Today in the Mission Yearbook - Despite the pandemic, Michigan church is growing

Memorial Presbyterian Church in Midland is thriving as a ‘church on the move’

December 7, 2021

The Rev. Matthew Schram is senior pastor at Memorial Presbyterian Church.

Over the course of the past year, churches across the globe have wondered what coming out on the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic looks like. Many have wondered how to make the best decisions for their worshiping communities. As the pandemic pushed churches to make difficult decisions, many churches saw an opportunity to try new things.

In a season of change and growth, one such church in Michigan cultivated a spirit of “church on the move” that inspired members to find innovative and creative ways to live into their mission statement: “A house of prayer for all people.”

The Rev. Matthew Schramm, senior pastor of Memorial Presbyterian Church in Midland, Michigan, said that from the beginning, church leaders have tried to connect to people in ways that move the “house of prayer” beyond just the four walls of the church. Over the course of the year, Memorial gained almost 40 new members. Some of those new members have never stepped inside the building, proving again the church is more than just its brick and mortar.

“Our groups never stopped,” Schramm said. “They just went online.”

Schramm began his call as designated pastor of Memorial in 2018. On Sept. 27, 2020, the congregation voted at an outdoor worship to call him as their senior pastor, though his official installation depends on when gathering together safely with the presbytery can occur. The church has met virtually since March 2020, though the traditional service was always available via livestream.

People came to Memorial in a variety of ways. Some happened to drive by and notice an outdoor worship that piqued their interest. Others found the church virtually. Mostly, Schramm said, word of mouth has been the best testimony to what God is doing at Memorial.

According to their stewardship newsletter, Memorial has had about 9,500 views of worship services on its website and more than 40,000 views on social media. In addition to a traditional and contemporary worship service on Sunday morning, Memorial finds different ways to consistently engage with the community. For Memorial, the key to keep moving has been “adapting.” When the church couldn’t hold its traditional chili cook-off as planned, Memorial moved the cook-off outside of the local shelter and invited the shelter guests to serve as the voters.

Last May, Midland experienced a flood that affected over 10,000 people. Since then, Memorial has partnered with local and federal emergency services to help rebuild the community. Memorial has also maintained their food pantry, the largest food pantry in Midland County. Instead of people coming into the building to select their own food, volunteers bag food and bring it to people’s cars. Memorial’s food pantry gives away over 90,000 items of food a year, including fresh produce and meat. This missional spirit — and the desire to love and help their community — has helped get the word out that Memorial is here for people.

Since the beginning, leaders of Memorial have worked to create a spirit of welcome. Chat monitors are sure to welcome people who sign on to virtual worship and volunteers offer zoom fellowship gatherings. Folks are available to help walk people through technology changes. Memorial has even reached out to the local community, sending goodie baskets to locally owned businesses as a way to celebrate their neighbors.

Like most churches, members and friends of Memorial have seen their share of challenges. Not every idea was successful, but Schramm said he feels a great deal of freedom to try things. They were even able to spend some time this past year doing renovations to the church building, something much easier without scheduled building use by groups.

Not everything about what post-quarantine looks like at Memorial is clear. But Schramm said there are certainly benefits from the virtual community that will continue regardless of what the future looks like. Schramm said he gets inspiration and encouragement from the larger church community.

“Everyone has had to adapt,” Schramm said. “I’ve been impressed with all of my colleagues and all that they’re doing. I really don’t think we’re doing anything different than anybody else. We’re just trying to do the best we can. I’ve seen crazy creative ministry during this time.”

The Rev. Rebecca (Becki) Mallozzi, Pastor at Faith Presbyterian Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Jeffrey Eddings, Associate, Coaching & Spiritual Formation, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Anna Edlin, Systems & Delivery Support Officer, Trust Services, Presbyterian Foundation

Let us pray

Working together, across national and religious lines, may we increase God’s love. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - First Presbyterian Church of Yorktown in New York tackles food insecurity

Legacy now includes becoming a Hunger Action Congregation

December 6, 2021

 

First Presbyterian Church of Yorktown opens its pantry twice a month and draws many working families. (Photo courtesy of FPCY)

First Presbyterian Church of Yorktown in Yorktown Heights, New York, recently became a Hunger Action Congregation, capping off a long tradition of serving the community through a food pantry and other endeavors.

Churches qualify for certification as Hunger Action Congregations through the Presbyterian Hunger Program when they are active in these areas: hunger alleviation, development assistance, hunger education, lifestyle integrity, corporate and public policy witness, and worship.

“Although we’ve just been recently certified, this has been something the church has been very attuned with for a long time,” said Ellen Miles, the Hunger Action Congregation Team Lead for the church.

The crown jewel of FPCY’s hunger-action efforts is a twice-a-month food pantry that’s evolved over time to meet community needs. It has been around for more than 30 years and serves individuals and families living within about 10 miles of the church.

“FPCY’s ministry to tackle hunger started out in a very humble way, 15 to 25 bags of food twice a month to people who were hungry from a literal pantry closet in the church,” said the Rev. Chip Low, co-pastor and coach. “It was a simple and straightforward task. Then we began asking questions that moved this ministry from something transactional twice a month to what it means to engage in food justice ministry and how does that ministry ask deeper, more meaningful, more relational and transformational questions of us and the people we serve.”

Low continued, “This has happened over time as we listened to the lives of those who come to our pantry, explored the shortcomings of programs like SNAP (the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), gone on national and international mission trips that were less about building something and more about learning the impact of our lives on others, explored biblical texts, including the differences between Jesus’ compassionate response in the feeding of the 5,000 and the disciples’ response, and then asking, ‘What is all of this asking us to become as well as do?’”

FPCY attracts a large number of food recipients — 175 to 180 families each time the pantry opens or closer to 275 (per pantry opening) during the height of the pandemic — and makes sure that bags are given out with a full portion of friendliness and compassion.

“While we don’t see the same clients every time, there are some regulars and we have real relationships with them,” said Katharine Frase, co-leader of the food pantry. “Some of them have been coming long enough that we can ask about their kids or their dog … and I think that really is different. While we try to be efficient, the compassion is really important.”

She recalled an older gentleman who was eager to share a vintage photograph of himself along with some buddies and Marilyn Monroe. “What really tickled me is that we were the people he wanted to show that picture, which really speaks to relationship,” Frase said.

Most recipients come to the church to receive bags of food, which are loaded into their vehicle by volunteers for health and safety reasons during the pandemic. The church also takes bags of food to two senior complexes and is involved in local programs to feed the homeless.

“They’re broad-based efforts,” Miles said. “Lots of folks in the congregation are involved, but in terms of the actual coordination of these initiatives, it’s really a handful of people, which is just amazing. … It’s kind of a well-oiled machine.”

FPCY also has members serving on the town of Yorktown’s Food Security Task Force, and the church is searching for ways to make the community more aware of the factors that contribute to hunger and household financial crises.

“Say you’ve got a family of four and both adults are working full-time but minimum wage; they can’t afford an apartment,” said Frase, co-chair of the task force. “The vast majority of my (pantry) clients are working. They just can’t feed their families.”

Some of the produce that’s distributed by FPCY’s pantry is grown at a community garden that adults and youths from church help to tend as part of an interfaith collaboration that also benefits other pantries in the area.

Darla Carter, Communications Associate, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Cindy Ealy, Budget Assistant, Office of the General Assembly
Lindy Ebbs, Administrator, Constituency Relationships, Relationship & Development Operations, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

God of all peoples, help us to trust that you will bring to completion by the day of Jesus Christ the good work you have begun. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Servants’ Entrance

We worship best when worship is participatory, according to Routley Lecturer Tom Trenney

December 5, 2021

Photo by Susana Fernández via Unsplash

For a minister of music who’s also a choral music and conducting professor, Tom Trenney is a born storyteller.

During the fourth of his five Routley Lectures delivered to the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship and Music Conference, Trenney told this story about a man he’s long admired, the Presbyterian pastor and children’s television pioneer Fred Rogers.

Even before he was Mister Rogers, Fred Rogers was a student at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. On Sundays, preaching students were sent out to Pittsburgh area churches to hear different preaching styles. Rogers was excited because one of the great Christian orators of the day would be preaching at the church he was visiting.

Sadly, a supply preacher substituted in the pulpit that Sunday. Throughout the sermon, Rogers was taking mental notes about everything the preacher was doing differently than he was being taught. After the service, he turned to a fellow student to lash into this preacher’s hermeneutical efforts — only to see she had tears in her eyes. “He said exactly what I needed to hear,” the woman told Rogers.

“A worship service is not there to serve us,” Trenney concluded, “but for us to serve, to honor and glorify God. Our neighbor may need something different than we do.”

Trenney is minister of music at First-Plymouth Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, and an assistant professor of music at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He said that as the nation begins emerging from the pandemic, churchgoers “keep singing in communities of faith when the rest of the world has abandoned communal singing.”

People used to sing together much more than they do now, he said — at service club meetings, around a campfire and at family reunions.

“The church continues to be the place where we sing together,” Trenney said. In part that’s because the hymns found in any hymnal “are designed to be sung in community.”

Sadly, “worship has become in my lifetime less participatory. We feature people with particular talents,” including soloists and instrumentalists. “We should have choirs and soloists who enliven and inspire the voice of the community, not to celebrate the gifts of people on stage or in the chancel.”

“We can sing any kind of music,” Trenney said, “as long as it’s designed to allow people’s voices to be heard.”

Once during the pandemic as part of an online choir practice, Trenney invited each member to unmute and sing their favorite hymn — all at once.

“It sounded God-awful,” Trenney said with a laugh. “But you should have seen the looks on people’s faces as they sang the hymn that meant something to them.”

Then, Trenney invited everyone in the room and the 13 or so people participating via Zoom to try the same experiment. It was indeed a cacophony.

“There are some expressions I wouldn’t say in my own words that I would use in music,” Trenney said. “I feel comfortable singing into them. God can hold it all together.”

Trenney said that during the first two weeks First-Plymouth churchgoers were forced to worship online, in March 2020, the church’s YouTube channel attracted 1,500 new subscribers. “People who weren’t able to participate in communal singing needed to hear and feel what it was like when communities sang,” Trenney said.

By the end of 2020, 184,000 hours had been spent listening to hymns from First-Plymouth. “The work you do is essential,” Trenney told the choir directors in the audience. “People need it in difficult moments, and you found a way to be there for them.”

Eventually, “I was getting super tired of making movies,” Trenney said. “But you know what? It’s not about me. People needed to feel like they still belonged. God makes community — we don’t.”

Trenney said he’s always amazed that choir members can arrive for rehearsal feeling tired, then “work hard for two hours and they leave feeling better. We let them give themselves to something else, and what emerges is stronger than what came in.”

Then Trenney shared one of his favorite church signs, placed in the Narthex and visible to churchgoers as they leave worship. The sign reads “Servants’ Entrance.”

“Go. See. Be. Do. Love,” Trenney said to close his fourth lecture. “Blessings. Thank you.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Sandra Duverge, Associate, Equity & Mission Impact, Mission Personnel Team, World Mission, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Tricia Dykers Koenig, Associate Director, Mid Council Relations, Office of the General Assembly

Let us pray

God of life, summon us to service with the poor and oppressed, so that our collective actions may facilitate healing of our relationship with one another and with all of your Creation.  Urge us toward wholeness, we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - ‘We are free’

Conference preacher: Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was meant to help us ‘to take our grave clothes off’

December 4, 2021

Conference preacher the Rev. CeCe Armstrong says that Jesus’s friend Lazarus had to die so that we might know we are free. (Screenshot)

During a worship service at the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Worship and Music Conference, the Rev. Cecilia (Ce Ce) Armstrong told those gathered in person and online that she was not going to preach a devotional sermon.

“It’s not only to warm the heart,” she said, “but to promote devotion to God.”

Preaching from John 11:32–44, Armstrong, of St. James Presbyterian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, said she wanted to see something different in this familiar story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead — even as Mary rushes to Jesus saying, “Lord if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”

“We say that under our breath sometimes, don’t we?” Armstrong said. “But sometimes God makes stuff die, so that we can be free.”

 Armstrong pointed out that in this biblical account, freedom can be obtained only after the stone to Lazarus’s tomb is removed.

“Sometimes life is a stinking mess,” she said, “where you have to uncover hard truths about yourself or others.”

For Armstrong, the real power in this story is when Jesus speaks to those around the one who was dead, saying, “Come and take his grave clothes off.”

“Notice that his hands and feet are bound,” she said.

Armstrong believes that because we get so caught up — and shocked — about a dead man coming to life, we sometimes forget this command that Jesus has for us.  As a result, she said many people get turned away from Jesus because we don’t help those who don’t “look, walk, talk or smell like us.”

“But could it be they’re so bound by what they’re wrecked in? It is the church’s responsibility take their grave clothes off,” she said as applause rippled throughout Anderson Auditorium at Montreat Conference Center.

“Beloved child of God, what in your life has to die?” she asked. “What has to die when you go to church?  What permission do you need? What is the prayer you are you praying that grants assurance?  How are you helping others take the grave clothes off that bind us all?”

After each question, Anderson repeated the phrase, “You are free.”  And then, as Phillip Morgan played, conference adult choir director Phillip Shoultz and Armstrong sang these words from “I’m Free” by the Rev. Milton Brunson:

“I am free
Praise the Lord, I’m free
No longer bound
No more chains holding me
Soul is resting
And it’s just another blessing
Praise the Lord
Hallelujah, I’m free”

 The Rev. Dr. Margaret Aymer of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary continued her study of Matthew 18, looking at verses 15–22, where Jesus gives guidelines on what to do if a member of the church sins against you.

“This text is about the church itself,” she said. “It’s how to deal with people in your group to determine if you can do ministry together.”

By giving guidelines that include going to the one who offends you first; then, if they won’t listen, to go again with two or three witnesses; and then to the whole church if necessary, Aymer said that Jesus is after restoration instead of resentment.

“The call to reconciliation isn’t to make nice,” she said. “It’s a call to not slander, to not bear a grudge.”

A woman in the room talked about how hard it is to go to a person who hurt you.

“I mean, people talk in the parking lot,” she said. “What if you go that person to pray and find they don’t like you anymore. What if the person has power, and I lose power?”

Aymer said it’s really about trusting one’s community.

“That’s the hard part,” she said. “It goes back to the call [in Matthew 18:1–5] to become like vulnerable children.”

Paul Seebeck, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Amy Dusatko, 1001 Apprentice, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Chad Dusatko, 1001 Apprentice, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Lord, help us to care for those in need. May we offer hope in the face of chaos, confidence in the face of uncertainty and joy in service to you. May all who endure loss be filled with your presence and confidence in your love. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - A small but impactful program in Congo lifts children out of malnutrition

Volunteers conducted more than 1 million screenings last year

December 3, 2021

A community health volunteer screens a child with a MUAC (mid upper arm circumference tape) to determine if the child is malnourished. This child is suffering from moderate acute malnutrition and was referred to a health center for follow up by a nurse. Community screening is helping to reduce the prevalence of malnutrition in Nord Ubangi province. (Photo by Inge Sthreshley)

When the numbers on a graph showed recently that children are thriving nutritionally in the province of North Ubangi in Northwest Congo, mission co-worker Inge Sthreshley said it made her heart sing.

The graph she was reading showed the proxy prevalence rate for malnutrition in the province. The proxy prevalence rate is the estimated number of children who are suffering from malnutrition, one of the important issues facing the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In the past six years, it dropped from 14.6% to 4.6%.

In a recent letter to supporters, Sthreshley said the information comes from intensive systematic screening carried out by community health volunteers. Each quarter, the volunteers use tapes to measure the arm circumference of every child between 6 months to 5 years of age in each village. In the last year, volunteers completed nearly 1 million screenings.

This success story is the result of many dedicated people working together.

“Much of the credit for these results goes to the 2,500 plus community health volunteers and the young mothers’ support groups which they have organized,” she said. “They have been sharing information in their villages and neighborhoods on best practices for infant and young child feeding and have been carrying out the screening.

“Other important people are Mr. Papy Lengemo, his team of community animators, Mr. Narcisse Kimbondo, IMA’s nutritionist on staff in Nord Ubangi, and the provincial staff of the national nutrition program (PRONANUT) in Nord Ubangi. They trained the community health volunteers in nutrition education, screening, home gardening and how to carry out home visits to families with malnourished children.”

A child of missionaries in Congo and a longtime mission co-worker, Inge Sthreshley works with the ASSR project (a French acronym that means Support to the Health System in DRC) and also with the Presbyterian Communities of Kinshasa (CPK) and the Congo (CPC) to address problems of malnutrition through education, home gardens and low emission cook stoves.

IMA World Health partners with the Evangelical Community of the Ubangi-Mongala (CEUM) in this nutrition program of the ASSR project. ASSR provides support to the health system in Congo through funding from the British government. Lengemo has been overseeing this work for CEUM.

“It’s been a privilege to work with him over these past six years,” said Sthreshley. “Papy’s team consists of 6 to 12 community animators who have been working in the 11 health zones of the Nord Ubangi province. Over these past six years they have been in the health zones almost every month, reinforcing the capacity of the community health volunteers and meeting with community leaders to help them understand why it is important to prevent and treat malnutrition early on and to discuss with them how the community can reduce malnutrition.”

Sthreshely said she was pleased to learn that the provincial health office in Nord Ubangi had placed a nutritionist in every health zone. Although many were young and inexperienced, the CEUM community animators have helped them understand how to work with the community health volunteers to draw up micro-screening plans and collect and analyze the nutrition data from the screenings and home visits. With the systematic screening results, they can zero in on which areas and villages have the highest malnutrition rates and develop action plans for those areas and follow up to ensure the action plans are implemented.

“I also believe that part of the success we have seen in the last year has been due in part to getting MUACS (measuring tapes) into the hands of mothers and teaching them how to use them to screen their own children on a regular basis,” said Sthreshley. “The MUAC bands cost only 19 cents. As they are color coded, illiterate mothers can ‘read’ the colors even if they cannot read the numbers.”

Although the numbers are still heading in a positive direction, Sthreshley said there is still much work to be done in Nord Ubangi. Based on the population of the area, a proxy relevance rate of 4.6% represents an estimated 13,600 children suffering from malnutrition.

“So, we will all continue writing the next chapter — living into this story, bringing the message that malnutrition is preventable, treatable and beatable,” she said.

Kathy Melvin, Director of Mission Communications, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Angela Duffy, Chief Compliance Officer, Trust Services, Presbyterian Foundation
Amanda Dunphy, Business Administrator, Finance, Board of Pensions

Let us pray

Dear God, thank you for giving us opportunities to serve — to be your hands and feet — and to share our time, talents and treasures with our neighbors in need. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Don’t weary while doing good

Bring God back into the racial justice work we are called to

December 2, 2021

Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and other people of color (BIPOC) are not simply those who are marginalized because of their race. They often find themselves working the hardest for racial justice. My friends of color tell me it is grueling to feel the oppression and to also be left with most of the responsibility for fighting it. Working toward racial justice can be exhausting.

We who are white often tire of working for racial justice, too. However, we have the very real advantage of backing away if we become overwhelmed trying to make a difference — an advantage never permitted for our BIPOC siblings.

In one way, BIPOC and white communities both face a similar challenge: Our faith tradition often treats progress toward racial justice as an ethical demand that we, as a society or church, must do. The work of racial justice is often framed as something that we must engage and support person to person, group to group, with God often left out of the equation. Yet in Ephesians 2:11–22 we hear again that Jesus Christ is the one who breaks down dividing walls. These verses describe an “in” group — “the commonwealth of Israel” — and an “out” group — “Gentiles by birth.” The latter is the group that is marginalized and oppressed. They are described as “aliens” and “strangers to the covenants of promise” who have “no hope” (v. 12).

The author of Ephesians, though, does not demand that either group jump into action, as if reconciliation depends solely on them. Instead, our attention is immediately drawn to Jesus, who has united the groups, creating one humanity out of two. On the cross, Jesus has put to death their hostility and given peace to both. Yes, the Bible does repeatedly proclaim that Christians need to work for reconciliation and justice. In this specific passage, though, the focus is first on Jesus’ ministry itself, reminding us it is Christ’s work that precedes, accompanies, and equips our own. 

We can see this in the ministry of Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, an organization on its way to becoming the largest gang intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world, with an annual budget of $19 million. Through Homeboy Industries, Jesus Christ is destroying hostility and ministering to the out-group. Jesus is bringing gang members near and uniting them with a society that often marginalizes and mistreats them. Jesus is bringing peace as the ministry fights racist structures that make inequalities so difficult to combat. 

At the time of his 2017 book, “Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship,” Father Greg had performed the funerals of 220 people lost to gang violence and had gathered a multiracial team to develop a dozen social enterprises to train and employ the overwhelmingly BIPOC gang members. In a video on the organization’s website (homeboyindustries.org), Father Greg points to God’s primary work to love and show compassion for all of humanity, saying, “We want to see people as God does — with the highest, deepest reverence [for human complexity] — to see each other today and always … as God’s delight.” He adds, “Everyone is a lot more complex than the worst things they’ve ever done.”

Father Greg focuses first on God’s action before ever considering what we might do in response. This fortifies him to continue work that can be tiring and overwhelming. Like Father Greg, we have our role to play in breaking down the walls of racial injustice. It is a role that can wear us down and wear us out. But we can’t give up just because we grow tired.

Rather, we must seek the strength that comes from seeking God first and recognizing that Jesus is before, alongside and in us, breaking down the dividing walls, creating in himself one humanity instead of two.

Chip Hardwick, Transitional Synod Executive, Synod of the Covenant

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Leo Dorsey, Web Developer/designer, Communications Ministry, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Kate Duffert, Manager for GA Business & Per Capita Promotion, Office of the General Assembly

Let us pray

God of grace and justice, may we empower our families and children with the means to stand up together for economic security and physical safety as we seek to become the beloved community. Amen.

Minute for Mission: World AIDS Day, Presbyterian HIV/AIDS Awareness

December 1, 2021

Poster of the skit tackling the stigmatization of HIV testing and PLHIV (provided)

Last September, the Youth Advocates Through Theater Arts, a group of thespians I work with, organized a webinar titled HIV HIV Haway (Haway is a local term that means “leave”). YATTA had partnered with the U.N. Population Fund, the Center for Health Solutions and Innovations Philippines and Y-PEER Pilipinas to promote HIV Combination Prevention. The initiative came with the assessment that the Philippines had one of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics in the world, mostly affecting young, marginalized people not easily reached by mainstream health services and programs.

As part of the program, YATTA produced three recorded videos of five-minute skits. The first scenario explored a couple’s first night of intimacy after four years of abstinence. They realize, though, that the condom had expired and had a hole. The second scenario showed three friends openly sharing about their lives, including their intimate relationships. One of them talked about having an HIV test earlier that day and meeting a person that the other two in the group had sexual relationships with. The information led to malicious assumptions and shaming of the person. In the third scenario, Alec just found out that he is positive for HIV. Distraught and unsure of his future, he decided to burn bridges with his partner.

The scenarios were meant to present an undesirable situation, to provoke discussion and seek better models of thinking and practices that are informed and come from a place of kindness. So, in breakout rooms, participants were asked whether they agreed with the characters, and if not, what they would do differently. They were asked to rewrite the scripts, so to speak.

There is much rewriting to do to achieve a wholistic approach in addressing HIV/AIDS.

Dear God, grant us the compassion and courage to follow Jesus’ example to care for the sick and to love one another with all our heart, all our soul and all our mind.

Dessa Palm, Mission Co-Worker, Philippines, World Mission, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Jhanderys Dotel-Vellenga and Ian Vellenga, Mission co-workers in Nicaragua, Presbyterian Mission Agency
Elle Rogers, Marketing Manager, Presbyterian Publishing Corporation

Let us pray

God of Life, we pray for those in our community and around the world who are infected and affected by HIV and AIDS. We pray that our church may be a place of compassion and protection for those in desperate need of healing. Amen.