You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. — Matthew 22:37–40
A year of service, a lifetime of deeper questions. One of the many ways the Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program hopes to challenge participants is through the continual reshaping of the program’s own concepts about service. This is done best when young volunteers and local people of faith walk together to encourage, challenge and inspire one another.
It has been 10 years since I stepped off an Ethiopian Airlines flight and placed my feet on Kenyan soil. However, the impact of my Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) experience has left me feeling, at times, as if it were yesterday. I don’t remember how I came to know about the YAV program. I vaguely remember filling out an application. What I do remember is my interview with Phyllis Byrd and my excitement about the possibility of serving for a year on the continent of Africa. I vividly remember her stern and stoic demeanor and my desire to convey how much I needed this experience.
The children coming to “Camp in a Van” were one of Misión Presbiteriana Hispana’s greatest success stories of 2017.
Forty children showed up when the new worshiping community in Fayetteville, North Carolina, took its Vacation Bible School to a nearby park. Eighty percent of the children were not members of Misión Presbiteriana. Some of the children told leaders they had not seen their parents, who had been deported to their home countries, “for a long time.” Then they asked for hugs.
Work is an important part of vocation, but an equally important part of living out my calling is my new home. My current home as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) is an intentional Christian community in Boston, where my fellow YAVs and I seek to build faithful relationships with one another, with our neighbors and with God. My year of service is teaching me that “being in mission” is a way of living that starts in the place where I eat, rest, reflect and pray with those closest to me.
For as long as I can remember, every prayer has begun and ended with the sign of the cross. The sign of the cross has been the catalyst for, and the conclusion to, every Mass I have ever attended. The sign of the cross is indicative of my religious and Latina identity.
I was sent to the home shortly after the death to comfort a family I had never met. The case sheet read: young, male, black, single, Baptist, terminal cancer.
The GPS guided me deep into the heart of Chicago’s South Side. My destination was Englewood, a poverty-stricken area that often makes the headlines due to gun violence.
I still remember the first words from the first church leader I met as I first arrived in Manila: “You are welcome here, but
you are not needed here.” Those words, spo0ken with wisdom and love almost two decades ago, would shape the course of my time as a Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) in the Philippines. I didn’t know it then, but that same sentiment shaped the YAV program at its inception. And it continues to guide our vision for the program as volunteers serve around the world and witness the holy ways the Spirit is leading them.
Fasting clergy and staff from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) joined with congregation and community members for a Jan. 18 vigil at a Wendy’s restaurant in Louisville. The witness was one of nearly five dozen taking place at Wendy’s restaurants across the U.S. on the National Day of Fasting and Witness. As many as 160 clergy and faith leaders took part in the fast.
To be relevant in the 21st century, the church must read Scripture differently — to determine who is left out of the biblical texts and reach out to those people, the Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson II told Seattle Presbytery on Jan. 16 in a thunderous sermon that electrified a full house at Mercer Island Presbyterian Church.
