M. Agnes Peebles
1986 Educator of the Year

"Being a Christian educator is to be with people, learning from them, exploring ideas with them, sharing what you know, searching with them for answers to questions, being led by and with them into new areas of life of people and experiences. One gets caught up in the excitement of others who are discovering that the ministry of education is where the action is!"

Agnes Peebles has been involved in Christian Education from the time she taught Sunday School as a youth. During her college years she was a student trustee for the Westminster Foundation at Penn State University and a member of the first work camp sponsored by the Presbyterian Church in the USA.

In 1947 she was called as director of Christian education and church secretary to First Presbyterian Church in Geneva, NY. Since that time she has worked in other congregations, as a staff member in the former Board of Christian Education, UPCUSA, and currently as an educational consultant for the Synod of The Trinity. Her gifts have been shared through her work on the National Council of Churches Friendship Press Committee, for whom she wrote and edited several guides for children's mission studies, and on the General Assembly Committee on the Small Church.

One of her most unusual assignments was serving as a Lend-Lease Consultant, a project conceived and funded by the Presbyterian Women's Organization to provide Christian education help to churches too small to employ an educator. She spent three years moving from church to church every eight to ten weeks, first on the east coast and then in the northwest corner of the United States.