It's been a looong day.
Started the morning teaching at Penn Friends Community Church in Cassopolis, Michigan. Over the past ten years, Bill Brunea has transitioned this 165 year old church from a tradition-bound church of about 20 people, who were all basically related to one another, to a growing Purpose Driven congregation of over 200 people. When you consider that the entire population of the town is 1700, it's down right amazing. Read the whole story here.
PFCC is growing in their passion for the great nation of India. They have begun the process of training pastors and church planters. In addition, they have adopted 14 orphans, and help three families start small businesses. They are sending their first official team over for the next wave of PD training.
So, they were looking for someone to stir up some passion for the Great Commission, the local church on mission, and the Kingdom party in India. Somehow, Bill got my number.
We experienced what may have been a straight up miracle this morning. Come back later this week to read that story. That one deserves a post all it's own.
After preaching the services, I hoped in the car with the family to join up with the Oasis Chicago Mission Team.
Johnnie Kiem is running point on all the mission efforts of the youth ministry. Under his leadership, John has been aligning the youth ministry teams with the mission focus of the entire church.
That way every team and effort, whether its youth or adults, is adding to the same long term, cumulative impact. Most churches miss out on this kind of cooperation with every sub-ministry splintering off in their own direction.
We are hanging out with our family at Good Seeds Ministries, a church plant we've walked with from day one. This year has seen a sharp increase in violence in the community, with three shootings within the two blocks of the church. One of those shootings took the life of a twelve year old boy.
One of the initiatives the church has launched to pull kids into the life of Jesus and out of the streets is the sponsorship of a little league baseball team. It's a whole lot more than baseball. Glenn Bone, the pastor of Good Seed, is the coach, and the entire church embraces the boys and their families, providing after school tutoring, mentoring, financial literacy training for the families, outings for the kids, meals, travel costs, and a whole lot more.
They are literally saving these kids lives.
However, because these kids live in the wrong neighborhood, the city won't fix up or maintain the baseball field in the park.
The middle school students of GCC are going to make it right. The folks of Good Seed can maintain the field. But, our students are going to overhaul the field. Makes me so proud of our kids I want to shout!
As they say, 'If you build it they will come."
To put it lightly, the field is in BAD shape. Today the kids, busted it, pulling about ten million weeds, picking up garbage, and then removing what was entitled the "Lake of Englewood," which happened to be right between third and home.
I can handle a pretty mean broom...
DC literally dug a drainage channel to get the water out to the street and our job was the pull the water over.
Here's some of the kids and leaders cleaning up after the mudfest.
We'll be back at it tomorrow. Pray that it dries! We're bringing in new dirt. If you want a bigger picture of what the team is doing you can follow along at DC's blog...who, in my opinion, is the greatest student leader ever.
If you've you got a few more minutes, you've got to read this story about Glenn. He is one of my heroes.
UPDATE: Official team blog here.
Thanks so much for joining us today. The students were very excited. Thanks for posting pictures too. We don't have any on the team blog. I'll but a link to your blog on ours. Here is our site link...
www.chicag08.blogspot.com
Posted by: Sarah Koutz | July 21, 2008 at 12:10 AM
I love our kids! They are AMAZING!
It is awesome that you and Michelle showed up to hang with them. THANK YOU!
Posted by: Phil | July 22, 2008 at 06:56 PM