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Christian Churches Together
September 23, 2014
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Upcoming Unlocking Justice Webinars
Sponsored by the Sentencing Project
RACIAL PERCEPTIONS OF CRIME AND SUPPORT FOR PUNITIVE POLICES
Presenter: Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Research Analyst, The Sentencing Project
Dr. Ghandnoosh's recent report, Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies, synthesizes two decades of research revealing that white Americans' strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos are related to their support for punitive policies that disproportionately impact people of color.
Coming on the heels of the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, the report demonstrates that the consequences of white Americans' strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos extend far beyond policing.
CAMPAIGNS TO ELIMINATE FEDERAL LIFETIME WELFARE BAN
This webinar will take place on Tuesday, October 14th at 2 p.m. Eastern.
Presenters
Jessica Bartholow, Western Center on Law and Poverty
Jeanette Mott Oxford, Missouri Association of Social Welfare
During 2014, state advocates achieved legislative reforms in California and Missouri to eliminate the federal ban on food stamps for persons with felony drug convictions. As documented in our report, A Lifetime of Punishment: The Impact of the Felony Drug Ban on Welfare Benefits, a provision of the 1996 welfare reform legislation passed by Congress subjects an estimated 180,000 women in the 12 most impacted states to a lifetime ban on welfare benefits. This webinar will highlight the political and communications strategies in states that have achieved recent reforms.
ORGANIZING TO ADDRESS MASS INCARCERATION
This webinar will take place on Wednesday, October 1st at 2 p.m. Eastern.
Presenter: Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Research Analyst, The Sentencing Project
Dr. Ghandnoosh's recent report, Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies, synthesizes two decades of research revealing that white Americans' strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos are related to their support for punitive policies that disproportionately impact people of color.
Coming on the heels of the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, the report demonstrates that the consequences of white Americans' strong associations of crime with blacks and Latinos extend far beyond policing.
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U.S. Bishops Plan to be Stronger Advocates for Israeli Palestinian Peace
By Judith Sudilovsky
Catholic News Service
JERUSALEM (CNS) -- American bishops were returning to their dioceses after a nine-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land with a stronger resolve to advocate for peace and to urge the U.S. government to take a leadership role in ushering Israelis and Palestinians toward peace, a member of the delegation said.
"Framed by Pope Francis' encouragement of encounters in Christ with the poor and suffering, (we have encountered) in the Holy Land Palestinians and Israelis who live sometimes with fear, sometimes with hate," Bishop Oscar Cantu of Las Cruces, New Mexico, told Catholic News Service Sept. 18.
"In Gaza, we have witnessed the destruction, death and loss of family. We feel an urgent need to bring attention to this," he said.Representing the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops, the clerics met with Israeli and Palestinian religious and political leaders, spent time meeting local residents and prayed at holy sites during the pilgrimage that began Sept. 11. Bishop Cantu was among five bishops who also visited Gaza a month after the recent 50-day Gaza war ended.
Bishop Edward J. Weisenburger, of Salina, Kansas, who had served as a chaplain in Oklahoma City after the 1995 bombing of a federal building there, said he had never expected to see such destruction and suffering again.
He described what he saw in Gaza as "painful to see."
Electrical service remained sporadic and school was suspended while children healed from the trauma.
"All this makes us realize that there is no price too high to pay for peace," Bishop Weisenburger told CNS. "(We need) the international community to coalesce to help both parties to come together for the sake of justice for both sides who have known suffering. Both sides have the right to have stability and peace."
Just a few short years ago, the bishop noted, he had thought there would never be peace in Northern Ireland, but now peace has come.
"Hope makes it possible to envision a new future," he said.
Bishop Bernard J. Harrington of Winona, Minnesota, said he was struck by the difficult situation in East Jerusalem in terms of building restrictions and lack of freedom of movement for residents.
"We met some wonderful Israelis who are truly interested in peace and also some who talk about peace but say there are too many restrictions, namely the issue of security," he said of some Israeli leaders.
At the same time, explained retired Oklahoma City Archbishop Eusebius J. Beltran, both Israeli and Palestinian leadership has failed their people, with Palestinians lacking "sincere leadership" while Israeli leaders have become increasingly more aggressive.
Bishop Richard J. Malone of Buffalo, New York, noted the intensity of the experience, and admitted that he was returning home with a greater sense of the situation's complexity because of its parallel narratives.
"I am going to have a lot more learning and thinking and praying to do," he said. "People on both sides need to open their ears to the other side, especially the ears of their hearts."
While calling for the removal of the Israeli separation barrier, which he said serves only as a sign of exclusion, retired Bishop Michael D. Pfeifer of San Angelo, Texas, said the warm relations shared by Christian and Muslim students in Catholic schools was inspiring. He suggested their cooperation could serve as a model for further grass-roots encounters between Israelis and Palestinians.
"I think promoting (encounters) like this could promote change on the grass-roots level while we do work on the higher levels within the USBCC," he said. "I think youth can bring about change."
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Suzii Paynter: Training young people to lead in a Christian organization
Faith & Leadership
September 23, 2014
The top executive at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship uses her organization's strategic plan to build a team of young leaders at CBF headquarters.
Suzii Paynter stepped into the role of executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) at a time when the organization was making dramatic systemic changes.
Soon after her arrival, CBF adopted a new governance structure and strategic plan to guide the global nonprofit organization, which comprises 1,800 churches and more than 130 missionaries. With those changes came shifts in leadership development, as Paynter expanded the leadership team and began to map the organization's staff structure and performance evaluation to the new plan. Guiding and nurturing young people in leadership is a particular focus of Paynter's work. "It's a big commitment of my time to create a strong, broadly based leadership team," she said. "We have a lot of young leadership in our ranks. ... This is our future, this large number of leaders that we want to keep and sustain." Paynter spoke to Faith & Leadership about leadership development of the CBF staff, including the unique opportunities offered by her "denomi-network." The following is an edited transcript. Q: How has your staff changed since you've been in this position? When I came, there were three direct reports to this position, so I've expanded that structure [to currently 10]. I've flattened the organization, taken out some of the folks in between, and I've done that in order to create a broadly based, younger leadership team in the organization. Q: When you came into this position a year and a half ago, how did you assess what needed to be done in terms of leadership development? One of the things that was driving us is that we had a new strategic plan. And so I mapped our staff structure and the incentives -- both intended and unintended -- that came from that staff structure to this new strategic plan.
Article continues on original posting - Click HERE |
 | | Breaking out of prison thinking: Melanie Snyder at TEDxLancaster |
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Deporting the Heart
America Magazine Daniel G. Groody
There is a story, often quoted in church circles, about a man who lived near a river. One morning he went to get some water and saw a body floating downstream. He dove in, rescued the body, pulled it to shore and gave it a proper burial. Two days later, he went for water again and saw three more bodies floating down the river. He pulled them out and buried them. A week later, there were even more bodies, then more burials. As this trend continued over time, he realized his efforts at burying the dead were not enough. He sought long-term solutions and began looking upstream to understand why the bodies were floating down river in the first place.
Today one of the strongest northward flowing currents is not in the Bighorn, Shenandoah or Nile rivers but in the surge of unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the U.S. border. A river of desperate children is flooding this country's overwhelmed immigration system. Between 2004 and 2011 about 6,800 unaccompanied minors traveled across the U.S.-Mexico border each year. The number jumped to 13,000 in 2012 and to 24,000 in 2013. By the end of this year, more than 90,000 unaccompanied minors could flow up to the U.S. borders from countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. What is happening upstream that is causing such a massive influx of children? Many of these children are coming because of the mistaken belief in their home countries that the United States is giving away green cards, that amnesty is in the works for young people, that there is a free pass for unaccompanied minors. But these reasons account for only a trickle in the river. The real explanation is much more complex. In November 2013 I was part of a delegation of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Migration and Refugees Services Committee that journeyed "upstream" to Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to look at this issue in greater depth. Meeting with high-level government officials and church workers on the ground, especially those from Catholic Relief Services, we received a firsthand look at the root causes for why children are coming north. Given the enormous financial and human cost of reaching the U.S. border, it is amazing they are coming at all.
Up the River: Riding La Bestia
Unaccompanied minors coming from Central America first face a perilous trek to the Guatemala-Mexico border. If they are lucky enough to get into Mexico, they still have a long journey ahead of them. With scarce financial resources, these children-along with pregnant women and many others-hop on freight trains to travel as far as 1,500 miles. This train system is known as La Bestia ("the Beast") or El Tren de La Muerte ("the Train of Death"). Many lose arms and legs jumping on and off these trains. Some are jolted onto the tracks and fall to their deaths. All are easy targets for harassment, robbery and assaults by violent gangs that systematically prey on these vulnerable migrants for profit. Eighty percent will be robbed and 60 percent of the women will be raped.
Continue reading: HERE |
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Love Alone is Eternal
Love Alone Is Eternal (Part Ten)
Most of us realize that life is more than our limited experience of day-to-day activity. We believe there is a God we believe that it is he who sustains the world. We further believe that it is God who made us. But moments of wonder and transcendence do not mean that we know God really loves us. Explaining the world, and especially our own lives, without a personal, sustaining and loving God seems impossible. The alternative is an accident, or worse yet, pure fate!
When John says "God is love" we are prone to think, "That's really nice." Then a dozen popular and cheerful songs flood our minds about love, sweet love, what the world needs a little more of we say. We conceive of someone who cheers us up by being sunny and happy. But the biblical writers didn't sing these kinds of songs or conceive of this kind of sunny personality. They surely didn't have these ideas in mind when they spoke of God being love. Love, for the biblical writers, is the will to do good for another person, even at great cost to one's own person. The God who is Trinity is a God who is passionately committed to the good of the other. The God who is Father, Son and Spirit is such a loving God. The Father shares an eternal loving relationship with the Son and is passionate about his well-being. The Son has this same love for his Father. And the Spirit overflows in love for the Father and the Son and is equally committed to the whatever is good for them.
Love is the perfection of God's being. "This means it is not something temporary or accidental to him. All of his being is love. To speak of God apart from his love is to speak of someone other than God" (Kelly M. Kapic, with Justin Borger. God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010, pegs 18-19).
The Great Imperative
All true and healthy relationships must be grounded in love or they will not endure to the end. There are many ways to command attention, even to create allegiance, but there is only one way to bind ourselves to one another relationally in the deepest possible way and it is divine love.
Chiara Lubich understood divine well when she said:
God-love, believing in his love, responding to his love by loving, these are the great imperatives today. This is the essential thin that today's generation has been waiting for. Without it the world is heading for destruction, like a train off the tracks, Discovering, or rather, rediscovering that God is Love is today's greatest adventure (Essential Writings, 56).
Continue reading blog HERE
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 CCT 2015 Annual Convocation
February 10-13 Houston, TX Immigrant Faith Communities and the Future of the Church in the USA |
Support the work of Christian Churches Together
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For more information on Christian Churches Together in the USA
contact our Executive Director, Rev. Carlos L. Malavé at
email
or call 502.509.5168
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