Mission Yearbook: Speaker Dr. Angela Carpenter’s webinar explores gun violence and Christian ethics

During the Office of Public Witness’ new series on gun violence and Christian ethics, which recently launched via a webinar, Dr. Angela Carpenter of Hope College in Holland, Michigan, began her presentation by helping the more than 75 people in attendance think about their fears.

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Dr. Angela Carpenter

Specifically, she looked at Luke’s account of Jesus being tested in the wilderness. “I learned this story as a child, and I was always a little confused by it,” Carpenter said. “As a child, I thought, why would it be a sin for Jesus to use his power to get something to eat? Worshiping Satan was not something he would want to do. And casting himself off the temple to summon the angels? It made no sense to me.”

Years later, “I have come to think of this as having profound insight for who we are as human beings,” she said. “The commonality is Jesus is tempted to refuse authentic humanity.”

Carpenter called fear “a paradigmatic sin.” Some of us “erase human vulnerability” by turning to such things as firearms as a means of personal protection. “I do not want to suggest that gun owners are particularly prone to the sin of fear,” she said. Gun ownership is instead “a manifestation of behavior patterns much broader than that.”

In the United States, 40% of adults live in a house with a gun. There are about 378 million guns in circulation, more than one for every adult and child living in this country. Two-thirds of gun owners cite “personal protection” as their reason for owning a gun. Polling from several years ago showed most people owned guns for hunting or for sport, Carpenter said.

Among Christians, 36% of white evangelicals and 35% of white mainline Protestants own a gun, compared to 25% of the general population. Thirty-seven percent of evangelicals favor stricter gun laws, while 48% of mainline Protestants, 64% of Catholics and 76% of Black Protestants favor such laws.

Carpenter then turned her attention to guns, fear and Christian nationalism. She called Christian nationalism “a response to fear,” and cited factors including changing culture, the role of men in society, the number and status of white people, crime that’s real or perceived, and the shortage of resources, including housing and jobs.

Many proponents of Christian nationalism are also strong supporters of the Second Amendment and gun ownership, Carpenter noted. “The notion is that Jesus wants Christians to have cultural, political and violent power,” according to Carpenter, and the Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol is a memorable example, “with all sorts of Christian symbols.”

But gun owners and Christian nationalists “do not have a monopoly on fear,” she said. Fear dominates our culture. Social media algorithms heighten people’s fear, she said, and fear is further weaponized by those who seek more political power.

Jesus’ life “displays authentically human love, vulnerable love,” Carpenter said. During his temptation in the wilderness, “he is rejecting the back-up plans that might be available to him. He enters into the full vulnerability of being human.”

Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane — to “remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done” — is the “final rejection of a back-up option,” Carpenter said, quoting this from theologian Herbert McCabe: “When we encounter Jesus, in whatever way we encounter him, he strikes a chord in us; we resonate to him because he shows the humanity that lies more hidden in us — the humanity of which we are afraid. He is the human being that we dare not be. He takes the risks of love which we recognize as risks and so for the most part do not take.”

In addition to our activism in issues including gun violence, “we can try to show what it looks like to love in the midst of fear, to love without back-up plans,” Carpenter said.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Kelly Riley, Executive Vice President, Plan Operations, Board of Pensions
Leslie Rizzo, Production Clerk, Hubbard Press, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 

Let us pray:

Almighty God, we pray for those who are picking up the pieces of their lives. We pray that out of chaos hope will rise, and we offer ourselves humbly in service. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, author of ‘Loving Our Own Bones,’ helps others

Julia Watts Belser, a rabbi and faculty member at Georgetown University, recently delivered a lyrical and deeply thoughtful Grawemeyer Religion Award address at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Watch her presentation here.

Belser’s books include “Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole.”

“I want to lift up a core commitment I see at the heart of disability culture: a fierce and unabashed commitment to insist on worthiness, brilliance and the value of disabled people’s lives in a world that so often treats us like trash,” Belser said. “I name that work as sacred, that conviction we can help each other to spit out poison … that conviction that we deserve a world that welcomes us.”

She said her aim during the address was to “to show how disability wisdom can transform the way we read the Bible and other sacred texts. … I think disability wisdom can shiver something vital and new into the ways we name and know God.”

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Rabbi Julia Watts Belser

Belser defined disability expansively, including neurodivergence, depression, chronic pain and fatigue, and long Covid.

“We live in a world that is set up to accommodate certain kinds of bodies and minds. That’s what I mean when I talk about ableism,” Belser said.

In the Talmud, the rabbis talk about the “world’s most wicked city, Sodom,” and how it was destroyed alongside Gomorrah as recorded in Genesis 19. But Sodom was destroyed for reasons other than sexual activity, the rabbis pointed out: it was, as Ezekiel 16:49 explains, that Sodom and her daughters “had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”

“The sin of Sodom is a failure of hospitality,” Belser said. “It’s a practice of cruelty, violence, brutality and greed.”

In the Talmud, the rabbis teach that Sodom had one bed “on which they laid each and every guest,” Belser noted. “If a person was too tall, they cut off his feet.” Short people were stretched until they fit the guest bed.

“I find this a powerful story for thinking about ableism, where we force everyone into the same too-tight box,” Belser said.

Another truth — one that’s not spoken of frequently, she said — is “ableism hurts all of us. Ableism isn’t good for any body or any mind.”

“One way ableism works is it makes a fetish out of productivity,” Belser said. “It tries to sell us a lie, that our fundamental worth is tied to our work. That lie hits hardest against people with disabilities.” Some can’t work, “and some of us need accommodations that all too often get refused. Ableism is that fear that gnaws us in the night.”

Belser next turned to the example of Moses, “no confident speaker, even though he speaks directly to God.” She called Moses “a disabled prophet whose disability is recognized and affirmed by God.”

Moses asks God to “please send someone else” to speak to pharaoh. “I take Moses’ hesitation as a witness to the way internalized ableism creeps into our hearts,” Belser said.

God assures Moses, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” The Hebrew verb at the start of that verse is “part of the way God names God’s self when God first speaks to Moses at the burning bush,” Belser said, where God says, “I will be who I will be.” God’s presence in the mouth of Moses “is in the very place where Moses might have imagined God to be absent.”

“This verse has become something of a touchstone for me when I am frustrated with my own disabled bones,” Belser said. Some days, she lays a hand on her knee or hip or thigh “where I feel my disability acutely, and I whisper those words to myself — a balm, that promise of presence.”

In short, God meets Moses’ access needs. God tells Moses to take Aaron, his brother, “in a moment we might call the first reasonable accommodation in the Bible,” Belser said. “It is for me a powerful reminder that disabled people deserve a world of abundant access, a world that offers kinship and support.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Meg Rift, Executive Assistant, Stated Clerk’s Office, Interim Unified Agency  
Kathy Riley, Associate for Emotion, Spiritual Care, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Interim Unified Agency 

Let us pray:

God of wholeness, may the world you intend be the one we seek. May the way you love be the way we love, so that even broken hearts pulse with your grace. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: How land acknowledgements can be incorporated into worship

The “Along the Road” podcast recently offered a glimpse into the deeper meaning and history behind what has become an increasingly common practice in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.): land acknowledgements.

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Photo by Asso Myron via Unsplash

The episode titled “Nourish: Acknowledging the Original Habitants of the Land” featured a conversation with the Rev. Lauren Sanders, who is an ordained PC(USA) minister and an Indigenous person who serves as Indigenous care chaplain for an organization called First United in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Sanders also serves on the General Assembly Committee on Representation. She was interviewed by host Martha Miller, who is a ruling elder and certified Christian educator and is the manager for ministry education and support in the Interim Unified Agency.

A land acknowledgement is a formal statement offered at the beginning of a gathering that recognizes the Indigenous peoples who originally inhabited the land where an event or gathering is taking place.

In 2018, the 223rd General Assembly of the PC(USA) voted to include land acknowledgements at the beginning of all official meetings and events. Virtual PC(USA) gatherings have often invited participants to do land acknowledgements of their own, recognizing the Indigenous inhabits of the lands from which they are calling in.

In keeping with this PC(USA) practice, Miller included a land acknowledgement at the beginning of a Leader Formation webinar she facilitated for ruling elders and deacons on March 6. After recognizing the Anishinaabe people and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian tribe who historically resided on the land where she was, Miller invited participants to type in the chat space and recognize the Indigenous inhabitants of the land where they were joining from.

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The webinar was part of the reason Miller wanted to have Sanders featured on an episode of “Along the Road.” The episode was part of the podcast’s “Nourish” series, which — like the Leader Formation webinar — are particularly aimed at ruling elders and deacons. Miller wanted her conversation with Sanders to provide some background and depth of meaning around the practice of land acknowledgement.

“I think there’s a danger, particularly when there’s something that has passed through the General Assembly, that it could become a box to check, rather than something that comes from the heart,” Miller said in the episode. Indeed, authentically heartfelt intention is a key part of making a land acknowledgement, Sanders explained.

“How and when you give your land acknowledgement, how that looks, where that is, and how we all engage with it, does need to come from our heart,” she said. She went on to explain that there are no formal parameters about how one might include a land acknowledgement in a worship service, for example — it could be an opening, a prayer, a confession, a response to the sermon, a benediction or something else. The important part, she said, is truly recognizing that the land you’re on was once inhabited and tenderly cared for by Indigenous peoples and that those people were forcibly moved and the land was stolen from them.

At the outset of the episode, Sanders offered her own greeting in Potowatomi, which is the Indigenous nation she belongs to. While she is Indigenous herself, Sanders lives and serves on lands that were historically inhabited by other Indigenous nations who she acknowledged in her greeting, referring to those nations with the names they use to refer to themselves.

As the conversation unfolded, Sanders clarified that a land acknowledgement is part of a larger ritual.

“My Indigenous community … and the Indigenous communities that I am familiar with have a ceremony that is called a welcome. A welcome is a two-part ceremony, where one half is the welcome of the host nations — the peoples’ lands that we’re on. And the land acknowledgement is the second part. It’s acknowledgement that we are all guests on that land.”

Layton Williams Berkes, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Rick Purdy, Manager, Human Resources, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Jim Quiggins, Strategic Communications Manager, Unification Management Office

Let us pray:

Gracious Lord, you affirmed the worth of every human being. Help us do the same. You loved the unloved and the unlovable. Help us do the same. You set the captive free and consoled the sorrowful. Help us do the same. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Synod of the Covenant delivers a talk for teaching on the fourth gospel

The Rev. Dr. Karoline M. Lewis, homiletics professor at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of “John: Fortress Biblical Preaching Commentaries” and “A Lay Preacher’s Guide: How to Craft a Faithful Sermon,” recently delivered the Synod of the Covenant’s online monthly preaching webinar on the Gospel of John.

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Photo by Tim Wildsmith via Unsplash

“I am a bit passionate about the Gospel of John,” Lewis said once she’d been introduced by the synod’s executive, the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick. “I am delighted to share this with you.” Her presentation is here.

Lewis offered this summary of John’s gospel:

• Where does Jesus come from? This is also where he is going.
• What is his relationship with God like? This is the believer’s relationship, too.
• Who is Jesus? Answer: The “I AM.”

Lewis dates John’s gospel around the same time as Matthew’s and Lukes, 75 or 85 CE. It’s “a gospel that wants to bring in believers,” she said. “It’s apostolic, and it’s written for a community that was likely excommunicated for believing in Jesus.”

Central to John is our relationship with Jesus, she said. “Believing is synonymous with being in relationship with Jesus,” Lewis said. “It’s an active thing, not something you get.”

John 1:1 “is one of the most famous verses in Scripture,” she noted, with claims “we’ll keep coming back to over and over.”

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The Rev. Dr. Karoline Lewis

“In the beginning” hearkens back to Genesis 1:1 in the Septuagint, and “was the Word” is a claim of Jesus’ origin, part of Creation. “Jesus is coming as the Word to create, to give new birth, to create this relationship with God,” Lewis said. “Relationship is so key with this gospel.”

“The Word was with God,” and the believer is invited into this relationship, which is “absolutely at the heart of why Jesus has come.”

“The Word was God.” There is “no other New Testament book that makes such a profound claim on Jesus’ identity,” Lewis said.

Lewis calls John “Not the Baptist.” “He’s not a messianic figure, but a witness, the testifier,” she said, citing John 1:15. For John, testifying is the key characteristic of a disciple. “We see lots of portraits of John pointing,” Lewis said, displaying one. Those preaching on John’s gospel in the coming weeks can “invite our listeners into a theological image they may not be used to, but it’s present in the text.”

In John 1:14, the Word becomes flesh, and Eugene Peterson’s The Message says the Word “moved into the neighborhood.” The verb is “tent” or “tabernacle,” Lewis said. “It’s a unique word here. John is recalling the wilderness wanderings in the Book of Numbers.” Since the gospel comes out after 70 CE, “the theological crisis is, where is God if the Temple is destroyed and Jerusalem is razed?” God “is tenting in a human body,” she said. Jesus “enters into the fullness of what it means to be human.”

John 1:18 completes John’s Prologue by restating the first verse. In the earliest translations, the word “son” is not found here. Jesus is “the only begotten, the one and only.” Who’s the “beloved” disciple in John’s gospel? Many believe it’s John himself, but Lewis thinks “it’s you and me, the unnamed believer. This is what we’re invited into. We are the disciples whom Jesus loves.”

John “is so different, and that’s one of the challenges in preaching John,” she said. It has different soteriology, Christology and eschatology, “and a different understanding of what the Spirit is. We learn to appreciate its particularities and preach that for all it’s worth.”

Learn more about the Synod of the Covenant’s monthly series of preaching webinars here.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Sonia Prescott, Reference & Outreach Archivist, Presbyterian Historical Society
Kim Pryor, Director Trust Relationship Services, Presbyterian Foundation    

Let us pray:

Loving creating God, we thank you for your presence in our churches. We ask your blessing for those who care for each other. Give us energy, vitality, and vision to continue to be your hands and feet to a hurting world. Help us recognize the beauty of resilience and the value of each one of your churches and your children. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: At documentary premiere, speakers discuss ways to mobilize to address eviction and homelessness

Though “Evicting the American Dream” was filmed in Dayton, Ohio, documentary co-producer Dr. Katherine Rowell is quick to point out that it’s not just a local story.

“The issues in this film you're going to see are across the country,” Rowell explained to a packed house at the March 30 premiere. “But I'm really thankful for the citizens and organizers and activists in our city who came forward to tell the story.”

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Dr. Katherine Rowell receives a hug at the premiere of "Evicting the American Dream" (Photo by Darla Carter)

Rowell, a sociology professor at Sinclair Community College, was addressing more than 350 people who’d gathered in the campus auditorium to see the documentary, which delves into systemic issues and insidious practices that can lead to families being forced out of their homes and into unsafe, substandard housing, or even homeless shelters.

“There's a dominant narrative out there that says there is nothing we can do to prevent homelessness,” director David Barnhart told the crowd. But there are “counter stories that say, ‘Oh yes, we can.’ There are so many things that we can be doing differently, systemically, policy-wise, to stop this epidemic and to prevent it from happening.”

Attendees at the premiere included John Zimmerman, vice president of the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center, which engages in activities designed to encourage fair housing practices.

Viewing the film is important, Zimmerman said, because “people who are evicted should have the same rights as everyone else in this country, and they should have the right to counsel, and 97% of the people in the United States that are evicted don’t have that right, and that is essentially saying we have forgotten your children.”

“Evicting the American Dream” is an educational resource of Counter Stories Productions, the story ministry of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, that captures the trauma and innocence of children living in a shelter.

“When you look at any of the research on the adverse childhood experiences, housing instability is one of the top experiences that can cause that ongoing trauma, and we know that trauma, then, is not just part of our mental experience moving forward but can affect our educational outcomes, our health outcomes, all types of outcomes as we age,” said Amy Riegel, executive director of the Coalition on Homeless and Housing in Ohio.

The children’s testimonies appear after research and interviews with community partners and experts like Riegel, who explain forces that make it hard for their families to keep their housing and how the dream of American homeownership is being sapped by corporate priorities.

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The Rev. Edwin González-Castillo, director of Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, addresses the crowd at the premiere at Sinclair Community College. (Photo by Alex Simon)

This film is “about the reality we are living as a society, a growing crisis of displacement, of families being forced out of their very communities that they helped build, of neighbors turned into numbers in the system and courts and dreams that are being deferred by rising costs, broken systems and institutional neglect,” the Rev. Edwin González-Castillo, director of PDA, said at the premiere.

Breaking the cycle is important because “what we know is that children who are homeless, unfortunately (often) grow up to be adults who experience homelessness,” Riegel said. “I think the movie outlines how we might be able to break that cycle and change the system, so they have a different outcome in 20 years.”

The documentary was followed by a panel discussion featuring experts and community partners. Joining Rowell and Barnhart were Debra Lavey, an attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE); Destiny Brown, a community organizer for ABLE and Dayton Tenant Union; Riegel and Zimmerman.

The panel discussed ongoing challenges, such as the uncertainty of retaining federal funding for groups that serve tenants who face housing discrimination and other woes, but also about some progress that has been made since the documentary was filmed.

Lavey highlighted the fact that people in Dayton can now request for their eviction record to be sealed instead of it following them like a scarlet letter ‘E.’ She also highlighted the Access to Counsel pilot program that was launched last year for people living in particular ZIP codes where there’s been disinvestment.

For more information about the documentary, go to pcusa.org/evicting. If you’re interested in hosting a screening of the film, contact PDA's Michelle Muñiz at michelle.muniz@pcusa.org. 

Darla Carter, Communications Strategist, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Irv Porter, Associate, Native American Intercultural Congregational Support, Interim Unified Agency 
Doug Portz, Vice President, Church Relations, Board of Pensions    

Let us pray:

Lord, teach us that leadership begins with compassion and prayer and ends in service. As we model giving, remind us that all good gifts come from you. Amen.

Minute for Mission: World Refugee Day

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Outside U.S. District Court to support resettlement.

You cannot turn on the news these days without hearing about violence and displacement. We live in turbulent times. According to the United Nations, we are witnessing record high numbers of forced displacement and migration — over 100 million globally.  The causes are many — civil wars, the rise in autocratic governments who violate human rights with impunity, drug wars and even domestic violence. Natural disasters, too, such as hurricanes, droughts and flooding. And when asked, most migrants will tell you that they have left home for a combination of these factors. Their destinations are often determined by where they have family or friends and the financial resources to get there.

June 20 is World Refugee Day. A day to remember and acknowledge all those who have had to seek safety outside their country. We take time to remember and pray for the situations that caused them to leave in the first place. We pray for their safety as they journey and where they settle. We recognize the many gifts they bring with them and the contributions they make to their new homelands. We pray for our own communities to be a place of welcome, comfort, joy and new possibilities for all of us.

June 20 is also a day to recommit ourselves to living into the type of world that God envisions for us. As Christians living in the United States, we have a particular responsibility to speak up with our elected officials. To speak out against xenophobia, racism and hatred. To speak for the dignity and rights of every human being — in our foreign development policies and in our immigration policies.

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance has compiled World Refugee Day resources from across our denomination and from our ecumenical and interfaith partners to offer a number of ways that we can honor refugees and displaced people. How will you honor this day? 

Susan Krehbiel, Former Associate for Migration Accompaniment Ministries, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance

Let us join in prayer for:

Katherine Pierce, Business Administrator, Church Engagement, Board of Pensions 
Cristina Pitts, Mission Specialist, Latin American & the Caribbean office, Interim Unified Agency  

Let us pray:

O God of the sojourner, today we remember those who have set out on journeys not of their own choosing. We pray that you may guide them to safety and give them courage to face the challenges that lie ahead. And may our hearts be open to meet Jesus in each encounter. Amen.

Minute for Mission: Juneteenth

Juneteenth, the official freeing of enslaved people on June 19, 1865, in Texas, is one of the most important events in American history — but most students haven’t even been taught it. Maybe that will change now that Juneteenth is a national holiday.

It makes sense to acknowledge the day when Union troops arrived in Galveston a full 2½ years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — it is the start to remedying one of this country’s darkest sins.

However, it also sets in motion the maintenance of Black subordination in the country’s postbellum society. Yes, Black people were no longer enslaved, but white supremacy ideology is still openly and unapologetically killing Black people and people of color because of extreme ignorant terrorist cells of hatred and silently approved all around this country.

Yet, more than 20 states are moving to strike aspects of American history and anti-racist teaching from public school curricula. Their argument is that examining our history of racism breeds contempt that is racially divisive. On the contrary, discussing history truthfully and using its lessons to inform our future breeds empowerment and is racially unifying. Instead of seeding anger and blame, it allows us to approach solutions to current and future problems with the greatest insight and it helps build trust and accountability within our systems.

A white supremacist, neo-Nazi, mass murderer and domestic terrorist was convicted for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in South Carolina. During a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the terrorist killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person.

And recently, a white adult male gunman entranced by a white supremacist ideology known as “replacement theory” opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He methodically shot and killed 10 people and injured three more, all of them Black, in one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

Knowledge of our history is essential to inform solutions to future problems.

Gunmen have referenced the racist idea known as “replacement theory” during a string of mass shootings and other violence in recent years. It was once associated with the far-right fringe, but has become increasingly mainstream, pushed by politicians.

Knowledge of our history is necessary for accountability – not retribution or atonement.

Without a clear understanding of what led to these boiling points through an examination of history, we cannot create systems of accountability that are strong enough to maintain order. Studying history does not involve retribution, revenge or atonement. It involves an understanding of why one inciting event can lead to such outrage and mistrust that we need to examine the efficacy of the system itself.

That is what anti-racist teaching does: It does not retroactively place blame on the perpetrators of negative acts. Instead, it examines the role of different systems in allowing repeated negative acts and offers solutions to strip away some of the negative relics of the system that causes these acts to occur. In this case, it is examining the criminal justice system’s history of police brutality in Black communities and adjusting laws and policies that intentionally targeted these communities, while holding wrongdoers accountable in the moment.

Knowledge of our history is empowering and can shift entire narratives about people.

Learning history can be extremely empowering: It provides a portal into what we can achieve, while helping us put current, often negative, conditions into better context. It also provides a crucial opportunity to change the narrative for entire populations of people.

Michael Moore, Associate for African American Intercultural Congregational Support, Racial Equity & Women’s Intercultural Ministries, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

Jim Phares, Web Systems Developer, IT Application Development, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Sarah Pickrell, Mission Associate II, Executive Director’s Office, Interim Unified Agency 

Let us pray:

Eternal and Divine God, we honestly lament how disheartening it is to still not be free from the bonds of the sin of racism. We lament that the ever-present pain of injustice is like an anchor around the necks of Black people since our enslaved presence in this land. God, help us to see you as the God of the oppressed and savior of those who seek liberation. We ask that you empower those in positions of power to be positive and vocal agents of change instead of silently complicit in the pain of those most marginalized in our world. We thank you for the freedoms obtained and yet we pray for your guidance to achieve that which is still yet not reality. In Jesus’ name we pray this solemn prayer. Amen.

Mission Yearbook: Tackling society’s systemic problems and finding solutions for people with disabilities

It’s not that the 39-year-old California native who grew up in the Chicago suburbs went out intentionally looking for community; she just immediately recognized when she had made that life-changing connection.

“At first I didn’t know anything about the disability rights movement,” said Sullivan, who lives with a disability. “I got involved with ADAPT Chicago by someone inviting me to go to one of their meetings because I was already at Access Living for another meeting and my ride didn’t show up. Since I was just going to wait around anyway, I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I went to the meeting, and I knew that these were the people that I had been looking for!”

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Alliance for Community Services is a grassroots, member-led organization that is partnered with the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People and supported by gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing.

Today, Sullivan not only serves on the board, but she is also co-coordinator of ADAPT Chicago, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that says it “organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom.”

ADAPT Chicago is also one of nine organizations under the umbrella of the Alliance for Community Services, a grassroots, member-led organization that is partnered with the Presbyterian Committee on the Self-Development of People, a PC(USA) ministry that similarly seeks to change the structures that perpetuate poverty, oppression and injustice.

ACS was formed about 10 years ago when public aid offices were being closed and Medicaid benefits were being cut around the state. According to the group’s coordinator, Fran Tobin, and their published mission statement, ACS works to bring together people with disabilities, low-income families and front-line service workers “to resist threats, identify common ground and put the ‘human’ back in human services.”

“As justice, access and inclusion have been key issues in our society, the work of the Alliance for Community Services truly and profoundly illustrates the power of communities and their collective voices as they continue to proclaim economic justice in addressing intersecting issues such as health care, disability, collective bargaining, aging and education,” said the Rev. Dr. Alonzo Johnson, coordinator of SDOP. “ACS’s work can truly be described as transformative power incarnate. Their emphasis on community ownership, organizing, empowerment and self-determination are all important values shared by the ministry of SDOP.”

The unique grassroots power at the heart of ACS’s work is made possible, in part, through a grant from SDOP, which is in turn supported by Presbyterians’ generous gifts to One Great Hour of Sharing.

For more than 75 years, its purpose of helping neighbors in need around the world remains constant, giving the PC(USA) and other Christian denominations a tangible way to share God’s love. In addition to SDOP, One Great Hour of Sharing also benefits the ministries of the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance.

“Although there are a lot of benefits to working with SDOP, the centerpiece that makes the partnership important,” said Tobin, “is the moral centering that SDOP has of the lived experience of people experiencing poverty and oppression and engaging in making change in the world for their own world and the bigger world beyond us. And that’s really essential because there are a lot of groups that do funding and support that are less about that.”

In 2024, members of ACS met with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to address the inequities in the taxi industry.

“If we were able-bodied people, we could call a cab in two to three minutes,” she said, “but now we’re waiting for an hour in certain places, and that’s not right. The mayor agreed, and he said that we need to look for ways to incentivize the cabs to take more wheelchair riders.”

Community organizing is just what Sullivan will continue to do.

“Because I am completely disabled, I consider my job to be doing the stuff I do with the Alliance and ADAPT Chicago,” she said. “We’re not huddled in the corners and shriveling away from problems. We are attacking these problems and finding solutions. That’s what we do.”

Emily Enders Odom, Associate Director of Mission Communications, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)

Let us join in prayer for:

Andrew Peterson, Mission Associate, Office of Public Witness, Interim Unified Agency
Jason Peterson, Senior Vice President & Chief Operating Officer, Presbyterian Investment & Loan Program  

Let us pray:

Gracious and merciful God, open our minds and hearts to see your presence in all people, that we might provide welcome and room for growth to all. Amen.