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April 5, 2024

The pictures of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza being forced by the Israeli military to evacuate the northern part of the Gaza Strip heading south evoked old memories of the 1948 Nakba. In 1948, Jewish Israeli terror groups destroyed and erased over 500 Palestinian villages and displaced nearly 800,000 Palestinians,¹ including more than 50,000 Palestinian Christians who had to flee, thus becoming refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon.

April 4, 2024

Meeting for much of Thursday as a committee of the whole in executive (closed) session, the Unification Commission announced Thursday afternoon it has selected a consultant to help it with the work of unifying the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency.

PHS will develop RNS exhibit with support from Lilly Endowment grant

April 4, 2024

Kristen Gaydos | Presbyterian Historical Society

PHILADELPHIA

The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) will use a $94,750 grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to develop a traveling exhibit of photographs from its Religious News Service Collection.

The planning grant will fund the design and fabrication of an exhibit prototype that explores how the Religious News Service covered the interplay of religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs from 1936 to 1983.

April 4, 2024

Just days after an airstrike killed seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza and as experts says famine is imminent in northern Gaza, the PC(USA)’s Office of Public Witness held a webinar Wednesday on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Nearly 300 people attended.

April 4, 2024

As a fundamental pillar of our Christian experience and testimony, justice is inseparable from peace and a fulfilling life for every human being as proclaimed by the good news of the Kingdom of God. Currently, there is a grave deficit of both justice and peace in many countries around the world, particularly in Central America.

April 3, 2024

Women should consider their life expectancy — and the fact that they tend to live longer than men do — when thinking about and planning for their financial futures. Those were some of the takeaways from “Empowering Older Women as Consumers,” a virtual event held in conjunction with the 68th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. The March CSW68 summit included delegates from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and Presbyterian Women as well as women from around the world.

April 3, 2024

Now is the time eager applicants await their college acceptance letters. Individuals and families start to consider not just what institutions to attend but also how they will realistically pay for them. Churches around the country add these young adults and their families to their prayer lists and prepare to celebrate the members graduating in May or June. But for many seeking a degree, the PC(USA) can do more than just pray for their acceptance and ongoing education.

April 3, 2024

Congregations will have greater flexibility and choice when the new Benefits Plan of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) takes effect Jan. 1, 2025. The plan, redesigned to better support congregational ministry in the Church of today, received approval last month from the Board of Directors of The Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

April 3, 2024

The PC(USA)’s Christian Zionism working group, which includes PC(USA) national staff and members from its congregations, will present the first in a series of webinars centered on the topic of confronting and challenging Christian Zionism. The Zoom-based webinar is scheduled for noon Eastern Time on Thursday, April 18.

April 3, 2024

Christians are minorities in Asia and the Pacific. The area is known to be home to the most Buddhists in the world, with a projection of 476 million followers in 2050. Nonetheless, the Christian population may rise by about 33% and reach 381 million in 2050.  The highest growth in church membership occurred between 1970–2020. In countries like China, the phenomenon of house churches continues to grow, which is in direct contrast with the global North, where church membership is declining.

April 2, 2024

Kayla Craig describes her family’s dinner table as “absolute chaos, but it’s a great kind of chaos.”

April 2, 2024

John Pavlovitz’s “Worth Fighting For: Finding Courage and Compassion When Cruelty is Trending,” a book published by Westminster John Knox Press, is now available.

April 2, 2024

If given the choice, most people would rather not ride on a hospital gurney. Except for Hector Cardenas.

April 1, 2024

Very early on Easter Sunday, two women went to the historic cemetery in Decatur, Georgia, accompanied by a musician. They carried a Christ candle and copies of a printed liturgy. Others joined them, but it was hard to say how many, for they were just shapes in the darkness — spirit or flesh? It was hard to tell until the morning light reached its fingers through the trees and gravestones to pull away the shroud of the long night.

April 1, 2024

Describing himself as an “almost empty-nester” with a daughter set to soon attend college in Scotland and a son preparing for higher education two years later, the Rev. Dr. Andrew Pomerville, the president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary since July 2023, says he’s seeing the world more and more through the eyes of younger people.

March 30, 2024

Easter Sunday’s coming. But on Saturday afternoon, those who attended the online “Hope in the Dark: A Holy Saturday Vigil for Palestine” were reminded that while we may be Sunday people, we live in a Friday-Saturday world, where “loss, grief and the humanness of tombs being filled are all around us,” as one speaker lamented.

March 28, 2024

As the International Day of Transgender Visibility falls on Easter this year, Christians wrestle again with the ways that religion wounds those on the margins of society and in what ways the resurrection calls Christian into new ways of seeing, believing and loving.

March 28, 2024

Lisa Baker has a promise for those pondering the idea of becoming a member of the National Response Team (NRT) of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance. “It might seem daunting, but the reality is, you’ll get more than you give in this ministry,” said Baker, who’s part of the team. “Your heart becomes larger with every deployment.”

March 28, 2024

In response to a recent General Assembly mandate, the Advocacy Committee for LGBTQIA+ Equity is at work assisting the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in providing full expression to the rich diversity of its membership as described in the Book of Order.

March 28, 2024

For the past year, building on an initiative in the Presbyterian Mission Agency Mission Workplan to organize a Global Advisory Panel, a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) team has been working with a representative group of the full range of the PC(USA)’s global partners to create a space where in the spirit of living into a decolonial vision of being the church we could meet with our global partners and explore together how the PC(USA) could most effectively show up in the world today.