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An Unconventional Guide to Making a Meaningful Gift This Holiday Season

12/21/2018

If you are looking for a meaningful last-minute gift, please consider making a gift in your loved one's honor to a worthy nonprofit! This guide from our friends at the California Association of Nonprofits, makes some great suggestions for gifts that reflect your values and also some important cautions about online giving.

Of course, we would be thrilled if you would choose to honor someone with a contribution to the California Council of Churches here, or California Church IMPACT here; but we urge you to support the nonprofit that most reflects your values.

Thank you!

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Can You Help Us Continue Our Work for Justice?

12/11/2018

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YES! I believe light is stronger than darkness and hope is stronger than despair!

Please share your generous contribution to support another 105 years of social justice for all people!

Dear Friends,

As we enter the blessed season of Advent, we end our year looking back on far too much anger, trouble, division, and turmoil. We, as people of faith, are called as rarely before to lead the way to love, hope, peace, and justice. This is a work born in hope.

Will you accompany us on this journey?

California Council of Churches is dedicated to helping people find their way toward a better, more just and humane world.  We bring insights into the issues of our day, clarifying what is laid out before us so we can make wise decisions about who we are and what kind of state and nation we want to be.

We listen to you in your requests for information on many concerns. We read deeply and engage in discussions with many diverse voices to find pathways to a moral and effective quest for decency in our public policy.  We transmit our insights to you all for your own deliberation and discernment.

That is the charge we were given in 1913 and that we carry out today.

No time in our year is more compelling in doing this work than now in Advent — the season before Christmas that fills us with hope and longing for a just and better world. Celebrating the birth of the lowly child, born of humble origins, offers us annual renewal of our commitment. Individually and collectively, we are reminded we can create a path to peace and justice by following his teachings.

It is our hope that our work helps your own.  It is our hope that our insights invigorate yours. It is our hope that we bring contemporary understanding to ages-old questions.  It is our hope that we offer you resources to underpin your work of justice.

In return, we need your support.  We may be the proverbial church mice, not wealthy, eking out our place even with sometimes meager resources, but we cannot do without that help.   Your help.

The California Council of Churches was founded to bring you insights into the moral foundations of our state’s and nation’s public decisions.  We interpret pending laws and policies, movements and issues, in the light of our belief in justice as well as democracy.

We begin, however, with the hope laid down on that first Christmas night.  Whatever we do or say, it must uphold hope.  Hope for humankind. Hope for the world. Hope for what Jesus taught us made manifest through our work.

And to continue to do this with the faithfulness, depth, and insight we have long been known for providing, we need your partnership and your support.

We love Christmas for the in-gathering of our families, but the entire year, every year, it is our work at CCC to expand the meaning of “family.”  We stand up against the injustices and harm that our society both intentionally and accidentally does to those we have not included in our bounty.  We celebrate changes that make life better for all, and we keep vigilant when those changes are threatened or incompletely delivered.

Please consider a year-end holiday donation of $250, $100, $50 or other amount you are able you share with us.  Your tax-deductible donation allows us to continue to look around to see who is missing at our table of riches.  It is for them we tell their stories.  It is for them we remember Jesus’ promise that all God’s children will be valued and served and kept whole.

It is not only at Christmas but all year around that CCC lifts up the stories that tell us we have not yet completed the work of real justice and offer insights into what remains to be done.

Please click here to share your generous contribution to support another 105 years of social justice for all people!

With vision and hope,

The Rev. Dr. Rick Schlosser The Rev. Dr. Alan Jones Elizabeth Sholes
Executive Director President Director of Public Policy

P.S. The California Council of Churches is committed to being a good steward and serving faith communities to pursue justice, equity and fairness for allGod’s children.  If our work stirs your passion, please consider leaving a Legacy gift as you are making your estate plans.  Please call the Rev. Dr. Rick Schlosser at 916-488-7300 or email rick@calchurches.org.

Activists Needed!!!!

California Church IMPACTand the California Council of Churches need you and your friends to become members.  Your support allows us to continue and to expand our important work.  Help us expand our activist base in every legislative district to continue and increase the effectiveness of our efforts to work to provide updates, training and resources to help people of faith to be as effective and articulate advocates as possible.  It is essential to our mission to be the advocacy voice for justice for our member denominations.  Please send us the names and email addresses of activists in your community or share this letter with them and ask them to visit churchimpact.org/take-action.html

Like us on Facebook!  facebook.com/CACouncilofChurches

The California Council of Churches is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, EIN 94-2780260. Contributions are tax deductible.

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God in the Belly

12/11/2018

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Black Lives Matter Madonna (Copyright: Bromickeymcgrath)

Art by Mickey McGrath, O.S.F.S,: We need images of the Black Madonna now more than ever

A powerful reimagining of The Magnificat by our dear friend, the Rev. Jim Burklo, Senior Associate Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California. You can read more in his blog, musings, here.

God in the Belly

Full of God, full to birthing,
Mary howls: head back, hair tossed,
Hands skyward with joy
That wrongs are about to be righted,
Salvation's about to be sighted.
No more groveling for crumbs of charity:
She pronounces justice with crystal clarity.
She's done waiting for the concentrated wealth of the 1%
To trickle down magically to the other 99.
The Santa System is stuck in the chimney;
And she won't be burned by it again!
A new kind of Christmas is coming -
To undo the dogma of domination,
Snap out of blame-the-victim hypnosis,
Chase money-changers out of the temple,
Redistribute the common wealth,
Restore power to the people,
And send the Religious Right empty away.
With one magnificent rhetorical swing,
Mary bats the political center into left field.
Pundits fumble, talk-show hosts mutter,
Super-PAC donors quiver, campaign strategists stutter:
Mary out-Magnificats them all.
So let's get in her line and carry her sign
And holler and act as if we, too,
Have God in our bellies!

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An Unconventional Guide to Making a Meaningful Gift This Holiday Season

Can You Help Us Continue Our Work for Justice?

God in the Belly

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An Unconventional Guide to Making a Meaningful Gift This Holiday Season

Can You Help Us Continue Our Work for Justice?

​God in the Belly

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Archives

Categories

God in the Belly