This week I met with a pastor that shared what God was doing in a small group at his church. They were growing more and more passionate about reaching their community through the local Public Elementary School, an idea they had learned about from SRC.
Over the last year we have really been moving our outreach focus to local communities, and seen the elementary school as the most localized family connection. We even approached our local school to volunteer to begin serving them.
At a church board meeting we conducted a study of what churches in our area are doing to serve the community and the results were not good. We found that of the churches that were doing "outreach" only one event was actually in the community. Everything else was "outreach" that required people to come to the church to receive ministry. This is what really drove us to start asking the schools what we could do to serve them. But the door was closed, we were not even given an appointment to talk in person with the principal. We were disappointed.
It turns out though that our disappointment (which I believe is temporary) was part of the journey for this other church to begin reaching out in a new way. Already they have painted a hallway, and are doing a "bookraiser" that will raise two thousand books for the classroom needs of their local public elementary school. Doors for them to serve the school are continuing to open. Their pastor credits us with this success.
Wow!
--Ben
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