John Knox Presbyterian Church in Louisville held a dry run Sunday as it seeks to reopen for in-person worship on Mother’s Day, May 9. A dozen of us — all fully vaccinated — masked up and sat only in the pews marked with green streamers to take in the dry run, worship our risen Savior and make suggestions for next week’s opener.
Born in 1946, the Rev. Nibs Stroupe, now retired after serving for 34 years at the intercultural Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia, grew up “in a totally segregated society” in Helena, Arkansas. He said he saw Black folk “all the time” while growing up, but “they didn’t feel like people” until he did some work in Brooklyn, New York as a young adult.
Using a question-and-answer format, a longtime Presbyterian pastor and an inquirer in Sacramento Presbytery offered a workshop during the recent Intercultural Transformation Workshops.
The past year has been this odd dance of ever-changing realities and downright monotony. We have completely shifted how we live. From shopping to Sunday school, nothing is the same. All the while, this new way of living has meant staring at the same walls, the same Zoom screen and the same people day after day. Waking up to wonder what crazy thing happened while I slept, while at the same time realizing that today’s schedule will essentially look like yesterday’s, has pretty much sucked the creative lifeblood right out of me.
On International Women’s Day, Vilmarie Cintrón-Olivieri noticed her social media feeds were loaded with memes in celebration, but one stood out:
“On this day, we don’t need flowers. We need justice and equity.”
When a mission co-worker is invited to speak at a Sunday service, the road that takes them there and the service itself can look very different than what we are used to.
In the fall of 2018, youth at Bon Air Juvenile Correctional Center (BAJCC) in Chesterfield County, Virginia, asked to start a gospel choir. The request reached the Rev. Lauren Ramseur and the Rev. Ashley Diaz Mejias who, along with friends, collaborated to support the initiative. Ramseur and Mejias soon discovered that they were “doing church” — gathering twice a month at the correctional center for a community of worship. The group named themselves the Voices of Jubilee.
Charles and Melissa Johnson served as ruling elders in their home congregation, Northwood Presbyterian Church in San Antonio, and now as mission co-workers in Zambia. In both places they found joy and strength in the strong sense of community that surrounded them. Now sheltering in place in Atlanta at Mission Haven, short-term housing for mission co-workers, they are busy staying connected to partners, supporting churches and finding that sense of community in new places.
“Blessed is the church that trusts in the grace of Christ to build congregational vitality,” said Ruling Elder Elona Street-Stewart, Co-Moderator of the 224th General Assembly (2020). This is just one of the Beatitudes read by Street-Stewart and the Rev. Gregory Jerome Bentley, Co-Moderator of the 224th General Assembly, as they opened the newly recorded Matthew 25 worship service.
