In most Maundy Thursday services the clergy wash the feet of members of their congregations. But Bishop James Mathes took to the streets on Thursday along with members of the diocese of San Diego to wash the feet of people living homeless and in need.
The UN’s World Water Day is today, with the main event happening in Rome, including a live webcast. The home website reports:
by Linda Ryan The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair is due to the fact that an angel might come by and sit on it.
New research from the World Health Organization is showing that number of deaths world-wide due to malaria have been significantly underestimated. Instead of the 655,000 or so thought to have died in 2010, nearly 1.22 million died. That’s the bad news. There’s good news too.
Timothy Park of Redmond, Oregon, documents the work of hair stylists who go to Nicaraugua to teach hair styling to women to help blunt the epidemic of prostitution.
The Rev. Dr. Gary Nicolosi, rector at St. James Westminster Anglican Church in London, Ontario, suggests seven questions that every church should ask itself.
We Christians need to expect that the Reign of God is do-able, now, and our job, our mission, is to pray and worship, proclaim the Gospel, and promote justice, peace, and love in making it a reality.
Congregations full of teachers and librarians and social workers and community organizers show up on Sunday morning to hear that because their church doesn’t have a soup kitchen or a shoe drive or something, that they aren’t involved in mission. Lay people should respectfully request that this definition be broadened.
The mission is daunting. We start from zero in a neighborhood new to us in a fairly broken-down old building. Our assignment from the bishop is to maintain the former church’s heart for the poor and to engage young adults as ministry leaders in the new mission work.
Seth Godin suggests that the way in which an organization approaches new ideas largely determines whether those ideas will stick.