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minute for mission
Africa Day, commemorated on May 25, celebrates the vibrancy and diversity of Africa’s societies and cultures, marks the progress achieved toward liberation of the continent’s peoples, lifts up a vision of pan-African unity and cooperation, and invites reflection on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
Do you ever feel — just off? Lost, disconnected or maybe even … a little defeated?
Truth be told, we all feel this way once in a while. Yet we do the best we can to live every day to its fullest, and always with the reality that God’s love, God’s grace, which is the very essence of God, will never leave us.
“We’re Presbyterians. We don’t DO evangelism.”
I heard these words as I served as a presbytery’s associate for mission and evangelism. The speaker was the chair of a congregation’s Mission and Evangelism committee ….
Mahmoud Darkish once said, “Whenever they find the reality that doesn’t suit them, they alter it with a bulldozer.” It is the reality of the Palestinians facing the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. You know, the Nabka didn’t happen only in 1948; it has been happening since 1948, as the leveling of villages is still occurring. House demolitions are on the rise, confiscation of lands is still ongoing, children, young adults, and others continue to be imprisoned, ethnic cleansing still occurs and unemployment is skyrocketing. It was a shocking war of 1948, a war which led to “independence for Israel” but a Nakba for the Palestinian Arabs in which 750,000 at least were forced to leave their country, and where 600 villages were destroyed.
Jesus fed the hungry and told his disciples to do the same. Yet, we know that hunger is an extremely complex phenomenon with economic, political and social causes. The Presbyterian Hunger Program does root cause work that addresses the underlying questions of why people are hungry in order to reduce ongoing hunger. That work includes accompanying Presbyterians in questioning our economic lives as we move beyond what our dollars do in the offering plate, to considering what our dollars do in the marketplace.
On this day, communities around the world observe Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Together, we stand in solidarity with the Jewish people and pay tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. An estimated 6 million European Jews and at least 5 million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and other victims were murdered by the Nazis in one of the most horrendous campaigns in human history. On this day, as we pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust, we also come together knowing that this act of remembrance is a commitment to a shared responsibility for humankind to ensure such crimes never happen again.
Indigenous communities have been struck by the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirit people (MMIW) for decades. This epidemic is a systemic failure where Indigenous women are going missing and being murdered at alarmingly high rates with minimal justice. Within the past several years, the MMIW movement has brought awareness of this violence to the public’s attention. Still, there is much work to be done.
May Friendship Day, a Church Women United initiative, is most often celebrated on the first Friday of the month of May around a theme of shared concern for Christian women and their communities. The predecessor to May Friendship Day, May Fellowship Day, began in 1933 after two Christian women’s groups planned gatherings based on similar concerns: child health and children of migrant families. These groups united and, over the years, eventually became what we now know as Church Women United. The May celebration has been continually observed since 1933; in 1999, Church Women United changed the name from May Fellowship Day to May Friendship Day.
Wisdom. That’s one of the things the Rev. Jacob Duché prayed for at the first Continental Congress in 1774 — wisdom in forming a nation.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. This month, we can all be mental health advocates, joining others to come together as one unified voice to decrease the stigma surrounding mental health and illness, increase visibility of treatment options and support those who deal with mental health concerns.
