Save the date for Ecumenical Advocacy Days and its Presbyterian prelude

For the third year, the annual faith-based advocacy events will be virtual

by Rich Copley | Presbyterian News Service

LEXINGTON, Kentucky — It’s not quite time to make reservations, but certainly time to save the date for Ecumenical Advocacy Days and CPJ Training Day 2022.

As they have the past two years, both events will be virtual due to uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Ecumenical Advocacy Days (EAD) were typically an April weekend in the Washington, D.C. area, immediately preceded by the Presbyterian-focused CPJ Training Day, organized by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Compassion, Peace & Justice (CPJ) ministries.

The last time the events happened in that configuration was 2019. This will be the third year the events have adapted to pandemic realities and the closest it has come to their pre-pandemic form.

The theme of this year’s EAD is Fierce Urgency: Advancing Civil & Human Rights, and as it usually does, the CPJ event will have the same emphasis.

“This year, because EAD will be a virtual event, we’ve decided to have an abbreviated CPJ Day with two webinars lifting up the work of Compassion Peace and Justice on human and civil rights domestically and internationally,” said Catherine Gordon, Representative for International Issues for the PC(USA) Office of Public Witness on Capitol Hill and director of CPJ Day. “We are hoping to show how Presbyterians can get involved in the work for human and civil rights through the PC(USA) and the programs of Compassion Peace and Justice.”

Catherine Gordon

The webinars will be in days immediately preceding Ecumenical Advocacy Days, which will be April 25-27.

“This year Ecumenical Advocacy Days decided to center its theme around human rights, both domestic and international,” Gordon said. “When we were looking at issues we thought would be most relevant and timely it was obvious that we need to address the global increase in totalitarianism and illiberalism and the struggle for voting rights in our own country that is central to our own civil and human rights. The increasing targeting of human rights defenders internationally and the continued support by the United States for policies that undermine the human rights we say we want to support internationally is frustrating and tragic. We are hoping to lift up and show the connections between the voting rights movement in the United States and the support for human rights defenders globally.”

Speakers, times, and registration information for both events are still being finalized. Watch Presbyterian News Service and the Office of Public Witness Facebook page for more information as it becomes available.

The Office of Public Witness is one of the Compassion, Peace & Justice ministries of the Presbyterian Mission Agency.