“When the church is awake, justice is done,” says the Rev. Heidi Worthen Gamble.
Gamble serves as mission catalyst for Pacific Presbytery, which worked in conjunction with a Southern California church movement called Matthew 25/Mateo 25 to secure the recent release of a Guatemalan immigrant pastor who had been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Presbyterians met in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, in November to consider the future of Presbyterian Border Region Outreach (PBRO). The relationship between the Mexico and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) denominations ended, major financial support had been dwindling for years, and communications between the six border ministry sites had become slack. On the surface, it was remarkable that so many still active in the border ministry were determined to travel as much as a thousand miles to meet on behalf of an organization that appeared to be in its final days.
In an open letter to the church dated Dec. 6, General Assembly Co-Moderators Denise Anderson and Jan Edmiston said a “deeper cultural shift” is needed to overcome sexual harassment and other forms of sexual discrimination, and they urged Presbyterians to use “specific resources to help achieve that goal.
The World Council of Churches (WCC) is inviting ecumenical youth to be stewards at the 2018 Central Committee in Geneva, Switzerland. With an application deadline of Jan. 31, the Stewards Program aims to bring together a
dynamic and diverse group of 20 young people, between the ages of 18 and 30, from all over the world. The program will take place June 5–23. The invitation is open to people from a variety of backgrounds, churches and regions.
Despite the Trump administration’s anti-environmental policies, delegates to a recent climate convention in Bonn, Germany, are prepared to continue their fight for environmental protection, says a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) delegate to that convention.
The Rev. T. Denise Anderson, co-moderator of the 222nd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), added her voice to the many faith leaders present for the recent launch of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival in Washington, D.C. Owing its name to the Poor People’s Campaign instituted in 1967 by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the call seeks to unite “tens of thousands of people across the country to challenge the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, ecological devastation and the nation’s distorted morality.”
Between 1880 and 1940, nearly 5,000 black men and women were lynched in the United States. In response, African-American Christians turned to their religion and to the cross of Jesus as a symbol of suffering but also of profound hope. Despite these violent killings and the centrality of the cross in Christian communities, the lynching tree did not occupy any space in the American theological imagination.
As the hurricane season drew to a close, the bulk of the work for the year’s storm season had just begun for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. To help in that effort, PDA hired David L. Myers as senior advisor for PDA’s hurricane recovery.
The Rev. Jihyun (pronounced “Jee-hum”) Oh, a pastor in the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, has joined the staff of the Office of the General Assembly as manager of call process support. She began working part-time on Nov. 29 and began working full-time in Louisville on Jan. 1.
An oil leak in the Keystone Pipeline in November spilled more than 210,000 gallons of oil approximately three miles southeast of Amherst, South Dakota. The state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources said it was the largest Keystone oil spill to date in the state.
