UPIKE’s Chapel welcomes APCU
0Written By: Gary Johnson
The new Executive Director of the Association of Presbyterian Colleges & Universities (APCU), Dr. Jeff Arnold, visited UPIKE and attended Chapel service for the first time February 23.
As the Executive Director for APCU, Arnold travels across the country to the 56 Colleges associated with the APCU.
Arnold said he was visiting UPIKE “to see how the college is representing the Presbyterian Church, which has a more academic approach to Christianity.”
The guest speaker, Julianna Obrien, works for the Christian Appalachian Project (CAP) an Interdenominational, non-profit organization that works with the poor, elderly, handicapped, and disabled people in six counties of Eastern Kentucky.
Obrien said, “CAP is about giving people the help they need, so they can learn to help themselves.”
To clarify CAP’s methods, Obrien told a story about one of their “participants,” who is an 85-year-old woman with no family and zero income. The only reason she had food to eat was because she has a garden, even though she was entitled to receive food stamps, and social security income from the government.
She refused to fill out the paperwork after one of the CAP volunteers informed her that she could get help from the government. “She would rather have the money go to someone who really needed it,” she said.
After she had some time to think about it, she decided to have CAP help her fill out the proper paperwork and now she has a little income coming in each month, which allows her to have more freedom and independence than she had before.
Obrien said that after getting her income, she told the CAP volunteers not to worry about coming to visit with her anymore because “she didn’t want to take time away from other people who were in need of CAP’s services.”