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Racial Justice
Eighteen pastors are gathered at the Zephyr Point Presbyterian Conference Center on Lake Tahoe this week to engage in a program of mentoring that hopes to develop future leaders of the church while improving their skills for professional advancement and self-care.
Two congregations that worship in the same Louisville, Ky., church are comfortable enough with one another that host church members didn’t even bat an eye recently when the smaller congregation told the larger one that the church has termites.
Charles Atkins serves as chair of the Justice Committee for the Presbytery of New York City, and late last year, one of his committee members came to him with an opportunity he had never thought of.She was Sue Rheem, whose day job is mission specialist for the Presbyterian Ministry at the United Nations (PMUN), and she thought Atkins would be a prime candidate to be a Presbyterian delegate to the United Nations Commission for Social Development (CSocD) in February.
At age 16, Kalief Browder found himself on New York’s Rikers Island, awaiting trial for a crime he says he didn’t commit. Returning from a party in the Bronx, Browder was accused of stealing a backpack holding a credit card, an iPod Touch, a camera and $700. At his arraignment, he was charged with second-degree robbery. Bail was set at $3,000. Browder didn’t have the ability to “bond out” — pay the fee. He would spend the next three years in jail before being released, with his charges dropped.
The Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis was delivering an impromptu sermon at the end of a long, hot day riding around Western Kentucky on a bumpy bus when she turned to the story of a leper who approached Jesus.“The leper said, ‘If you choose, you can heal me,’” Theoharis said. “’If you choose, you can heal me.’“Now that leper had gone a lot of places up to that point. He went to the HMOs of his day, and they turned him away. He went to the hospitals nearby, they had closed down. But Jesus traveled around the land opening up free healthcare clinics, never charged a co-pay. The leper said to Jesus, ‘If you choose, you can heal me.’“The question before us this afternoon is, ‘Do we choose?’”
The Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, director of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Office of Public Witness in Washington D.C., says “we have third-world conditions in parts of the United States of America,” reflecting on his travels to cities some might find surprising.
The adobe walls are all that remain of the C.H. Cook Memorial Church in Sacaton, Arizona. Built in 1887, the historic church was destroyed by fire on March 25.
Samantha Paige Davis had to start her lunchtime talk at Compassion, Peace & Justice Training Day re-framing her given topic: “Movement Building in a Time of Fear.”
When the Rev. Kirk Perucca of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Kansas City heard Presbyterian Mission Agency president and executive director the Rev. Dr. Dianne Moffett speak about the PMA’s new Matthew 25 invitation, he got excited.
A quick search on the Internet leads to countless facts about shifting American diversity. For example, in 2007, Rodríguez and García joined the top 10 list of most popular last names in the United States. And, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, beginning in 2030, the country will grow more by international migration than birth within its borders.
