Day of Service Recap

July 25th was a full day of building life around Jesus in our community. My previous eNews talked about the push-back we were originally getting with this Day of Service both with the North Brunswick Senior Home and Oak Leaf Village Apartments. The actual Day of Service, however, was as if the authorities were pushing us forward not back.

In conjunction with the Cloverdale Church of Christ (Searcy, AR) we spent Wednesday morning cleaning the apartments of 9 senior citizens. Our 6 groups of servants cleaned windows, cleaned appliances, vacuumed, cleaned bathrooms, put together shelves and otherwise showed the love of Christ. Even the young ones served!

Those who finished inside assisted in landscaping outdoors, prepared for lunch or made cool gifts for the residents out of paper and other supplies.

Beginning at 11:30am the first of 65 residents began arriving for the cookout! Those residents who had been served in their homes came with smiles from ear to ear. They were so thankful for the help they had received.

Lunch was served by table and as you can see from the picture above, the young ones put their faith into practice as well. After lunch the kids sang three spiritual songs to the audience followed by a collective chorus of hymns from the adults. I closed with a vision message about our desire to see a whole community built around Jesus Christ again.

As the residents departed to their apartments we them say, "This was the best event we ever did here", "I'm gonna tell all my friends what you all did for us today", and "I am going to have to visit your church sometime". Even the Leasing Manager said to me, "This was really good. Very inspirational." One resident has joined us for church on Sundays for 3 straight weeks now. I have also been back to check on some of the residents we served; they invited me in like I was family.

At 4pm we all met at the Oak Leaf Village Apartments and began setup for face-painting, spin-art, a clothing giveaway, pop-ice giveaway and a cookout. Keith cooked our food and every one of our Searcy, AR guests stayed busy for 2.5 hours serving the residents that came outside. Primarily an African American neighborhood, we stuck out like sore thumbs! But we loved on them and they on us.

We closed our time at Oak Leaf with 3 powerful skits about the destructiveness of sin, the power of Jesus to forgive and redeem us from our sin and an invitation by me to come build life around Jesus with us.

I spoke with Nathaniel (a resident of Oak Leaf for almost 10 years) this week and he told me the following:

"I haven't been thinking the same since you all came out here and served us that day."

He told me about his faith history, his ex-wife, his father and his relative distrust of churches. He said,

"Shaun I came to see that most of the church gatherings I had been to growing up were faking it. Not all of them of course. But for you guys to come out here among our type of people, people you don't even know and do what you did- I have begun to see that maybe there are people out there that truly are serious and real with their faith. Maybe there is something to it."

All in all the whole day was full of ministry. I want to thank the Cloverdale Church of Christ group for their selfless service and for the honest and mature way each person represented Christ to our neighbors.

For pictures from the day click here!