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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

Project Verdad and the Presbyterian Border Ministry

October 24, 2024

***Harmful Content Alert: This story contains outdated and offensive language.***

For more than 50 years, the Presbyterians of Mexico and the United States have partnered in ministry in the US-Mexico border region. Navigating barriers of history, economics, and language, unearthing and redressing racism, church workers in the borderlands continue to labor in serviglesias—servant churches. 

In the late 1960s, the towns of Mexico’s northern border rapidly industrialized, drawing millions of people to jobs in the maquiladoras. Cities...

Author: 
David S
Tags: 
Mexico, Chicano movement, Missions
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Presbyterians in Chiapas: Displaced and Abandoned

November 21, 2022

Ninety-seven years ago, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. joined the Reformed Church in America in support of the work of Rev. Jose Coffin of Chiapas. As we continue to document the Protestant heritage of Latin America and the Caribbean, we'd like to share this article by Princeton Seminary's Mark Lewis Taylor, originally published 27 October 1999 in The Christian Century, republished in part here with the author's permission...

Author: 
Guest Blogger
Tags: 
Mission History, Mexico
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Missionary Life in a Time of Transition: The Reifsnyders, Denominational Oversight, and National Churches

October 9, 2020

--By Richard W. Reifsnyder

Grace and Bancroft Reifsnyder were not only accountable to the “Mission,” the semiautonomous organization of missionaries within a particular country or region in which they served. They also were under the appointment and authority of the larger church through the church’s Board of Foreign Mission (BFM), as we discussed in our previous post....

Author: 
Guest Blogger
Tags: 
Mission History, Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba
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Missionary Life in a Time of Transition: The Reifsnyder Family in Latin America

September 16, 2020

--By Richard W. Reifsnyder

From time to time after I was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1972, colleagues would inquire whether I was related to Grace Reifsnyder, a retired long-time missionary in Latin America, and widow of T. Bancroft Reifsnyder, who had served the Board of Foreign Missions (BFM) from 1919 until his death in 1957. I did not know them (though surely they must be some distant relation) but was intrigued and wanted to learn more of...

Author: 
Guest Blogger
Tags: 
Mission History, Mexico, Venezuela
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