A webinar focusing on the current context of the Palestinian people, including disparity in access to COVID-19 vaccines, is scheduled from noon through 1 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, April 27. The event is hosted by Presbyterian World Mission’s Middle East and Europe office and the Office of Public Witness.
As the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, and with the anxiety and insecurity as well as the staggering loss of life that it is causing, the fear that this crisis may be used to usurp power or control in certain parts of the world, or worse, to trample upon the human rights of those most vulnerable, is very real.
Many people say a trip to the Holy Land is definitely on their “bucket list.” It’s something they want to do, plan to do, hope to do — one of these days.
The Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and World Mission have collaborated to lead a spiritual pilgrimage to the Holy Land every other year since 2014. The 2020 Mosaic of Peace Conference: Witnessing for Peace and Wholeness in a Land Called Holy is scheduled for March 15–28. Applications are being accepted online through Oct. 15, or after that should space allow.
At the 223rd General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) one of the Middle East resolutions that was approved in record time was a Commissioners Resolution (12-10) “On Gaza Violence,” expressing “profound grief and sorrow for the families of all Palestinians killed in the Great March of Return protests at the Gaza border.”
The Israel Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (USA) [IPMN] is pleased to announce the publication of Why Palestine Matters, The Struggle To End Colonialism, a new book contextualizing the liberation struggle of the Palestinian people within other global justice struggles, available from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) bookstore.
Mission co- worker Douglas Dicks has gone home. Not to his boyhood home in Virginia but to his spiritual home in Israel/Palestine.
Last month Dicks began serving as an associate for ecumenical partnerships at the invitation of St. Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church in Jerusalem, working with churches in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land. However, neither the job nor the region is new to him. He was commissioned by his home church, Buckton Presbyterian, to go to Jerusalem in September 1995 for two years. He stayed 18 years and finished his term in 2013 to return to Virginia to care for his aging mother.
The moderator of the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was among five interfaith leaders denied access to a passenger jet headed for Israel this week. Rick Ufford-Chase was part of an interfaith delegation of 23 Muslims, Jews and Christians boarding a Lufthansa Airlines jet at Washington Dulles International Airport for Israel on Sunday.
At Friday’s Big Tent workshop, The Church’s Stories of Struggle and Reconciliation, representatives of the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s (PMA) World Mission talked about the accompaniment of global partners in the work of peace building in South Sudan, Cuba and Israel-Palestine.