My Journey Begins Now: Meet the Church

Yesterday was our monthly Meet the Church day. I love these community projects we do every month! Dakota and I do this together and sometimes Greg will join us.

What is Meet the Church?

Our church, along with 4-6 other churches in our city, have been instrumental in getting this community missions-minded project going over the last year and a half. On the 3rd Sunday of every month we (all the churches involved) join together as one church and go out into the community to different project sites set up all around town and we spend the afternoon showing the love of Jesus to those in our community. We
don't go representing any one church in particular but as the body of Jesus Christ working together. That's the BEST part!!

Some of these projects include:

a homeless ministry where we set up a shower trailer behind a local restaurant that is closed on Sundays but the owner has graciously offered their parking lot for us to use. The team that's working that project cooks a meal for the people, provides showers for them and a change of clothes (clothes that have been donated and socks and underwear that have been purchased), and 2-3 hairdressers set up to wash and cut hair and shave/trim beards. While the homeless men, women and children (yes, even children) are eating - volunteers talk to them about the love of Jesus and have began forming relationships with some of these people.
visiting sick children at the Children's Hospital and praying with them and/or the family.
visiting Hospice centers and praying with those that are dying or the family members of those that are close to dying.
water/canned drink giveaway at Wal-mart or coffee/hot chocolate in the wintertime
$5.00 gas card giveaway at Wal-mart
cleaning elderly people's homes or yards
cleaning up old cemetaries in run-down areas
block parties in low income, crime-ridden areas - this has been such a success and has opened many doors! We started out by setting up a carnival type atmosphere in the playground area with a loud music, bounce house, kids games, face paint, coloring sheets, etc and we grilled hamburgers and hot dogs to feed the people. After several months of doing this and building relationships with the people in the neighborhoods and helping a few of them with some other immediate needs (not necessarily financial - but physical, manual labor type needs) we were able to preach the gospel from the stage. There have been many that have been saved through this process!

I worked at a block party yesterday where a new church from a neighboring town came and joined us. They wanted to check it out to see what this whole Meet the Church thing was all about because they kept hearing good things about it. They were excited to see how everyone worked together and the response from the residents. We couldn't have asked for better weather yesterday either!! It was fabulous!!

These pictures are actually from a Block Party we did back in October - I didn't take any pictures of yesterday's block party. (I had taken hundreds of pictures all morning of our Children's Easter Celebration party and I was tired of taking pictures LOL)
My pastor praying with one of the residents.