Sunday, October 2, World Communion Sunday

You shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace.
Isaiah 55:12a (ESV)

While the legal community may anxiously await the first Monday in October when the Supreme Court begins its new term, those of us who follow the liturgical calendar look forward to the first Sunday in October — World Communion Sunday.

There is something truly special about having a day where Christians around the world are all coming to the table. Of course, it can get dicey in that the table of Jesus Christ is like so many other things in the church — we don’t all agree on who gets to participate. So even on World Communion Sunday, we’re not of one accord.

Communion only makes sense for me if everyone is welcome at the table. Jesus instituted the ritual at the Last Supper and said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” No qualifiers (or disqualifiers, for that matter). Just do this. It grieves me every time I hear stories of people not being invited to participate or flat out turned away from the table of Jesus Christ.

Even on World Communion Sunday, not everyone is welcome at every table. But for me, the day is a promise of what we could be … what we should be as a community in Christ. A reminder that all over the world, people who don’t look like us or talk like us or live like us are all coming to the table. They are all invited, just as we are.

If Jesus included the one who was to betray him, who are we to decide who does and doesn’t belong?

Action: Gather round the table of Jesus Christ with people you love and even people you dislike. Get a glimpse of the kingdom. Be nourished for the journey ahead. Go out with joy and be led forth with the peace of the One who always welcomes us to the table in your heart.

Prayer: God of welcome and inclusion, may we go forth with great joy, spreading the Good News that all of God’s children have a place at the table. Amen.

 

Anne Russ is an ordained pastor with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She has a heart for small church ministry, Christian camping and the power of the Web to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Anne is a fiercely supportive theater mom, a loud laugher and a lover of good stories. She is a displaced Southerner living in New York who pastors through her online platform, DoubtingBeliever.com.

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This year’s Path of Peace reflections are designed to help participants explore peacemaking efforts addressing some of the major issues of our time. The theme for the 29 days of the 2022 A Season of Peace is Led Forth in Peace: Critical Areas of Engagement for Peacemakers. With these daily reflections, we are invited to reflect upon ways to practice peace by engaging the following critical areas:

1. 1. 1. Climate change
      2. Nonviolence
      3. The intersection of poverty and racism
      4. Immigration/migration

Sunday, September 25, A Season of Peace

Because the Lord your God is the God of all gods and Lord of all lords, the great, mighty,
and awesome God  who doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t take bribes. He enacts justice for
orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them food and clothing.
That means you must also love strangers because you were strangers in Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:17–19 (CEB)

America is a land of immigrants. Unless you are Native American, your people came from somewhere else.

When my in-laws immigrated from Germany, just 12 years after the end of World War II, they were not greeted with open arms in a country where anti-German sentiment was still strong. With the exception of a few kind and generous souls who made all the difference in their transition to this country, the good Christians of New England did not adhere to the biblical directives on how to treat strangers in their land.

For those of us who look to the Bible as our guide for living, there isn’t much wiggle room when it comes to how we should treat immigrants. We are to welcome them, care for them and treat them fairly. The government will have rules about who can and cannot live on this land, but our mandate as Christians is pretty clear.

The Jews were strangers in Egypt. Many years later Jesus and his parents were strangers in that same country, fleeing an oppressive dictator who wanted them dead. Our ancestors were once strangers in this land we call home.

We are called to love strangers in our land — not only because we were once strangers, but because we are called to love as God loves.

Action: Look into local efforts to welcome immigrants into your community. Consider ways that you can help with time, money or other gifts you have to offer.

Prayer: God who knows no stranger, help us to love ALL of our neighbors and to make those who have been displaced from their homes feel at home in our midst. Amen.

 

Anne Russ is an ordained pastor with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She has a heart for small church ministry, Christian camping and the power of the Web to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Anne is a fiercely supportive theater mom, a loud laugher and a lover of good stories. She is a displaced Southerner living in New York who pastors through her online platform, DoubtingBeliever.com.

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This year’s Path of Peace reflections are designed to help participants explore peacemaking efforts addressing some of the major issues of our time. The theme for the 29 days of the 2022 A Season of Peace is Led Forth in Peace: Critical Areas of Engagement for Peacemakers. With these daily reflections, we are invited to reflect upon ways to practice peace by engaging the following critical areas:

1. 1. 1. Climate change
      2. Nonviolence
      3. The intersection of poverty and racism
      4. Immigration/migration

Tuesday, September 20, A Season of Peace

The Lord loves righteousness and justice;
 the earth is full of God’s unfailing love.
Psalm 33:5 (NIV)

Whether we like to believe or acknowledge it, those of us who are white have participated (willingly or even unwittingly) in systems that perpetuate the cycle of poverty for our non-white neighbors. Perhaps none can so directly trace our participation than those who are descended from white veterans of World War II.

While there are numerous ways black veterans were prevented from receiving the benefits of the GI Bill (you can learn more here), none was so instrumental in helping to create the wealth gap between white and black that exists today as the VA home loan program. The VA guaranteed the loans, but did not administer them, so any institution who chose to refuse loans to Black people was free to do so.

According to historian Ira Katznelson in the book When Affirmative Action Was White, in 1947, only two of the more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans in 13 Mississippi cities went to Black borrowers. In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-white people.

If the house your white grandfather bought in 1950 Levittown (Long Island or Pennsylvania) for $4,500 under the GI bill is worth $400,000 today, your family wealth is going to be greater than your friend whose Black grandfather couldn’t even get a loan at the time.

No matter how progressive, inclusive and anti-racist you think you are, if you look like me, you are benefiting from racist systems designed to benefit us. May we not let denial, guilt or lack of understanding keep us from working to dismantle these systems.

Action: Educate yourself (and others) about the unjust and unbalanced systems that have caused the racial disparity in generational wealth. Knowing they exist is imperative to reversing their effects.

Prayer: God of justice, help us put aside our pride and any preconceived notions we may be harboring when it comes to systems of oppression. May we be open to learning, growing and changing to help bring about your Kin-dom here on earth. Amen.

Anne Russ is an ordained pastor with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She has a heart for small church ministry, Christian camping and the power of the Web to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Anne is a fiercely supportive theater mom, a loud laugher and a lover of good stories. She is a displaced Southerner living in New York who pastors through her online platform, DoubtingBeliever.com.

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This year’s Path of Peace reflections are designed to help participants explore peacemaking efforts addressing some of the major issues of our time. The theme for the 29 days of the 2022 A Season of Peace is Led Forth in Peace: Critical Areas of Engagement for Peacemakers. With these daily reflections, we are invited to reflect upon ways to practice peace by engaging the following critical areas:

1. 1. 1. Climate change
      2. Nonviolence
      3. The intersection of poverty and racism
      4. Immigration/migration

Sunday, September 18, A Season of Peace

I pray that the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see
what is the hope of God’s call.
Ephesians 1:18a (CEB)

There are many statistics that cite the disparity of wealth between the white population and the Black and Latinx populations in the United States, but our family lived it and witnessed it during my daughter’s time in high school.

In a town whose public school system had a high rate of white flight to private schools and neighboring town districts, we sent our daughter to a school where she was in the minority. Less than 15% of the student body was white. At her graduation, she was easily spotted as she was the only blond female in the 300-member class.

While we were by no means the richest people in town, she was one of the wealthiest students at her school — something she tried very hard to keep on the down-low. The correlation between race and poverty was not hard for her to make.

Now at college with a predominantly white student body, our daughter has realized that her fellow students don’t know what she knows. They haven’t lived with, studied with, played with and performed with people who don’t look like them, people whose families struggle to pay rent, people for whom daily bread is not guaranteed. Her world view is different. Often, our very opinionated daughter is not very patient with her current classmates’ ignorance on the causes and systemic cycles of poverty — especially when it is related to race. She is much more aware of her privilege than the average 21-year-old white woman because she lived in the midst of people who did not share her status.

It is easy to ignore and dismiss articles and statistics.

It is much harder to ignore and dismiss people — especially people with whom you are in community.

Action: Take an assessment of your communities — school, church, neighborhood, social and professional groups. What is the makeup of those social networks? What shifts can you make to be more involved in communities where people who don’t look like you make up the majority?

Prayer: Loving God, open the eyes of our hearts to the people around us. Help us to forge communities that make the systems of injustice in our world impossible to ignore and imperative to address. May we work with each other side by side. May they know we are Christians by our love. Amen.

Anne Russ is an ordained pastor with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She has a heart for small church ministry, Christian camping and the power of the Web to spread the Good News of the Gospel. Anne is a fiercely supportive theater mom, a loud laugher and a lover of good stories. She is a displaced Southerner living in New York who pastors through her online platform, DoubtingBeliever.com.

 

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This year’s Path of Peace reflections are designed to help participants explore peacemaking efforts addressing some of the major issues of our time. The theme for the 29 days of the 2022 A Season of Peace is Led Forth in Peace: Critical Areas of Engagement for Peacemakers. With these daily reflections, we are invited to reflect upon ways to practice peace by engaging the following critical areas:

1. 1. Climate change
   2. Nonviolence
   3. The intersection of poverty and racism
   4. Immigration/migration

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Get your social media noticed with hashtags

How to get more people to see your posts

December 11, 2021

Posting your ministry happenings on social media is great, but it can be even better (translation: more folks seeing what you have posted) with the use of a hashtag.

Hashtags are those words and phrases with a # in front of them that you may have seen attached to Facebook or Twitter posts. Hashtags are the filing system of social media. They make your posts searchable beyond your church’s username. The right hashtags can put your posts in front of people you want to reach. 

If you don’t have a unique hashtag for your church, create one and encourage others to use it whenever they post about the church. Create hashtags for special events as well and use both the church and the event hashtag on posts about the event. Social media marketers advise using only two or three hashtags on Twitter and Facebook, but between six and 11 hashtags on Instagram garner the best engagement rates.

Also, consider adding day-of-the-week hashtags to your posts to reach outside your current audience. Here are some of the most popular day-of-the-week-related hashtags. Many of them work well with things you’re already posting: #mondaymotivation, #tuesdaytips, #wednesdaywisdom, #throwbackthursday, #feelgoodfriday, #saturday (yes, just the word “Saturday” itself is a popular hashtag) and #sundayworshipcelebration.

And, as in-person worship resumes, start using the hashtag #newnormal when posting about upcoming services.

Anne Russ, Presbyterian Pastor residing in New York City

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Barry Ensign-George, Coordinator, Theology & Worship, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Betsy Ensign-George, Associate Editor, Presbyterian Women

Let us pray

Thank you, God, for unexpected gifts that lead us to new places and ways to serve you. Amen.