Rev. Rachel Anderson
Rachel ended service as a mission co-worker in July of 2012. In July she began serving in the national offices of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) with World Mission as the Program Assistant for Itineration Support of mission co-workers.
In August 2011, the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico (INPM) decided to sever ties in response to PC(USA) actions on Amendment 10-A regarding ordination standards. PC(USA) mission personnel assigned to Mexico and along the 2,000-mile U.S. - Mexico border still need support as they continue in deployment and discernment. World Mission is committed to continue to answer Christ’s call to serve alongside Mexican Christians in the wake of the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico’s decision. Read more
About Rachel Anderson's ministry
Rachel Anderson was appointed in July 2009 to serve as U.S. coordinator and co-director of the Pueblos Hermanos Presbyterian Border Ministry in Tijuana–San Diego. This ministry is one of six U.S.–Mexican Presbyterian collaborations of evangelism, new church development, community health and development, and mission education along our common border with Mexico—three along the Texas border, two along the Arizona border, one along the California border.
About Rachel Anderson
Prior to accepting her call to mission service, Rachel was the campus life coordinator at a group home for 60 children, the Tamassee DAR School in Tamassee, South Carolina. There, she recruited, trained and supervised all the staff in the home, and she coordinated or led all campus wide activities. Simultaneously she served as chaplain in a medical center in Anderson, South Carolina.
Prior to her two-year stay at Tamassee, Rachel spent three months in Amman, Jordan, as a consultant with Habitat for Humanity. It was during her stay in Jordan and a period of short-term service in Pakistan and Afghanistan that she began to discern a call to mission service. In an orphanage for the survivors of the Banyan massacre, Rachel learned the lesson so many mission workers have learned “The lessons they taught me,” she writes, “and the gifts they gave me are, again, too numerous to name. In this new creation in which I now stand, everything reveals myself to me.”
Rachel describes herself as a “cradle Presbyterian.” Her first call was to serve the mentally and emotionally challenged in different jobs around the state of Georgia for about five years — working for the Department of Child and Family Services in Jonesboro, the Charter Psychiatric Hospital in Atlanta, and the Outdoor Therapeutic Program in Warm Springs.
Then, following her seminary education, she spent two years in Colorado as a seminary intern or assistant pastor in two different churches: Capitol Heights and Central Presbyterian, both in Denver. She also did a seminary internship in Oakhurst Presbyterian Church it Atlanta, Georgia.
Rachel has an associate degree in liberal arts from Southern Seminary College in Columbia, South Carolina, a bachelor’s degree in human communications from James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and a Master of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia.
She was ordained to the ministry of Word and Sacrament on November 3, 2007, and is a minister member of Foothills Presbytery.
Birthday: April 13
