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Randi Rowan has announced her retirement from Discipleship and Leadership Formation, effective June 20. She has served as a program assistant for more than 13 years, since Jan. 2, 2012.

An invitation to join us in celebrating our 150th birthday with an Open House Weekend, March 29 and 30, at Holmesville Church of the Brethren, 30748 S 66 Rd., Holmesville, NE 68310.

[Diocese of Alabama] The Rt. Rev. Glenda Curry, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, has announced her intention to retire later this year when she turns 72, the mandatory retirement age for Episcopal clergy. Curry made the announcement and called for the election of a new bishop last weekend during the opening session of the 194th Diocesan Convention, held Jan. 31-Feb. 1 in Decatur. Addressing more than 400 gathered clergy and lay delegates, she reflected on her tenure and the spirit of reconciliation that has defined her episcopacy. “Six years ago, I read the bishop’s profile as you searched for the 12th bishop of Alabama,” Curry said. “High on your list of priorities was living in the reconciling love of Jesus and being reconciled to each other and Christ in our ministry and common life. God has truly granted us that great gift of reconciliation—marked by mutual respect and deep love. I have found incredible partners in all our parishes, particularly at the cathedral, among our dedicated lay leaders and talented clergy.” In a video message to convention participants, Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe described Bishop Curry as a “wise and valued colleague who is concluding her episcopacy with strength and grace.” He also highlighted the Standing Committee’s “innovative plan to ensure a healthy and thriving future for the diocese.” Curry turns 72 on June 20. She has offered to continue serving the diocese until it can elect and consecrate a new bishop based on a timeline this year established by the standing committee. The full announcement can be found here.

Farida Mohammadi served along U.S. Army soldiers seeking out the Taliban as a member of the Afghan military’s Female Tactical Platoon. After the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, she was forced to flee her country. Arriving in the United States in 2021, Farida found a new purpose as a Housing Navigator with CWS Lancaster, helping other newcomers rebuild their lives. ... Read More

As we join with many in mourning the death of Prince Karim Aga Khan, I extend on behalf of the Anglican Church of Canada our deepest condolences to his family and to our Ismaili Muslim neighbours here in Canada and all over the world.

The post Statement on the death of Prince Karim Al-Hussaini, Aga Khan IV appeared first on The Anglican Church of Canada.

Collections for United Methodist general-church ministries dropped in 2024, but financial leaders expect the denomination’s much smaller budget will better align with giving going forward.

Ambitious plans are brewing at the United Methodist Commission on Archives and History, in a time when budgets in The United Methodist Church are being cut. Top executive Ashley Boggan talks about those plans and raising the money to pay for them.

World Council of Churches general secretary Rev. Prof. Dr Jerry Pillay called for resuming dialogue that supports peace in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where conflict has escalated following an incursion of Rwandan troops into Congolese sovereign territory on the Goma/Rubavu border.

[Episcopal News Service] Jayne and Nick Kinney are sometimes a bit late for Sunday services at St. Martin’s by the Lake in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota. When they are, fellow parishioners can tell it’s because Nick spent the previous evening in the ring and still sports remnants of the colorful, glittery makeup he wears as his professional wrestler persona, Nick Pride. Pride is a bad guy (a “heel” in wrestling lingo) whose name exemplifies the worst of the seven deadly sins. The Kinneys have been members of St. Martin’s for four years, Nick told Episcopal News Service, after being drawn to a Christmas Eve service they found so compelling that he wondered aloud if the service was always that good. They returned on Christmas Day just to see, “and sure enough, it was that good,” he said. “I thought, I kinda want to make this our church.” They’ve been attending regularly ever since. Their faith also has moved the couple to make a difference in the lives of others in the Minnesota wrestling community, making themselves available to offer a prayer, a friendly word or even a place to sleep. Nick and other local wrestlers are professionals and get paid for their matches, though most need to keep their day jobs. They are booked through some of the 13 local wrestling companies within a four-hour drive of Minneapolis. The goal for many is to get to the pinnacle of pro wrestling, the WWE – formerly the World Wrestling Federation – which launched the careers of the likes of Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and John Cena. As in the WWE, which describes what it offers as “sports entertainment,” the physicality in the local circuit is real, but the outcome of matches is determined in advance. Jayne told ENS they don’t consider what they do within the wrestling community a ministry. “We’re just being servants where God puts us, and for us it’s wrestling,” she said. She said the wrestlers they know are “a hodgepodge of people from every walk of life” – people who are getting a master’s degree, battling addiction, having their career funded by a wealthy relative or sleeping in their car. One thing many have in common, she said, is having been burned by a church. And that’s where Nick saw how his faith could make a difference to them. “He quickly became intentional about how he used his time, becoming the person that people could talk to about literally anything,” she said. Sometimes that means listening over a cup of coffee or cat-sitting when someone is on the road. The guest room in their new house became a place where people could stay for a few nights. St. Martin’s rector, the Rev. Jeff Hupf, told ENS he knows the couple “are true believers in the redemptive power of Jesus active in the world, and it just spills out of them,” and that’s what fuels their care for the people in their community. Jayne, who grew up the daughter of a Methodist pastor, said it was an ironic contrast between the wrestler with a name boasting about the deadly sins and the man in the locker room willing to listen to people for hours after a show. “He offers to pray for them if that’s OK, or offers to think about them if being prayed for isn’t something that they’re comfortable with,” she said. She joins in the conversations when that’s helpful. She added, “There have been a couple of guys that we’ve been talking to for years that excitedly told us they started going to church again.” They all text each other about things they heard in Sunday sermons or how they see God working in their lives, she said. Nick’s fascination with wrestling goes back to his childhood, where he found in it “classic stories of good versus evil,” he said. As a young adult, he started to study wrestling and discovered the power of storytelling that takes place. In 2021, Nick decided to give wrestling a try – at 28 he felt it was then or never – and started studying and training with The Academy of Pro Wrestling in St. Paul, Minnesota. They taught him wrestling basics, including what Nick called the most important one – how to fall and not break anything. Wrestlers fall all the time, he said, and it hurts, but they learn how to minimize injuries. But importantly, he also learned how to make it a show. He had studied karate, where moves are compact, so he had some things to unlearn. “In wrestling, you have to make it big, to move in a way that the people sitting in the back row can tell what you are doing. It’s very much like stage acting,” he said. Wrestlers also try to make their actions, which aren’t meant to hurt an opponent, look as believable as possible. “It’s like how a magician doesn’t show where they pull the rabbit out of the hat,” he said. Nick said he always had envisioned himself as a wrestler good guy, known as a “face,” and adopted that persona early on. He thought he was doing well in that role until a local wrestling promoter came up to him after a match. “He said your wrestling is fine, but your character is boring, so we’re going to turn you into a bad guy.” He told Nick to come up with a “fun bad-guy character,” with a long-term potential plan of turning him into a good guy later when the time was right. The bad Nick took off, and eventually, the companies that arrange wrestling events and hire wrestlers for matches only wanted to book him as a heel. “They told me I was much more interesting and marketable as a bad guy,” he said. He now wrestles almost every weekend, and sometimes more than one match a day. When asked about the contradiction of […]

[World Council of Churches] World Council of Churches general secretary the Rev. Jerry Pillay has described the proposal of President Donald Trump as “tantamount to proposing full-scale ethnic cleansing and neo-colonization of the homeland of the 2 million Palestinians of Gaza.” Pillay noted that the proposal violates every applicable principle of international humanitarian and human rights law, flouts decades of efforts by the international community – including by the U.S.– for a just and sustainable peace for the peoples of the region, and would, if implemented, constitute multiple international crimes of the most serious kind.  “The standing of the United States of America as a responsible member of the international community has been gravely diminished by the proposal itself, not to speak of any actual implementation thereof,” Pillay said. Read the entire article here.