Moral Mondays continue (though they will take the day off on Memorial Day). This week’s protest had the largest number of participants (around 600) and of people taking part in civil disobedience and being arrested (57). I saw a lot of Council folks there – current and past Board members, pastors of congregations (including Covenant Partner congregations), previous staff members, and the heads of some of our member bodies. I saw Bishop Hope Morgan Ward [...]
Continue reading Moral Mondays Continue in June
Now is the time to demand that North Carolina Senators Richard Burr and Kay Hagan stand on the right side of history and publicly support the Senate’s immigration reform bill. Call 1-888-891-3271 and ask Senator Burr and Senator Hagan to publicly support immigration reform. [...]
Continue reading Act Now to Make Immigration Reform a Reality
Thank you for joining the Partners in Health and Wholeness Book Club. You can officially sign-up here. Through it, we hope to engage people of faith in discussions over why our health matters. Our current choice of reading is from the free Saddleback Church Daniel Plan Curriculum. We are posting updates through the PHW Facebook page, but our PHW blog page has the discussion posts in full with responses from staff. Just look for the [...]
Continue reading PHW Book Club Discussion: The Daniel Plan, Session 6
We can’t go about our business as a society without messing up the environment to some degree. The challenge is to keep that damage to a minimum, ideally through steps that limit it at the outset.
North Carolina’s Environmental Management Commission has had the task of crafting rules meant to safeguard the state’s water and air from pollution. The commission traditionally has been sensitive to the economic consequences of its rules, and appropriately so. But [...]
Continue reading Talking on Water
All people affected by this week’s devastating storms, particularly those in Moore, Oklahoma, need our prayers. In addition, donations can be made to organizations providing assistance, including denominational relief agencies, Church World Service, and the American Red Cross.
–Aleta Payne, Development and Communications
The Islamic Association of Raleigh (IAR) is blessed to have a kitchen/restaurant facility which serves the entire community on different occasions. There is also the community’s school garden that is taken care of and well-groomed by the students, parents, teachers and staff of Al Iman School, which is one of the schools situated in the IAR complex. There is the weekly Friday sale of fruits and vegetables to its members. The IAR has a multi-purpose [...]
Continue reading PHW Success Story – Islamic Association of Raleigh
North Carolina’s own Arizona-style, anti-immigrant bill is still alive in the House, but your voices can help defeat this bill. Click here to take action now.
Recently, House Bill 786 was amended so that undocumented immigrants wishing to obtain a “restricted driving permit” have to show that they have pre-paid one year of car insurance, which statistics show costs over $1,000 on average in North Carolina. Few undocumented families are going to be able to pay that [...]
Continue reading Discriminatory Bill Won’t Deliver on Driving Permits for Undocumented Immigrants
For the month of May, Partners in Health and Wholeness is working with three interns from Bennett College for Women. They are helping with networking and outreach in the Greensboro area, particularly with Latino churches and communities.
The interns are: Estacia Crittle, who is majoring in psychology and is originally from San Francisco, California. She wants to work with children as a psychiatrist. Finesse Gordon is a biology major from Maryland. She is enjoying interning [...]
Continue reading Introducing Interns from Bennett College
Faith leaders in Asheville are adding their voices to those outraged by the actions of NC legislators. Rev. Joe Hoffman, pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ and an NC Council of Churches board member, is joining his colleagues as well as those from the non-profit community there for a press conference on Monday, May 20. Anyone interested in participating can contact him at revjoehof@uccasheville.org or on his cell at 828-777-8729.
In addition, he [...]
Continue reading Faith Leaders for a Just Society in Asheville
Thank you for joining the Partners in Health and Wholeness Book Club. You can officially sign-up here. Through it, we hope to engage people of faith in discussions over why our health matters. Our current choice of reading is from the free Saddleback Church Daniel Plan Curriculum. We are posting updates through the PHW Facebook page, but our PHW blog page has the discussion posts in full with responses from staff. Just look for the [...]
Continue reading PHW Book Club Discussion: The Daniel Plan, Session 5
Pediatrician and author Perri Klass has written a powerful essay on childhood poverty as a disease. She writes in part:
Toxic stress is the heavy hand of early poverty, scripting a child’s life not in the Horatio Alger scenario of determination and drive, but in the patterns of disappointment and deprivation that shape a life of limitations.
What Klass emphasizes, what many of us know, is that investing in our children is vital to their [...]
Continue reading Childhood Poverty is a Disease
As many of you already know, Rev. William Barber and the state NAACP are organizing weekly protests at the General Assembly, voicing opposition to the direction our state is being taken during this legislative session (that direction being backwards). These protests include, for those who choose to take part, nonviolent civil disobedience and arrest. In the last three weeks, nearly a hundred people have been arrested. The call has also been for supporters, people [...]
Continue reading Moral Mondays – Clergy Issued Special Invitation for May 20
I learned Tuesday morning of the passing of Bill Smith. I knew of Bill long before coming to the NC Council of Churches. He had been the state director of the Baptist Student Union before I came to work for the Baptist State Convention in 1978, but he was still remembered warmly by the progressive Baptists I had the most contact with. He was ahead of his time, leaving the Baptist denomination and becoming a [...]
Continue reading In Thanksgiving for the Life of Bill Smith
From Acts of Faith: Free Lectionary Resources for Prophetic Worship
Date: Proper 6 – June 16, 2013 Topic: Gender Equality Focus Text: Luke 7:36-8:3
From the pastoral reflection: “When I applied to divinity school thirty years ago, I was asked by my interviewer, “Why don’t you just be a good church member and serve the church that way?” That is, I was being advised to continue the traditional role of being a supportive woman to the men doing the “real work” of ministry. Ignoring that advice, I enrolled, and when I graduated and sought a call to ministry, the response was, “We don’t think our congregation is ready for a woman minister.” [...]
Continue reading Lectionary: Gender Equality (Proper 6)
The Rev. Joseph Brown, Sr. is Presiding Elder, African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He is a former Council president and a past recipient of the Council’s Distinguished Service Award. Rev. Brown is based in Fayetteville.
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