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(The attached artwork depicts Christian David felling the first tree for the construction of the village of Herrnhut 300 years ago.  He and his fellow Czech refugees trusted in God’s guidance as they began this new chapter in our Moravian history. Courtesy of the Herrnhut Moravian Congregation) The watchword for the week: Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. Jeremiah 17:7 How wonderful it […]

Appeal Name: CWS’ Emboldened Commitment in the Face of Adversity   Date Issued: 14 February 2025  Appeal Code: 6210  Appeal Amount: $5 million over 18 months  Church World Service was born in the wake of the devastation of World War II. People of faith came together “to do in partnership what none of us could hope to do as well alone.” ... Read More

As it moves past a divisive time, The United Methodist Church can experience renewal by embracing the values laid out by John and Charles Wesley.

Church leaders offer words of warning, encouragement and some practical advice on what to do when ICE agents knock on church doors looking for people to deport.

[Episcopal News Service] East Tennessee Bishop Brian Cole joined his counterpart in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to write a column in the Nashville Tennessean pleading for the state to commit to distributing federal food assistance to address child hunger this summer. The state has until Feb. 15 to decide whether to use the federal funds. The program helps feed low-income children in the summer, when they no longer have access to the free or reduced-cost meals they receive during the school year. “The program is a lifeline at a time when inflation in food prices makes it impossible for too many families to provide adequate nutrition for their children,” Cole said in the column with the Rev. Kevin Strickland, who leads the ELCA’s Southeastern Synod, with congregations in Tennessee and three other states. Cole’s Knoxville-based diocese has congregations in the eastern third of the state. The full column can be read here.

The General Synod will meet June 23-29, 2025, in London, Ontario. A major item of business will be the election on June 26 of a new Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada. This statement sets out the timelines so that the whole church may be well informed as to what will be communicated and when. A summary of key dates can be found at the end.

The post Key dates for the Primatial election process: from the General Secretary appeared first on The Anglican Church of Canada.

[Episcopal News Service] Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya has established a new migrant support fund and has asked diocesan congregations to take a special collection on March 2 to add to its initial gift of $10,000. Loya created the fund, he told Episcopal News Service, because the diocese has seven congregations where immigrants are the majority of members, and another two where immigrants are a sizable minority. Four are predominantly Latino, but all of them include people who have arrived in Minnesota from around the world. “We are richly blessed by this diversity,” he said. But in a time when recent immigrants are the target of what he called hateful rhetoric and unjust policies, “we really feel as a diocese that we have to provide a response,” he said. Loya thinks the fund can be helpful in two main ways: providing money to congregations’ existing or new initiatives that serve recent immigrants, especially if they need to expand those efforts; and partnering with other organizations to help fill the gaps that will result from cuts to federal funding under President Donald Trump. Specifics are still in flux, Loya said, as changing circumstances affect where the need is greatest, but he knows the need will be enormous. And just because there is a limited amount the diocese can do “doesn’t let us off the hook to do what we can,” he said With Episcopal Migration Ministries winding down its core operations after the Trump administration halted federal funding for refugee services, Loya said that now is “a moment for us to recommit to the stranger among us with the love God extends to every human being.” Since announcing the fund’s creation on Feb. 6, more than 100 individuals have made personal contributions, he said, and he also has been contacted by ecumenical colleagues in the state to see if there was a way they could either partner with the fund or start one of their own. Loya’s commitment to the fund, and meeting the needs behind it, springs from what he describes as the Christian community’s dual vocation of witness and resistance – “witnessing to God’s vision for beloved community in the world, witnessing to the power of God’s love and God’s coming kingdom in the world; and resisting the way in which the forces of evil in a broken world are always breaking down the creatures of God.” A model for how Christians can speak up in challenging times, he said, comes from the comments Washington Bishop Mariann Budde addressed to President Donald Trump in the Jan. 21 Service of Prayer for the Nation at Washington National Cathedral. Her words were “brave, convicted, clear, gentle, humble and loving,” Loya said. He also supports the action of The Episcopal Church in joining the lawsuit against the Trump administration for allowing immigration officers to target churches and other “sensitive” places for arrests as part of the president’s promised crackdown on legal and illegal immigration. “There is probably no clearer moral imperative in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures than the call to care for the stranger and the foreigner in our midst,” Loya said. “We are given that call because when we were estranged from God, God met us with embrace rather than exclusion.” Loya also acknowledged that while his primary motivation for serving immigrants in his diocese comes simply from being a follower of Jesus, as a third-generation Mexican American it feels personal. “When I see photos of some of the people in the early deportation efforts, I see my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins,” he said. He added that for Christians, “what affects one of us affects all of us.” In addition to announcing the migrant support fund, Loya’s message also encouraged support for the diocese’s migration caucus, a group of clergy and lay people who have been meeting online for several months to help congregations better understand what is happening with immigration and how they can assist. He noted a series of resources the caucus has gathered. As bishop, Loya also called on Minnesotans to pray as a way to ground their work and advocacy, and he offered a special prayer that he asked to be used as the end of the Prayers of the People every Sunday until Easter Day: O God, who embraced us with perfect love and made us your people when we were yet strangers to you: be present with all refugees, immigrants, and displaced people throughout the world; may they know the consolation of your presence, and the liberating power of your love. Then give us grace, we pray, to extend ever wider your embrace in a world of exclusion, until all your children are knit together as beloved family in the perfect love that is your very heart, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was displaced among us, and who now lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. — Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.

[Religion News Service] The Rev. Michele Morgan, rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., strives to be a “non-anxious presence” for the congregation she serves. It’s an important trait for any pastor, but especially for one who serves a church that sits a block or so from the U.S. Capitol and includes members performing high-stress jobs within the federal government. But over the last three weeks, as President Donald Trump’s administration has initiated sweeping cuts, funding freezes and work stoppages across the federal government, Morgan’s job has suddenly gotten harder. In an interview last week, Morgan said she frets over federal workers in her church who say their life’s work may disappear at any moment. She’s receiving frantic requests for pastoral care, such as from one person who had to furlough three-quarters of a team at a nonprofit that works in foreign aid. And as Morgan tried to leave church on a recent evening, she was stopped by a parishioner who recounted the difficulty of having to call people abroad and inform them the aid they rely on has been halted. “Worry is the watchword around here,” Morgan said. Ministering to anxious, fear-stricken congregations is rapidly becoming a shared experience for religious leaders who work in and around Washington, D.C. Clergy are preaching sermons of encouragement and having private conversations with congregants concerned about their own livelihoods and those of people they work with, fielding worries that range from paying children’s college bills to potential deportations of family members. The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Washington, D.C., estimated that around 60% to 70% of the people in his congregation are connected to the government in some way, either as federal employees or as contractors. When the government has furloughed workers in the past, he said, his church has tried to offer financial aid. Lamar said his church intends to again offer those services, pledging to stand with his congregation spiritually, emotionally and economically. “Some people are positioned to do something else, but the majority with whom I have spoken, who are in the most anxious place, are not sure about their economic security beyond their federal employment,” he said. But while previous experiences provide a blueprint, Lamar argued the current situation is different from past crises, not only in scale but also because he believes the layoffs are “needless, unnecessary” and “unconstitutional.” He voiced palpable frustration with the impact on his congregation, outraged by those who have cheered on the decimation of the federal government. “This is a con game,” Lamar said. “Getting rid of federal employees does not solve a problem. It inflicts pain. This is designed to inflict pain on human beings, and whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, whether you voted for Trump or not, I would hope that there are not people who delight in inflicting pain on other human beings.” Bishop Derek Grier, founding pastor of Grace Church in Dumfries, Virginia, said his multicultural church is starting to budget and plan for what people may need, including preparing its emergency team with psychologists, just as it has in previous crises. “During many of the government shutdowns, we’ve had to help people with their mortgages, we’ve had to help people put food on their table,” said Grier, who estimates more than half of the congregants of his independent evangelical megachurch are either government workers or contractors, and “a good number” are active military members. “To have more than half your congregation receive notices to resign or face the risk of losing a job, is a super, super big deal,” he told Religion News Service on Feb. 13. “We are already putting aside extra funds for the potential crisis ahead. We’re also beefing up our food pantry.” He’s pastored through other traumatic times but said “this one’s a little different than the past crises,” including the 9/11 airplane strike at the Pentagon and the 2002 D.C. sniper attacks. “It’s easy to look at the reduction in government in a purely intellectual way but, as a pastor, I have to look at it in terms of how it impacts lives of individual people,” he said. “And, no matter what side of the aisle you are on, we’re all in the same boat, and people are being impacted. So we need to pray for one another and pull for one another, and we’ll get through this.” Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations, said he’s hearing from an array of Washingtonians, including church employees and congregants, who are facing rapid change in a city where the federal government is so dominant that he calls it “a cornerstone of the economy and of people’s employment here in D.C.” Lynch said they are trying to respond to personal questions about their ability to make rent and mortgage payments while also determining how to help others. “People are afraid. People’s lives are being disrupted,” he said. “They’ve been thrown into consternation by the dramatic number of changes that are coming at them very fast.” Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb, rabbi emeritus of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland, said his house of worship is one of many across the Washington metropolitan area, as well as the country, that is affected. “Members of my own congregation are being let go of their longtime federal jobs simply because they performed well as directed by their supervisors in previous administrations,” he said on Tuesday of the 400-household organization. “The community came together just this Sunday with over 100 members for the first of a two-part exploration on how do we rise to meet the moment.” Dobb said the congregation is considering how to assist at-risk federal workers and contractors as well as how to support immigrants and creation care “and other core religious concepts, which have sadly become politicized along a partisan divide when, as we read it, Scripture […]

For years, CWS Thailand has been at the forefront of child protection, implementing programs designed to foster inclusive, safe and supportive learning environments. Through initiatives at three schools—Wat Sao Thonghin School, Radburana School and Chumchonmoobanpattana School—CWS has empowered students with essential life skills, emotional resilience and social awareness. Each program is uniquely tailored to address the needs of children from ... Read More