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Jon Chapman, Area Coordinator
Champaka Srinivasan, Administrative Assistant
Regional liaisons
Doug Baker, regional liaison for Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Art Beals, regional liaison for Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo
Bryce and Phyllis Little, regional liaisons for Portugal, Spain
Burkhard Paetzold, regional liaison for Central and Eastern Europe
Gary Payton, regional liaison for Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine
Overview of the region
In the last seven years, the nations of the Europe Area have
been drawn together by a common need to build a new regional
and national identity to replace the one they lost when the
old division of East and West, as defined by the Iron Curtain,
ceased to exist. [Read more]
All countries in this area are listed below. Countries with
Web pages giving Presbyterian-specific information are highlighted.
For other countries, there is currently no PC(USA) involvement
in this country or the Web pages have not yet been prepared.
The PC(USA) also participates in or relates to work in other
countries through ecumenical relationships.
The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, pp. 149–150
May 27
May 28
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Overview
Europe Area, as defined here, reaches
from Iceland to Siberia. In the last seven years, the nations
of the Europe Area have been drawn together by a common need
to build a new regional and national identity to replace
the one they lost when the old division of East and West,
as defined by the Iron Curtain, ceased to exist.
The new European identity has its own new divisions, to
be sure: There are the rich nations of the north and west
and the poor ones in the south and east. There are the nations
of the (mostly nominally) Christian West and the nations
that identify themselves in one way or another as Muslim.
Inside the nominally Christian part of Europe, there are
the nations that use the Latin alphabet and those that use
a Cyrillic script, a division that coincides roughly with
ancient boundaries between the old Russian Empire and its
Slavic allies on the Cyrillic side and the old Hohenzollern
and Hapsburg empires on the Latin side. Finally there are
the nations that are members of NATO, the nations that want
to join and probably will, the nations that want to join
but won't be allowed, and Russia and Belarus, which are quite
unhappy about the likelihood that NATO will expand in their
direction.
The churches in each part of Europe also
face their own special challenges: In central and eastern Europe,
the church is re-establishing congregations, seminaries and
diaconal ministries of all kinds as it recovers from decades
of oppression. In southern Europe the church is offering a
faithful evangelical witness at the same time it is seeking
to demonstrate to its Muslim neighbors that it approaches them
as a respectful friend and not as an enemy. In northern and
western Europe the church is trying to model for their entire
societies how it is possible to integrate immigrants and refugees
from the poorer nations to Europe's south and east. All over
the region the churches and individual Christians are working
to embody Christ's imperative for peacemaking. |
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