His name is Dave, and most summer mornings, from dawn until 9 a.m., you can find him in shorts and black knee-high rubber boots digging and fertilizing and pruning and weeding, drawing magic and sustenance from the dirt. I think of him as one of the ushers of the congregation of the community garden. He knows that we are new, and clueless. When I come early one morning to water, he greets me with a smile, opens the door of the shed and fetches from the cab of his old pick-up the liturgy of this place: a green booklet titled “Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky.” “Study up,” Dave says. “In a month, there’ll be a test.” This spring, to our surprise, my husband got an email that we were being offered a spot in a community garden about 10 minutes from our house. We’d tried once before, in a too-big plot too far across town, and it did not go well. Our backyard is guarded by two huge maple trees that throw extravagant shade — we’ve tried and failed growing tomatoes in the ground, … [Read more...]
Report released today calls for reconfiguration in structure and ethos of the Presbyterian Mission Agency
The Coordinating Committee of the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board voted by Zoom Sept. 16 to take next steps regarding a consultants’ report calling for a reconfiguration in structure and ethos of the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA) — something the report said could transform the work of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for the next 25 years. (The report is available here: CounterStories Consulting Report to PMAB September 2021.) The report is presented as a way for PMA to live into its commitment of being a Matthew 25 church – with its focus on congregational vitality, dismantling systemic racism and ending systemic poverty – and to provide “a scaffolding for a vision that will guide the organization over the course of a generation,” with intentions to transform the agency’s structure, the way it allocates resources and denominational culture. The report refers to the Matthew 25 overture that the 2016 General Assembly approved — stating that other concerns the overture raised … [Read more...]
Painful legacies: Acknowledging the church’s role in atrocities at Indigenous boarding schools
The reckoning has already started in Canada, where the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children were discovered earlier this year — at least 215 children, some as young as three, discovered in May 2021 at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, and at least 751 graves discovered in June 2021 by the Cowessess First Nation at Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. The Catholic Church was involved in running both schools. The accounting is coming for the United States, where Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has pledged a comprehensive review of residential boarding school records to uncover possible burial sites of Native American children, with a report due by April 1, 2022. Previously, Canada convened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which issued a report in 2015 documenting the abuse at those schools and calling what happened over more than a century to Native American children “cultural genocide.” A member of the Pueblo of … [Read more...]
“They wanted me to become a white man” — An Indigenous boarding school student’s story
Editor's note: The Outlook has received word that shortly after this article was published, Roy M. Nageak Sr. died at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center after becoming ill with COVID-19. Our deepest sympathy to his wife, Flossie; his children, grandchildren and extended family; and his many friends. The crying never stopped. The first night that Roy M. Nageak Sr.’s sister spent at Wrangell Institute in Alaska, she lay on her cot, exhausted from the long journey, but could not sleep. Wrangell was a school that brought Native American children from all over the state, and lying there she could hear “all the crying of the younger kids,” Nageak said. “Some were really young. She couldn’t get that out of her mind for many years.” Nageak heard stories growing up of teachers hitting Native children. “People were injured permanently, sometimes to where they limped all of their lives,” he said. Nageak, born in 1951, is from the Iñupiaq people and serves a commissioned co-pastor of … [Read more...]
Church reimagined: Same location, new life
This is what often happens. Over the years, a Presbyterian congregation gets smaller and smaller, its remaining core of members get older and older, and eventually the church runs out of energy or money or both. The church closes. The presbytery sells the building. A long season of faithfulness ends. Here’s what happened instead in a neighborhood in southeast Atlanta. Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church dwindled and died, the church closing in 2016 after more than a century of ministry. And now a new worshipping community, Ormewood Church, is spreading its wings in the same place — a community that recently won a $20,000 Walton Award, given to creative new church developments, and now is using that money to renovate the sanctuary and make the space more flexible and less traditional. This might seem counterintuitive: The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) starting a new worshipping community in the same spot where a church just shut down. But increasingly, there’s space in the PC(USA) … [Read more...]
Redemption & healing: Synod introduces program to share generational wealth
A new Restorative Action program, sponsored by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, is asking congregations, organizations and individuals to donate a portion of their assets to trusts that will be governed by African American and Indigenous people, and used for the benefit of their communities. The commitment is this: The wealth that white churches and families and organizations possess was built at the cost of African American and Indigenous people. And some of it rightfully, theologically, belongs to them and needs to be returned. While initiated by the Synod of Lakes and Prairies, which voted in October 2020 to give $351,000 – 15% of its net assets – to the Restorative Action program, the program is not limited to that synod. It’s starting there, but also inviting white people and organizations from across the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) and beyond the church walls to participate — hoping to serve as a model for how this work can be done in other locations and contexts. The … [Read more...]
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