The Presbyterian Mission Agency is about to enter an intense new phase of its Vision Implementation Process — creating a new structural design for how the agency will live into its Matthew 25 initiative, and which the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board is expected to vote on in October. “We’re not doing renovations here,” Diane Moffett, president and executive director of the Presbyterian Mission Agency (PMA), told the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board, meeting by Zoom April 23. “We’re building a new home.” Board member Kate Murphy, a pastor from North Carolina, said she’s lived through a few vision processes in other settings — including some that “looked good on paper” but when it was over “fundamentally the organization remained the same.” But another one, in a local church, turned her life upside down — “everything but the gospel was changed, and it was very difficult and exposed a lot of conflict,” Murphy said. As hard as it was, and as much change as it brought, “I … [Read more...]

The Presbyterian Mission Agency Board is deliberately shifting the way it does work — moving from focusing in its meetings mostly on items of business (things to be voted up or down) to spending chunks of time training and educating board members, so they can go out and help other Presbyterians understand the importance of the church’s Matthew 25 initiative. The emphasis of the board’s April 22-23 Zoom meeting is on eradicating poverty – and what churches can do to help achieve that. Follow Jesus In an opening devotion, Kate Murphy, pastor of The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte,  North Carolina, shared an opinion piece she wrote after a Gallop Poll was released showing that fewer than half of American adults now are members of religious congregations. Some blame the young people, the media, the government for taking prayer out of schools, she wrote. But she contends that “while church membership is declining, people are still as hungry for things of God as they have … [Read more...]

Who are the 140 million Americans living in poverty, or in spitting distance to it? What are their lives like? What policies and systems contribute to their suffering? And what responsibility do Christians have to do something about it? Those are some of the questions that Liz Theoharis – a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) minister and co-chair with William J. Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival – presented in a discussion April 22 with the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board. The board is focusing at its April 22-23 Zoom meeting on eradicating poverty — one of three emphases of the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s Matthew 25 initiative, along with dismantling structural racism and building congregational vitality. Theoharis said many of the 140 million Americans living in or close to poverty are one health crisis, one job loss, one bad storm away from “absolute economic ruin.” And they live in a country in which there is “no scarcity, except … [Read more...]