The Rev. Cheryl Barnes, Africa Area Coordinator for Presbyterian World Mission, delivered an engaging address on education Friday during the in-person and online gathering of the Congo Mission Network.
The Presbyterian Mission Agency’s World Mission ministry announced Wednesday that the Rev. Cheryl Barnes will become the agency’s new Africa Area Coordinator effective June 19.
Around the world, international partners of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) often invite our mission personnel to share in the ministry of their local congregations.
An African proverb says: “If you educate a man, you educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”
One of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” because “education enables upward socioeconomic mobility and is a key to escaping poverty.”
When mission co-worker and regional liaison the Rev. Paula Cooper thinks of this passage in Matthew, her thoughts are drawn to how the CCAP Synod of Zambia developed and is growing Chasefu Theological College.
Loveness is a 9-year-old child in Malawi who has a new friend in mission co-worker the Rev. Cheryl Barnes.
Barnes serves as an education facilitator for the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian (CCAP), where she collaborates with the CCAP Education Department and the education departments of the five CCAP Synods — three in Malawi, one in Zambia and one in Zimbabwe — to improve the quality of primary school education in the many schools under the CCAP umbrella.
The year was 2009, the place was Yei in what is now South Sudan, the newest country in the world. I was a mission co-worker serving as the first principal of RECONCILE Peace Institute, and our first class of students had arrived. The student body included about 45 church and community leaders from a dozen or more ethnic groups on opposing sides of a two- decades-long civil war. They had come to Yei to take courses in community-based trauma healing, peace studies and conflict transformation.
