Give to "Educate a Child"
The Pentecost Offering: A Funding Source for your Congregation
The Pentecost Offering is a unique revenue-sharing strategy: 60% of funds raised go to the Presbyterian Mission Agency for programs related to youth and young adults, and 40% stay with the local congregation for ministries with young people in their own communities.
The “Educate a Child” National Initiative encourages you to consider how your congregation can use to use that 40% for education ministry and child advocacy in your own community.
Perhaps your congregation feels called to adopt a school in your area, providing school supplies and serving as tutors and mentors. Maybe you have the skills and resources to form or upgrade an early childhood center, an afterschool center, or a summer lunch program.
You may want to send one or several members to one of our leadership training events, where they can gain knowledge and skills to bring back to the congregation. Presbyterian congregations across the country are coming up with creative ways to use these funds to meet the needs of children in their particular communities.
Children’s hearts are breaking in different places for different reasons. Some have no food or shelter, some face discrimination based on race or gender, some do not have access to quality education.
What is breaking the hearts of children in your neighborhood? How might God be calling you to respond?
Give Directly to the National Initiative
Your gift will make education possible for one million children! That is the goal of the "Educate a Child: Transform the World Initiative," affirmed by the 221st General Assembly (2014). The Assembly's action stood on the highest tradition of our Reformed heritage: education. Many of our children, God's children, are relegated to small futures by virtue of their race, their zip code or whether they are girls or boys. Powerful cultural and political structures conspire to relegate many children to substandard education - and then decry a high dropout rate that would perhaps be more accurately classified as a high "push out" rate. The urgency of this work is told in the cradle to prison pipeline, the rates of teenage suicide, in the lives doomed from their outset to despair and desperation and in the squandering of God's gracious gift of intelligence and imagination. Your gift will support efforts throughout our denomination including advocacy and public policy efforts.
