a magazine cover on veteran’s suicides grabbed his attention. After all, he thought, aren’t these the same men and women who fought so hard to stay alive during active duty, as Davis did during his combat service in Vietnam?
For 40 years, the World Hunger Ecumenical Arizona Task Force (WHEAT) has been tackling hunger in the Grand Canyon State through education, advocacy and empowerment. But there is one thing people are consistently surprised that the organization does not do.
Conversion stories are usually told about the moment people accepted their faith. But Alba Rostan’s story is about the experience that deepened her faith in God.
The Synod of Lakes and Prairies is home to 16 presbyteries and nearly 800 churches, all of them in the upper Midwest. One of its presbyteries, Dakota Presbytery, is considered non-geographical but is the oldest presbytery west of the Mississippi River.
Today at 8:15 a.m., the exact time that the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the Peace Bell at the Hiroshima Peace City Memorial Monument will ring. Residents of the city, whether at the Peace Park or elsewhere in the city, will pause for a minute to pay their respects, to pray for peace and to remember the horrors of war and of nuclear weaponry. Now, 74 years later, this moment of attention still seems like a sensible and prudent thing to do.
On a recent Sunday morning, I learned about the ancient Japanese art of kintsugi. It happened during the children’s time, when the leader held up a broken vase, a cherished family heirloom, that had been glued back together. And rather than a careful repair job that made the vase look like new, the broken places on this vase were highly visible, actually accented with what looked like raised golden paint. When you looked at this vase, you knew that it had been broken, and exactly where it had been broken. Kintsugi teaches that broken objects aren’t things to hide or throw away, but to display with awe, reverence, pride and restoration. The gold-filled cracks of a once-broken item tell a story; they are a testament to a history.
