Latest News

Visitors to the World Council of Churches (WCC) on 13 May included 22 students from an international initiative between HTWG Konstanz (Germany) and Elizabethtown College (USA), as well as Outi Piiroinen Backman from Tuusula, Finland.

[Episcopal News Service] When the Rev. Lucinda “Pete” Dempsey-Sims was a deacon at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension in Buffalo, New York, she noticed that many people who picked up food from the parish’s food pantry would also ask for meat for their pets. In response, she opened a pet food pantry in 2011. Episcopal Church of the Ascension has since merged with another Buffalo congregation, the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd. Dempsey-Sims died from cancer in 2017, but the ministry and her legacy continue to thrive through “Pete’s Pet Food Pantry.” The Church of the Good Shepherd renamed the pet food pantry in Dempsey-Sims’ honor in 2018. “Many people have really cavalier attitudes and say that people shouldn’t have pets if they can’t afford them, but Pete knew in her bones that, for so many of our clients, their cats or their dogs are their only companionship,” Dempsey-Sims’ widow, the Rev. Cathy Dempsey-Sims, told Episcopal News Service. “Pete knew the power of connection between human beings and their pets, and she would never, ever deny anyone who asked for help to feed their pets,” said Dempsey-Sims, who is partnership canon for pastoral care and congregational support in the Dioceses of Western New York and Northwestern Pennsylvania. Every first Sunday of the month from 3 to 4 p.m., anyone can receive up to two 5-pound bags each of dry dog and cat kibble for free from the Church of the Good Shepherd’s complex. Identification and paperwork aren’t required. Volunteers – mostly parishioners – divide, weigh and label food based on the approximate size and age range of the dogs and cats. Canned and special diet food will occasionally be distributed, too. Updates are regularly posted to Pete’s Pet Food Pantry’s Facebook page. Most of the food is purchased through cash, gift card and PayPal donations, though many people donate food directly. Many of the donations come from individuals, nearby Episcopal churches and the nonprofit WNY Food 4 Paws. The local Pet Supplies Plus store is also a major donor. Volunteers also donate cat litter, leashes, collars, toys and more, even food for guinea pigs and rabbits on special giveaway days a couple of times a year. “Pete’s Pet Food Pantry is a ministry that people can really get behind,” Elaine Richau, senior warden of the Church of the Good Shepherd, told ENS. “We only distribute pet food 12 hours a year, but the ministry keeps growing and the stats on how much pet food we donate are mind-blowing.” In 2024, Pet’s Pet Food Pantry raised $6,628, not including physical donations and gift cards, and donated 21,380 pounds – 10.69 tons – of pet food, according to Richau. More people have been picking up food every month in recent years; earlier this month, the pet food pantry donated food to 150 families. The Rev. Michael Hadaway, the Church of the Good Shepherd’s rector, told ENS he thinks Buffalo’s affordable housing shortage and increasing living costs are driving the growing need for services like Pet’s Pet Food Pantry. “We’ve seen firsthand that people will give their own food to their pets if they can’t afford pet food because it’s expensive,” Hadaway said. “This ministry helps people maintain their own health and their own food supply.” The Church of the Good Shepherd also operates the Ken Perry Food Pantry serving people experiencing food insecurity every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Unlike the pet food pantry, which is 100% operated by the church, the Ken Perry Food Pantry is operated through various grants and donations by the nonprofit FeedMoreWNY. In the United States, the average cost of lifetime care is $34,550 for a 10-year-old dog and $32,170 for a 16-year-old cat, and those costs are expected to increase – as much as 7% for dogs and 10% for cats – due to ongoing inflation and tariffs recently enacted by the Trump administration, according to the 2025 True Cost of Pet Parenthood Report by Rover, an online pet care marketplace. Even though pet ownership isn’t cheap, most U.S. households – 66% as of 2024 – include a pet, and 97% of pet owners consider pets a part of the family, according to data compiled by the American Pet Products Association and Pew Research Center. For Mark DiGiampaolo, Pete’s Pet Food Pantry’s volunteer coordinator, owning pets is worth the financial investment. He told ENS that he believes Jesus included animals when he said, “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat…,” in the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:35-40. “Dogs and cats, especially the little ones, see the world from 10 inches off the ground. When you realize that this dog or cat is a complete creature that’s anywhere from 5 to 20 pounds or more, and they’re totally dependent on humans … they teach us that there’s so much more to life than the material world,” DiGiampaolo said. “It says right there in those opening chapters of Genesis that we must be good stewards of all God’s creation. The message to care for animals couldn’t be clearer.” When she was alive, Pete Dempsey-Sims also started pet food pantries at other churches in the Diocese of Western New York that are still operating, including at St. Matthias Episcopal Church in East Aurora. “Pete’s good work just keeps going,” the Rev. Cathy Dempsey-Sims said. -Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.

From 14-17 May, an international symposium on Nicaea is taking place in Bucharest, organized by the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Faculty of Orthodox Theology "Justinian the Patriarch” University of Bucharest.  

General Secretary Rev. Michael Blair to speak at Centennial celebration with the Uganda Martyrs United Church of Canada in North York, Ontario

The Mennonite World Conference will mark the 500th anniversary of the first believers’ baptisms in Zurich with a major event titled The Courage to Love: Anabaptism@500 on May 29, 2025. The event will bring together church leaders, theologians and guests from around the world to celebrate five centuries of Anabaptist witness — a tradition rooted […]

The post Celebrating 500 Years of Anabaptist Courage and Love: WCRC and Mennonite World Conference Unite in Reconciliation appeared first on WCRC.

May 8-10, Cluj-Napoca, Romania; May 11, Budapest, Hungary

Five United Methodists killed, a church destroyed, and hundreds of families are affected by flooding in Eastern Congo.

[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church released a letter May 15 from Southern Africa Archbishop Thabo Makgoba thanking the U.S.-based church for declining the Trump administration’s request to help resettle white South Africans in the United States – a policy that Makgoba said is based on false assumptions about his country. Upon taking office in January, President Donald Trump had suspended the United States’ 45-year-old refugee resettlement program, but he later reversed himself to make a narrow exception for white South Africans, known as Afrikaners, whom he said were “escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe announced May 12 that the church’s Episcopal Migration Ministries, would end its federal contract to provide refugee resettlement services rather than participate in the Trump administration’s plan to let “one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years.” Rowe made the decision a day after consulting by phone with Makgoba, the bishop of Cape Town and primate of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. In his letter, Makgoba thanked Rowe for the call and expressed “our gratitude for the stand you have taken.” “What the [Trump] administration refers to as anti-white racial discrimination is nothing of the kind,” Makgoba said. “Our government implements affirmative action on the lines of that in the United States, designed not to discriminate against whites but to overcome the historic disadvantages black South Africans have suffered.” Afrikaners, who number about 3 million people in a country of 63 million, formerly were part of the governing white minority under South Africa’s extreme racial segregation of apartheid, until its end in 1994 allowed newfound enfranchisement of the country’s Black majority. Even more than 30 years later, however, Black South Africans still struggle under the weight of their country’s historical disparities, Makgoba said. “By every measure of economic and social privilege, white South Africans as a whole remain the beneficiaries of apartheid,” Makgoba said. By some measures, “we are the most unequal society in the world, with the majority of the poor black, and the majority of the wealthy white.” Trump’s Feb. 7 executive order on South Africa pledged “humanitarian relief” to Afrikaners and criticized a South African law allowing the seizure of property without compensation in certain circumstances. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has rejected what he calls the “completely false narrative” about the law, which was intended to address the lingering disparities that Makgoba wrote of in his letter to Rowe. For example, white South Africans, who make up about 7% of the country’s population, control an estimated 72% of the country’s farmland. Rowe’s May 12 announcement also lamented the harms that Trump’s executive order restricting refugee resettlement have caused for many of the millions of other people around the world fleeing war, persecution and other hardships in their home countries. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are more than 32 million refugees worldwide, and tens of millions more have been displaced within their home countries. EMM has resettled nearly 110,000 such refugees over nearly 40 years, following of the Gospel call to “welcome the stranger.” Until this year, it was eager to continue that work as one of the 10 agencies with contracts to facilitate refugee resettlement on behalf of the federal government, a program that has long had bipartisan support. Trump, in halting the refugee resettlement program, claimed without evidence that refugees had become a costly burden on American communities, yet his administration expedited the resettlement of an initial group of 59 Afrikaners, who arrived in the United States on May 12. After The Episcopal Church declined to participate in the resettlement of Afrikaners, the White House responded by questioning The Episcopal Church’s “commitment to humanitarian aid.” “Any religious group should support the plight of Afrikaners, who have been terrorized, brutalized, and persecuted by the South African government,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a May 13 statement. “The Afrikaners have faced unspeakable horrors and are no less deserving of refugee resettlement than the hundreds of thousands of others who were allowed into the United States during the past administration.” Makgoba pushed back against such depictions of the Afrikaners as refugees. “We cannot agree that South Africans who have lost the privileges they enjoyed under apartheid should qualify for refugee status ahead of people fleeing war and persecution from countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Afghanistan,” he said. – David Paulsen is a senior reporter and editor for Episcopal News Service based in Wisconsin. He can be reached at dpaulsen@episcopalchurch.org.

[Episcopal News Service] Christ Episcopal Church in Toms River and the Diocese of New Jersey are ramping up efforts to defend the church against the mayor’s effort to seize its 11-acre property downtown and turn it into a park. A Change.org petition, started by the Rev. Lisa Hoffman, Christ Church’s rector, and posted on Facebook May 13 by New Jersey Bishop Sally French, had garnered close to 2,900 signatures by midday May 15. French told Episcopal News Service she hopes that the strong public response can demonstrate that taking Christ Church’s land “is not the will of the community and that those in government in Toms River might notice that and respond.” The congregation, with the blessing of the diocese, opened a GoFundMe page on May 14 to go toward legal fees to oppose the Toms River mayor and township council. Eighteen hours later, by midday May 15, the appeal had raised more than $2,900 of its $3,500 goal. If money remains after any legal action is concluded, the appeal says, it will go toward Christ Church’s outreach ministries. To raise the church’s visibility, Hoffman had planned to be at the church’s tent during the town’s May 17 Founder’s Day celebration. However, the event has been postponed until June because of predictions of bad weather. A “Voices for the Voiceless” rally that evening, which Hoffman will open with prayer, is still set to happen. It was organized by other activists after the town council on April 30 approved the first reading of the land-seizure ordinance. Hoffman told ENS that the rally’s purpose is “not going tit for tat with the mayor over homeless policies” but to tell people experiencing homelessness that “we are there to support them, to lift and encourage the people that find themselves in that situation and advocate for them.” Christ Church also has been posting information on Facebook about its upcoming events to show its other contributions to the community. They include its annual rummage sale on May 16 and 17, a comedy show, a strawberry social fundraiser, a Christmas in July vendor event, the annual Pipes and Drums of Barnegat Bay event, and a car and truck show. The congregation is also posting an updated list of its food pantry needs. The efforts come ahead of the town zoning board’s anticipated final vote May 22 on the church’s application to allow for a 17-bed overnight homeless shelter on the church property. Toms River Mayor Daniel Rodrick opposes the shelter, as do some of the church’s neighbors and others. He is behind the effort to buy the church’s land or seize it through eminent domain. The council is scheduled to take public comment and make a final decision on the land-seizure ordinance on May 28. The shelter proposal calls for updating the church’s circa 1882 parish house while adding 949 square feet to it. Since 2023, the building has hosted staff from the Affordable Housing Alliance and the Toms River Housing and Homeless Coalition. Conversations about some sort of shelter began that year, Hoffman said. The Affordable Housing Alliance would run the shelter with a grant from Ocean County. Seventeen women and men who are experiencing homelessness would receive help accessing social services and finding permanent housing, as well as a safe place to eat, shower and sleep between 5 p.m. and 7 a.m. “The basic premise is to bring in people that are in the best position to get into permanent housing, give them 30 days [overnight housing] to gather resources and work with the AHA and other social service agencies to get them into permanent housing,” Hoffman said. In the morning, the Affordable Housing Alliance will provide transportation to social services, jobs and to any other agencies that the alliance has connected them with. People will have to apply for a spot in the shelter and undergo a criminal background check and an assessment of whether they could move into more permanent housing, she said. French told ENS that this approach is rooted in the “fulfillment of our understanding of the Scripture and our call to be with the poor, the homeless and those who are in need, just as Christ asks us to.” Christ Church tries to help immediate needs, she said, but church leaders are “not looking just for the quick fix, they’re looking for the long-term opportunity, and they’re trying to be good neighbors and good and faithful citizens. And that’s what we need our churches to be doing.” The shelter plan requires a land zoning variance. Its current designation does not allow for a homeless shelter, but it does permit group homes for people with developmental and other disabilities, victims of domestic abuse, the elderly and the terminally ill. None of Toms River’s zoning categories allows for homeless shelters, and there are no homeless shelters in Toms River or Ocean County. Christ Church’s outreach ministries bring many people onto the campus during the day. In addition to the help offered by the two housing agencies in the parish house, it has a weekly food pantry. Fourteen different Anonymous groups host 160 monthly meetings in the church’s buildings. Plentiful Plates of Ocean County uses its kitchen weekly to cook hot meals to distribute to local people experiencing homelessness. Ocean Christian Community, which meets in the 1882 church on the property, offers twice-monthly meals, food and clothing distribution events. The mayor has been highly critical of the presence of people experiencing homelessness in Toms River, accusing Ocean County of exaggerating the homeless issue and “dumping” homeless people into the township. He has criticized rock star Jon Bon Jovi’s pop-up JBJ Soul Kitchen at the downtown library, claiming it attracts people who are homeless. If Rodrick succeeds in his effort to seize the land and shut down the church, “Toms River will lose a vital source of support for vulnerable residents,” the Change.org petition says. Rodrick, who did not reply to Episcopal News Service requests for comment, […]

Proposed Bylaws Changes Regarding Director Terms for Consideration by General Synod 35 This summer, General Synod 35 will review and act on three different sets of proposed amendments to the UCC Constitution and Bylaws. This is the second article in…

The post Proposed Bylaws Changes Regarding Director Terms for Consideration by General Synod 35 appeared first on United Church of Christ.