pat loughery

A while back I wrote that I feel strongly that we are to focus more aggressively on serving the poor/needy this year. I’ve been praying hard about what that looks like for us – with limited people and limited funds, we can’t just try a bunch of things and hope something hits the mark.

So there’s a trailer court that’s just on the edge of town, actually only a couple of blocks away from the place we meet as a church, and also on the road that I drive on to go to the gym (nearly) every day. I’ve felt led to “adopt” that neighborhood, get to know them and build relationships with them – to focus our service projects on that particular group of people instead of more of a shotgun approach like we did last year. This particular neighborhood is probably the most poor in our area. I mean, it’s the one concentrated environment containing the folks who generally have the most needs. There’s a lot of widows and single moms in that neighborhood from what we’ve been told.

So this Saturday, we’re going to be handing out gift bags to the 30 or so families in this neighborhood. I’m really excited about this. We’ve put together a cool little bag with this stuff in it:

• 8 greeting cards and envelopes, with 8 stamps
• A 4-pack of extended life light bulbs
• Hershey’s kisses, mini Kit-Kats, etc.
• A pouch of decent coffee
• A couple of pouches of cocoa
• A couple of red balloons
• A couple of tealights
• An invitiation to our upcoming marriage workshop (I’ll have to blog about this later)
• And a postcard-sized card, stock servant-evangelism stuff, this one only says “Yes it really is free. We hope this small gift brings some light into your day. It’s a simple way of saying that God loves you – no strings attached. Let us know if we can be of further assistance.” It has our logo and contact info, but doesn’t include where/when we meet. (We stopped using these as our regular SE cards because we wanted business-card sized ones, which DID include where/when info).

All this is put into a nice little cellophane bag with red dots on it. It’s a pretty cool little bag.

What we’re really trying to do is to go deeper with servant evangelism – to go beyond the “give away free stuff to catch peoples’ attention for a moment”, and really meet their needs. So we want to show love, to disarm stereotypes of Christians, and to begin to build relationship by getting a foot in the door. My plan is to go back once a month to do SOMETHING, and more often if possible.

It’s a start. What it means for us is that about 15% of our tithes and offerings is going into this neighborhood, or to our local food bank. Last year we gave away 5% of our income, which I’m told is about average for churches nationwide. I’m hoping we can keep over 15%. It’ll be rough for us to do some months, but I really believe that it’s where God’s leading us, and I’d rather spend money here than on more books for me, or more decorations for our room, or whatever.