The older we get, the more we begin to think, “My memory isn’t what it used to be.” With each successive decade, we seem to remember less, and less accurately, than we used to. Sometimes we look back and see what we want to see, rather than what really happened. We see this in Numbers 11.
The older we get, the more we begin to think, “My memory isn’t what it used to be.” With each successive decade, we seem to remember less, and less accurately, than we used to. Sometimes we look back and see what we want to see, rather than what really happened. We see this in Numbers 11.
Rick Ufford-Chase, a ruling elder and the Moderator of the 216th General Assembly (2004), and the Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt, who last spring co-founded, along with Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary and the Presbytery of Utica, co-founded the Center for Jubilee Practice, appeared last week on A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast. The two talked about their work studying, among other things, how churches might facilitate conversations around reparations in light of the wealth gap between Indigenous and African American families and white families in the U.S.
Samantha “Foxx” Winship of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, wants to reshape the image of what it is to be a farmer and reclaim the practice of growing food as a source of empowerment for African Americans.
The Rev. Ashley DeTar Birt and Ruling Elder Rick Ufford-Chase, Moderator of the 216th General Assembly (2004) and the former co-director of Stony Point Center are pleased to announce the founding of the Center for Jubilee Practice with the Presbytery of Utica and Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary.
On June 19, 1865, Texas notified formerly enslaved people that they were now free citizens. Today, 155 years later, there’s still much racial justice work to be done.
A formal apology by the Presbytery of Giddings-Lovejoy to African Americans for what the presbytery calls “the sin of slavery and its legacy” recently occurred following a “Journey of Reconciliation” last fall to two institutions in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to telling the stories of enslaved black people and those terrorized by lynching and humiliated by Jim Crow.
At Caldwell Presbyterian Church, the walls of our sanctuary talk. The voices are those of enslaved African Americans owned by the Caldwell family on a plantation north of our city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Before emancipation, their forced labor, blood, sweat and tears created the fortune that was later given to this church to build its sanctuary in 1922.
African-Americans have played a pivotal role in American church history. Many may be familiar with Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of what is now known as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was established in Philadelphia in 1792. Less known but equally as important to the Presbyterian denomination was the Rev. John Gloucester, who founded the First African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1807.
