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Mission Yearbook
The key to social media is “social.” The goal is establishing a connection to people online with the hope that repeated connections develop into relationships. The least effective use of social media is to treat it as an electronic bulletin board full of announcements. Social media is not a bullhorn.
William Tennent probably never dreamed we would get to this point. The same could be said for John Witherspoon.
Tennent, some may recall, is considered by many to be the father of Presbyterian higher education in the United States. It’s been almost 300 years since this forward-thinking Presbyterian pastor established his ministerial Log College in Pennsylvania to educate and prepare commoners for ministry. The college was his response to the first “Great Awakening,” a revivalist movement in the early 18th century that aligned with the Presbyterian goal of “always being reformed.”
Mother’s Day was always fine for me, until it wasn’t. My husband and I had been trying to have a child, and month after month stretched into year after year. Eventually, we grew to dread the annual double punch of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Our well-intentioned church tried to soften the blow on those special Sundays by giving every woman a rose on Mother’s Day and having a blowout barbecue for the all the men on Father’s Day. I still, though, found myself choking back tears and doing a lot of fake smiling. It already felt like God had grown deaf to our prayers, but not finding our experience acknowledged in our church community made it worse.
The 49 churches in Mid-Kentucky Presbytery are being offered grants on a sliding scale, depending on their membership, to help them install electric car charging stations.
The words of Isaiah 55 convey a profound message to us during A Season of Peace: For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace.
Even though it doesn’t appear in the Book of Order — I looked — perhaps there’s no phrase, for better or worse, that sums up Presbyterianism than “decently and in order.” If something exists in our life together, we Presbyterians have a committee and — if we’re really on our game — an acronym for it. However, there’s an important reason for our fascination with process and structure: We value shared governance.
Thanks to the pandemic, tens of thousands of worship services are now posted online each week. For at least some stressed preachers who may be pressed for time, the temptation can be overwhelming to hear a well-crafted online sermon somewhere and pass all or part of it off as one’s own.
“If we learn how to listen, we can hear in the voice of Creation a kind of dissonance. On the one hand, we can hear a sweet song in praise of our beloved Creator; on the other, an anguished plea, lamenting our mistreatment of this our common home.”
On the last day of Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) orientation, we are sent off to be commissioned at churches in the area. Several churches in the area agree to host small groups of YAVs for worship where we are commissioned for our year of service, followed by a meal and conversations. We as YAVs come as we are, bringing our whole selves, exhausted from the past week of orientation, to a table of strangers, to share our intentions for our year of service and what we have already begun learning during the first week.
In the middle of the chaotic summer of 2020, I find myself one early Saturday morning at the recently opened pool that we use in the summer. Perhaps due to my vocation (youth ministry), I really enjoy and learn from observing and listening to young people.
