Project Homeless Connect is a one-stop shop model for delivering services to people experiencing homelessness. Hennepin County and the City of Minneapolis are partnering with service providers, businesses, citizens, and faith communities to bring multiple resources to one location where people can come to find the services they need. These services include: housing providers, employment specialists, medical care, mental health care, benefits specialists, eye care, haircuts, transportation assistance, food and clothing.

About 2500 participants expected for this event, which means at least 1400 volunteers are needed to make the day successful. Volunteers must be at least 18 years of age. Volunteers accompany guests as they make their way through the convention center seeking the services they need. The hospitality provided to each participant makes it a special day for volunteers and the homeless alike.

Before the event, all volunteers attend a 90 minute fun and interesting training program. You will understand the event and what you will be doing very clearly. One of the trainings is at the Ridgedale Library on Dec 2 at 7:00 pm and there are a number of others.

To get more information and to register to volunteer, go to www.homelessconnectminneapolis.org .  This website also has all the training times.

Gordon Stewart is the Pastor of Shepherd of the Hill Presbyterian Church in Chaska, MN.  This article originally appeared on Minnesota Public Radio .

Sometimes having a beer is a sacramental act. The president and vice president of the United States having a beer with Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and police Sgt. James Crowley, at a round table in the White House backyard, strikes me as that kind of moment.

There was no bread and there was no wine.

There was no prayer and no elevation of the host or cup. There was beer.

Gordon Stewart

And a most unlikely congregation — the arresting officer who responded to a 911 call regarding a suspected break-in; the Harvard professor whose keys wouldn’t work, arrested in his own living room for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest; the vice president with blue-collar roots from Scranton, Pa., and the president, who, in the aftermath of the most debated arrest since Rodney King, had stumbled on his words, and who had brought them all together for beer, conversation, and a “teachable moment.”

What was the teachable moment? What was it teaching us?

Sacramental purists, teetotalers and partisan ideologues will not see it. Nor will those who accuse the president of a public relations stunt to cover over a confessed political blunder that captured the news for 10 days. Their biases will not allow them to see it.

We see the world through the eyes of our experience. As a child I believed that the call of the Christian life was a call to purity, the call to clean hands. We were “Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before.” The world was a dirty place; our job was to clean it up in the march against evil.

Then, as a college student, I read Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

They pulled me down from my high perch into a radical crisis, a crisis that led me to the ideas of practicing Christian theologians Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, men whose faith did not suffer the illusion of the recovery of lost innocence, but rather took the form of responsibility for one’s behavior on behalf of a gospel of reconciliation.

This gospel of reconciliation has become the primary lens through which I see the world. I share this view, expressed in my tradition by the Presbyterian Confession of 1967, which made the shift from the paradigm of innocence to the paradigm of reconciliation as the work of the Christian life.

It calls the church to work toward the end of “discrimination based on racial or ethnic difference, real or imaginary … practice forgiveness of enemies and … commend to the nations as practical politics the search for cooperation and peace.”

The gathering of these four men in the backyard of the White House strikes me as a visible sign of such reconciling work. As in his speech to the Muslim world and in his historic Philadelphia speech on race, President Obama has brought to the White House a nonsectarian gospel of reconciliation.

Although they shared beer rather than wine, the scene of Gates, Crowley, Biden and Obama, each with his own dirty hands in a world without innocence, seemed like a reflection of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

“The Lord’s Supper is a celebration of the reconciliation of people with God and with one another, in which they joyfully eat and drink together at the table of their Savior … They rejoice in the foretaste of the kingdom … and go out from the Lord’s Table with courage and hope for the service to which he [Christ] has called them,” says the Confession.

Sometimes having a beer is a sacramental act, a kind of holy moment, a foretaste of the kind of world we seek, the dissolving of the divisions, community created boldly by grace out of the vain searches for innocence and the broken, rancorous claims of righteousness.

I am back in the Cape Town area in a town called Paarl, where I am visiting my sister Emily and her family; I also spent five years of my life (grades 8 through 12) here at Paarl Boys High. I am fortunate that my Sabbatical coincided with my 20^th high school reunion and homecoming for my alma mater against Paarl Gymnasium. On Thursday and Friday we will watch my nephews play rugby on their various teams and then Saturday we will be watching rugby the whole day with the epical final game in the afternoon between the first teams of the two schools. Hopefully Boys High can turn the tide around as Gymnasium has been winning for the past five years.

A great and life-changing experience I had these past weeks was spending a night and the following day in Soweto. Soweto is an urban area in the City of Johannesburg and its name an English syllabic abbreviation, short for South Western Township. What makes Soweto unique is that it is infused with the history of the struggle against apartheid and was home to people like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Very memorable were my visits with Antoinette, the sister of Hector Pieterson, a 12-year-old boy who died during the Soweto uprising on June 16, 1976. Hector was killed when the police opened fire on students protesting against the apartheid state’s policy of Afrikaans as the language of instruction in schools, regardless of the student’s first language. He became the iconic image of the 1976 Soweto uprising after a news photograph by Sam Nzima of the dying Hector being carried by an 18-year-old school boy, Mbuyisa Makhubo with Antoinette (then 17 years old) running next to them was published around the world.

Although I was too young to remember the events of June 16^th, it was  truly amazing to visit with Antoinette, who now is a tour guide at the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum. During my visit with her I once again realized how apartheid dehumanized people to the effect that we could forget that Hector was really a child, and not just an image in the newspaper. Antoinette helped me recognize that he was a normal 12-year-old boy who was very close to his mother, loved to play in the garden collecting bugs of all sorts, and that he dreamed dreams. As I was listening to her I became aware that he could have been one of my own two children who now are at the same stage in their lives. It was then that Hector came alive to me and I envisioned the cost of the ultimate price he and his family paid for a free and just South Africa. Most amazing to me is that Antoinette does not hold any grudges or bad feelings against the people or system who took her brother’s life. She has made a choice not to allow hate to hold her life captive. For her to be truly free and to do justice to her brother’s sacrifice is to forgive and to let go.

For me personally I broke a barrier spending the night in Soweto. Growing up white in apartheid South Africa we lived with a tremendous fear of the black majority, a fear that still separates many people today. For me it was unbelievable to be there, walking down the streets of Soweto, watching the Bafana Bafana’s (South Africa’s national soccer team) semi-final FIFA Confederation Cup match against Brazil, hearing the sounds of the vuvuzelas, and drinking a beer with my gracious host.

I left Soweto with a sense of wholeness, realizing that our biggest fears sometimes keep us from living our lives as people who are set free, which in turn minimizes the sacrifice of those who paid the ultimate prize.

June 12-14, 2009
Hospitality Place Retreat Center
Circle Pines, MN
Friday, 5pm – Sunday, 2pm

for information contact:  Rev. Don Christensen at 651-690-2609; rachelanddon@msn.com
Enrollment limited; registration deadline, May 22, 2009

As people of faith, we stand in solidarity with our immigrant brothers and sisters and their families as many gather for this nationwide day of remembrance to promote awareness of the devastating effects of raids across the country including raids here in Minnesota.
 
This event is a unified call for humane and comprehensive immigration reform, just labor practices, family unity, and an end to raids of all kinds.
 
For more information contact:
Rev. Loren McGrail at lorenmcgrail@mac.com
Interfaith Coalition on Immigration

The Environmental Stewardship Task Force encourages churches in the Presbytery to make use of a new, 2-part adult education or retreat study. This free power point presentation is a detailed and interesting review of 4 environmental actions that came out of our 2008 General Assembly. It is your chance to spark discussion of the issues and a wonderful way to let your church members know what they are being called to do.  There will be a great opportunity to get an overview of the presentation on Tuesday, May 12 at 2:30 at First Presbyterian in Red Wing at our PrePresbytery program. We hope someone from your church can attend, look it over and pick up our hand-outs.  If you have any questions, please e-mail Carole Rust. larry-carole-rust@msn.com .

The first is from Kristine Holmgren, an Hororably Retired Pastor.  She wrote her essay for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in early April.  You can read her essay in full by click on this link.

The second essay is from Paul Moore, the organizing pastor of Chain of Lakes New Church Development in Lino Lakes, MN.  He wrote his thoughts on his Chain Link blog.

 On the first day of each month, in order to build awareness, strengthen community and spark action Presbyterian Church (USA) bloggers will post their thoughts and musings addressing the following questions:
- how would you define describe POVERTY and its impact in your community?
- how has or has not your community of faith addressed issues of POVERTY?
- what are the greatest hopes and challenges that you think face your community, larger church and the greater society in dealing with issues of POVERTY?

This month [05.01.09] it is POVERTY. 

  If you are interested in taking part, please go here to sign up. If you don’t have a blog, but would like to take part, please send an email containing your thoughts to communications@ptcaweb.org by April 28 and we will post them on EMerge the Blog.  Please include your contact information if we need to contact you.

Sunday, April 26, 1-3 PM Minnesota State Capitol

Learn about genocides past and present, listen to local musicians and speakers, and find out what you can do to help end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, where hundreds of thousands have been killed and millions have been forced from their homes.  Speakers include: Minnesota State Senator Sandy Pappas, an eight-year-old human rights crusader, a Bosnian genocide survivor, and the Executive Director of the Genocide Minnesota. Co-sponsored by the Minnesota Interfaith Darfur Coalition. 

Continue reading for more information.

Honoring the Earth has as much to do with the little decisions we make every day as it does with the big ones. What can we do? In the spring of 2006, Betsy, a member of our church, designed a system of recycling and composting for the Blue Ridge Barbeque and Music Festival, which 26,000 people attended annually in Tryon, North Carolina. The overriding premise of the project was that most people will choose to do the right thing if they have the opportunity. An estimated 140 volunteers would be needed. One Sunday Betsy asked for volunteers to help with the recycling, and more than half of the congregation volunteered – enough to cover the first four-hour shift on Friday of the festival. They have volunteered for three years now, well aware that sorting garbage and food waste is one way to honor the Earth.

Recycling stations were set up throughout the festival grounds, each station containing a bin each for cans and bottles, compostables (food and paper), and trash (Styrofoam and non-recyclable plastics). “I have never seen anything more humbling than watching the 80-year-old lady lean into the food slop bucket to pull out a plastic fork and put it in the trash, while speaking kindly to the person who made the mistake. It was the way God works through us, and God was busy that day!” Betsy said.

For Betsy, the reward came late Saturday night when a motorcyclist dressed in studded black leather said to her, “Thanks for doing this. It’s the right thing to do, and you’ve given us the chance to do the right thing, too.”

In its first two years, the recycling effort reduced the amount of landfill trash from the festival by 60 percent, and the compost now fertilizes Polk County landscapes and community gardens. Thanks be to God!

-Rev. Gene Witherspoon, former assistant to the stated clerk

You have given us this wonderful Earth of land, sea, and sky to honor and care for. Grant us patience that we might take the time to recycle, though it may be inconvenient; time to protect it, though it may mean using less paper. As we fulfill our responsibility for caring for this Earth, you bless us with its beauty. For this we give you thanks. Amen.