Today in the Mission Yearbook - Rolling with the holy punches

A reflection on hope

November 5, 2022

iStock photo

I was recently watching reruns of “M*A*S*H” — the iconic 1970s sitcom chronicling the lives of the nurses, doctors and even clergy working in a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War — when I came across an episode titled “Dear Sis.”

The episode starts with an altercation between a patient who is flailing and fighting the nurses, refusing to accept their help or care. Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, who oversees the unit’s nurses, calls for the chaplain, the Rev. Francis John Patrick Mulcahy, simply known as “Father Mulcahy,” to help. When the good father steps in, the patient acts out, saying to Father Mulcahy that he is not qualified to help. He then punches the chaplain, and hard. In an unexpected moment of both self-defense and anger, Father Mulcahy punches the man back!

He then spends much of the episode dealing with that instinctual response.

He apologizes to the man and tries to explain his response, but the man will not hear it. He continues to verbally attack Father Mulcahy, saying he is in no way a holy man and must have gone to seminary at the YMCA. The patient cannot see his own actions as having been part of the problem, and he has no ability to offer grace or forgiveness.

As I listened to this interaction, I found myself struck deeply by this conversation both from a personal place, but also from a communal place. While we are not living through a literal war, like our siblings in Ukraine are, in many ways we are living through a metaphorical one.

Our war is against this tiny little virus that has many tricks up its sleeve and that appears to be using them all. We are in a constant state of stress and fear. Will we be the ones to get it next? How will it affect our families? Our loved ones? Our communities? We think we see the end of the pandemic, and then something else happens and it goes on with more violence and damage than before.

A MASH jeep (iStock photo)

At this point, I think few of us have avoided losing a loved one to this disease. Even fewer have remained unaffected by the illness. As Hawkeye said, “We don’t sleep. We don’t eat. And every day a truck dumps a load of bodies at our feet.”

Holding on to hope right now is difficult. Everyone remains tense, many are grieving, people are fearful and anxious, and everyone has moments when they are less able to act their best, to be their best. We are all making mistakes, and the results, because during this stress it is difficult to step back or to take things with the ease we otherwise might, are broken relationships, torn communities and a fractured world.

We see this in so many places in our world: deepening anger, acting out, rage and violence. We also see it, more personally, in the church. There have been numerous articles written recently, including one in The Wall Street Journal, saying that church communities in general are experiencing a return of only about 50%–70% of their people because of Covid. Many of our churches are simply having to close because of this loss of membership. Churches are learning to adapt, but pastors’ burnout level is extraordinary right now, leaving many to rethink their calls. Some leave ministry altogether, while others are reassessing how best to use their time, talent and treasures.

Recently I added into our worship services a “moment of hope” where I share a positive story, a story of someone doing good, being kind, making a beautiful difference, even in the face of these difficult and painful times. Again, I feel the deep importance of being that voice of hope, even when I cannot summon it for myself. Yes, hold on to hope.

 Barbara Barkley is pastor of Clayton Valley Presbyterian Church in Clayton, California.

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Ellie Johns-Kelley,  Ministry Relations Officer, Presbyterian Foundation
Alonzo Johnson, Coordinator, Self-Development of People, Compassion, Peace & Justice, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Loving God, help us to recognize our gifts and honor the gifts of others, so that we may together proclaim our justice and peace to a hurting world. Amen.

Minute for Mission: World Community Day

November 4, 2022

World Community Day began in 1943 as a day for church women to study peace. After World War II, church leaders felt that they should set aside a day for prayer and ecumenical study. The leaders thought that while believers were performing peace and justice work by themselves, a day when they could study across denominations would be beneficial to all. The theme for this year’s World Community Day is “A Call to Prayer.”

As Christians, we are known by God. With thanksgiving, we commit our hearts and hands to demonstrate this love in action, working purposefully for peace, justice, and reconciliation. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” — Ephesians 2:10 (NIV). As God’s own, we are called to pray, comforted in knowing that God hears our prayers of lament and joy alike.

Resources for World Community Day are available from Church Women United. Write to 3605 Campbellton Road SW, Atlanta, GA 30331; email info.churchwomenunitedinc@gmail.com; call 678/705-3711; or visit churchwomenunited.net/cwustore.

Carissa Herold is marketing associate for Presbyterian Women in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Inc.

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Susan Jackson-Dowd, Executive Director, Presbyterian Women
Linda Jacobsen, Executive Vice President, Church Engagement, Board of Pensions

Let us pray

God of grace, we are grateful for the blessing of good work to do for your good world. Thank you for the gifts of prayer and study, loving ways we stay close to you and your call on our lives. Amen.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Dragon boat racing gives pastor insights

Paddling as one

November 3, 2022

The Golden Dragon team of senior rowers provided a powerful witness on the Charles River as to what God’s children can accomplish working together. Courtesy of Brett Webb-Mitchell

It was an exciting ending to Boston’s 2019 Dragon Boat Festival. Our team — the Golden Dragons — won by an eighth of a second, beating a group of 30-somethings from the San Francisco Bay area. The average age of our crew was 70. We lived up to the motto emblazoned on our T-shirts: “Old age and treachery will always win out against youth and ambition.”

A dragon boat is a human-powered long canoe. Its origins can be traced back over 2,000 years in the Pearl River Delta region of China’s Guangdong province. Like the outrigger canoes of many Pacific Island, Asian and African cultures, long boats have been used for religious and commercial crafts. While there were dragon boat races between competing villages, dragon boat racing itself became a modern sport in Hong Kong in 1976. Since then, large and small cities worldwide host dragon boat racing festivals yearly.

Most of my graduate studies have been in the sociology, anthropology and theology of communities from L’Arche gatherings to Benedictine monasteries. I have also served 11 Presbyterian churches. What I discovered in these communities was that their dynamics were similar to that of a dragon boat team.

For starters, a dragon boat team is ideally made up of 20 people who sit in a long canoe filled with 10 benches. There are two people to a bench who are facing the boat’s front or bow, with a caller in the front of the boat facing the paddlers, and a tiller in the back or stern steering the boat.

Next, paddlers have equipment to be used, including a life preserver and a paddle. The paddles are not connected to the boat but are in the hands of the paddlers. When seated, paddlers face the bow and paddle forward. Likewise, churches have necessary equipment, used to assist us and move us forward. We have things such as a bowl for baptisms, a chalice for the Lord’s Supper and Bibles to read and study.

With paddlers in place with the right equipment, it is now the caller’s and tiller’s jobs to move the boat forward — coaching the team to synchronize their strokes as if there was just one paddler.

(Left) Dragon heads, affixed to boats, are brought to “life” as part of an ancient race ritual. (Right) The Rev. Brett Webb-Mitchell is currently trying out for a senior men’s national dragon boat team for a race this fall. Courtesy of Brett Webb-Mitchell

In a race, the caller-as-coach determines how fast the boat goes, sitting behind a drum on the bow of the boat, beating out the rhythm of the pace with a large stick or verbally calling out the pace of the stroke. The tiller’s job is to steer the boat, using a 9-foot straight oar that is locked in an upside-down “U” known as the oar lock on the stern. In a church, the pastor and church leadership council are the caller and tiller, working in concert together in moving the “ship of faith” forward.

While there are many paddlers, we are to paddle as one, singular in purpose. Even though we all have small, quirky, unique ways of paddling, by the time a race comes, we strive to stroke in unison.

Likewise, the church is many members but is called to act as one body. In Christ’s body we are called to be synchronized in our movement, doing the hard work, making sacrifices as members of the body. And yet all work must be grounded in communication. Many times, there are discussions among a dragon boat team when practicing, in which a caller listens to paddlers — a reminder of how healthy conversations must take place within faith communities.

Finally, a dragon boat is “alive.” Before a race, a carved dragon’s head is placed in the boat’s bow, its tail at the stern. The head is then dotted with red paint at the climax of a solemn ritual, calling the dragon to life. Through our baptisms, as the water dots our foreheads, we too are called to life.

With many years of study and serving, who would have thought it would be a recreational outlet that would have given me a powerful insight into ministry? But dragon boat racing has done just that: We are members of the one ship, the one body, responding to Christ’s call, who, with the Spirit holding the rudder, guides us into our future.

Brett Webb-Mitchell, part-time pastor for both The Community of Pilgrims Presbyterian Fellowship and Portsmouth Trinity Lutheran Church, Portland, Oregon

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Daniel Johnson, Maintenance Specialist, Building Services, Administrative Services Group (A Corp)
Donna Jackson, Editor, Mission Publications, Media & Publishing, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us pray

Lord, be with those you have called to take leadership in reaching people who have not heard of your love for them. Give them wisdom and courage as they seek to make your kingdom manifest in our world today. Amen.

Ministry Matters - Practicing attention in the digital age | Missional characteristics of an adept church

How are we to work against inattentiveness and toward practices of attention on what matters? Practicing attention in a digital age by Deanna Thompson   How do we negotiate the constant barrage of information and messages that infiltrate our lives? Many of us likely have developed some self-imposed guidelines for keeping at least some of the distractions at bay. Whether we pledge to look up from our devices and into the eyes of our children and our spouse when they talk to us, or to attend a weekly yoga class, or to commit to keeping our phones out of sight while driving, we are aware of our growing distractedness and growing need to resist all the opportunities for distraction. Read here

What does it mean to be an incarnational or contextual church? Missional characteristics of an adept church by F. Douglas Powe, Jr.   Understanding the four key characteristics of missional congregations can help a congregation that wants to move forward and live more missionally. Missional congregations are incarnational, sacramental, creational, and eschatological. Translating these theological terms in everyday language, we can say that missional congregations are contextual, communal, innovative, and visionary. As congregations become more adept at living out these missional characteristics, they become more like canals. Read here

How are our present divisions related to the evangelical church’s roots in systemic and biblically-justified racism? Gradualism, false unity, and incompatibility's history by Wesley Bros Comics   Biblical literalism is still every bit just as married to biases and context as evangelicals want to accuse liberals of remaking the Bible in their own image. We all bring our experience to Scripture, and it's important to interrogate that dynamic. This week we look at more of our history, and the interactions between gradualism, false unity, and modern evangelicalism's rise. Read here

Standing in a turbulent world and preaching this Sunday Resources for engaging children in worship this week

Prayers and litanies for Sunday's worship

We're looking for congregational leaders like you. Our mission is to offer resources and content that can help you in your work—and we want to know how you are putting those resources to use. We're looking for congregational leaders to review books and other resources for MinistryMatters, helping orient our readers to the resource and explaining how the resource has influenced your practices in ministry. If you are interested in becoming a published reviewer, please contact our editor here.

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Having fun with the Bible

The Adult Bible Study at PAM’s Worship & Music Conference samples biblical Creation stories

November 2, 2022

The Rev. Dr. Justin Reed

“What was Mary’s favorite nickname for baby Jesus, or Jesus as a toddler?” asked the Rev. Dr. Justin Reed.

This was the opening question at the Adult Bible Study at the Presbyterian Association of Musicians’ Music and Worship Conference.

“It’s in between what’s there in the Bible,” Reed said. “Mary might have called him something other than ‘Jesus Christ my Lord and Savior.’”

As light laughter filled the room, Reed, associate professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, encouraged those present in the room and watching online to use their imagination and creativity by having fun with the Bible.

The stories Reed chose were diverse, he said, because each author wasn’t giving an objective, historical account of Creation. Rather they were living in real times, and they were drawing upon the traditions they had to make a point about the real issues they were dealing with.

Participants read from Isaiah 27, where Creation imagery is used to project hope into the future for people in exile. They then read from Isaiah 51:9–11, where this hope for a future is rooted in a long-ago past, in the days when God split open this great monstrous dragon creature and cut it to pieces. That mythical victory is mixed into the people’s historical memory of God splitting open the Red Sea and bringing the Israelites to freedom in Exodus 14:21–29.

“Their hope was that a God who could defeat the great forces of monstrous chaos is strong enough to orchestrate a ransoming back of God’s people from Babylon,” Reed said.

The class also looked at Job, who’s in such distress and is being judged by friends that he figures his sin must have caused the calamities that befall him. So, the author uses Creation imagery in chapter 26:6–14  to shut down the objections against Job. Job is telling his friends their ideas of God are broken, Reed said, that no one can understand God because of the power differential between the Creator and the created.

In Job 38:1–11 God finally speaks to Job with challenging questions, including, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the Earth?” and “Do you understand?” According to Reed, God uses Creation imagery to counter what Job and his friends believe about God’s justice, that it’s supposed to work like a machine. You do the right thing, and you get a good reward. You do the wrong thing, and you get punished.

“God basically says to them, ‘There’s so much that is beyond your comprehension,’” Reed said.

The class also looked at Proverbs 8:22–36, where Wisdom is speaking about being in Creation, describing herself as the first of God’s acts long ago, before the beginning of the Earth.

“Wisdom says, ‘I was there before the deep, I was here before anything, setting up the foundations of how the entire cosmos works,’” Reed said. “The point here is that if you get in harmony with wisdom, then your past [and present] will be in concert with the very way all of Creation was made.”

After discussing their ideas about what the author’s main point in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 was — in light of the other Creation stories in the Bible — Reed shared a children’s story with the Adult Bible Study Class.

In “A Very Big Problem,” co-authors Amy-Jill Levine and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, together with illustrator Annie Bowler, tell the story of the world’s first created garden — and how everyone in it bragged and boasted that they were the most important, the one that God loved the most.

“By the end of the story, what you think the message is?” Reed asked. “God’s love is big enough for all of us. We’re all connected. We all play an important role.”

Paul Seebeck, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Mission Agency

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
José Irizarry, Vice President, Education, Church Engagement, Board of Pensions
Valerie Izumi, Manager, General Assembly Nominations, Office of the General Assembly

Let us pray

Loving God, thank you for sending your Son who laid aside heavenly comfort to take on human flesh and live for others, even giving himself on the cross for the salvation of all people. Give me the chance today to set aside my own comfort for another’s good and strengthen my heart to respond to your call. Amen.

Find courage and creativity for the elevation of the Gospel!

Churches, Denominations and Religions: Find courage and creativity for the elevation of t...:                                      Are you caught in the Fraught & Flummoxed cycle? Have you been trying to engage your congregation i...

Today in the Mission Yearbook - Protecting the ‘center of the ancient world’

Clergy joins in a sacred task

November 1, 2022

Tri-wall structure at Pueblo del Arroyo-Chaco Culture National Historical Park National Park Service

The Rev. Andrew Black, a pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is coordinating an effort to ensure protection of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park located in the northwest corner of New Mexico. The National Park Service calls Chaco Culture National Historical Park “the center of the ancient world.”

Recently, more than 250 faith and Indigenous leaders sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland — the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary and a 35th-generation New Mexican — thanking Haaland for a proposed withdrawal of oil and gas drilling for 20 years from federal lands within 10 miles surrounding the park. The letter urges final approval of the administration’s proposal.

As a UNESCO World Heritage site, “Chaco Canyon tells an ancient story of the rich history, culture, spirituality and resiliency of Indigenous communities throughout the American Southwest,” stated the letter, which was signed by ecumenical and interfaith leaders from more than 30 faith traditions, including more than 50 Presbyterians.

The letter also stated that “since time immemorial, these communities have had a deep and sacred connection to the land, water and wildlife of this important area. It is our moral responsibility as a nation and our sacred task as spiritual leaders to be responsible stewards of Creation and work to protect places of such remarkable cultural, spiritual, historical and ecological significance.”

The Rev. Andrew Black, with First Presbyterian Church of Santa Fe, New Mexico, leads an effort to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Courtesy of First Presbyterian Church

Black isn’t just a pastor. He also serves as the National Wildlife Federation’s public lands field director. The Presbyterian was moved by the support from other faith leaders to protect the Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

“It’s remarkable to have such a diverse array of spiritual leaders from across the country speaking in support of protecting Chaco Canyon. The breadth and depth of this support truly is a testament to how important Chaco Canyon is as a place of national significance with its incredible history, culture, spirituality and wildlife,” said Black.

Chaplain Joseph L. Villegas Sr., of the Texas Band of Yaqui Indians, was also encouraged with the action taken by such diverse faith communities, citing that “overdevelopment undermines the area and violates the protections and treaties of our Tribal nations that were set forth by the same government that has historically tried to erase this sacred place and cultural heritage sites that don’t belong to them.”

Those who signed the letter saw the action as a sacred task. “Supporting the well-being of land is a sacred task, as recognized by numerous faith traditions. Land is something all humans have in common — we walk on land, we grow on land, we are sustained by the land,” said the Rev. Craig Topple, a chaplain with St. Mary’s Health Care System and Highland Hills Village in Athens, Georgia, and pastor of Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church in Statham, Georgia. “Chaco Canyon is a place where the sense of the sacredness of land has been honored for generations. Our duty and responsibility are to stand in solidarity with those who know and care for the land most intimately.”

“St. Francis of Assisi invites us to listen to ‘our sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us.’ Our Native American brothers and sisters have listened to Mother Earth from time immemorial, and now we must stand in solidarity to care for our Holy Mother Earth and special places like Chaco Canyon,” said Sister Joan Brown, the executive director of New Mexico Interfaith Power & Light. “We cannot continue to destroy our sacred trust.”

Chaco Canyon isn’t an isolated case. A 2021 article in USA Today reported on several sacred sites off tribal lands that remain at risk for Indigenous communities. Tribes — and those who walk alongside them — face multiple challenges: “a revolving door of federal officials,” “opposition by stakeholders like recreation companies or extraction firms” and “a lack of knowledge by the public about these places,” coupled with laws that have become outdated.

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service

Let us join in prayer for:

PC(USA) Agencies’ Staff
Danny Hutchins, Mail & Print Specialist, Administrative Services Group (A Corp) 
Todd Ingves, Vice President, Health & Well Being, Board of Pensions  

Let us pray

You, O God, raise us from despondency. You are faithful, seeking after every one of your children. We join with all who call on Jesus’ name, thankful that our story begins and ends in you. Amen.