Saturday, May 15, 2010

Serve Elyria


Wow, what a day today was! It was one of those days where I was so proud to be the Pastor of Church of the Open Door. Over 500 volunteers demonstrated the love of God to the people of Elyria at Serve Elyria completing over 360 projects throughout the city. 260 of those were gardens using the organic and super creative gardensoxx from Filtrexx (check them out here). Our Pastor of Life Groups, Dan Samms, led the project this year and he and his team did a great job organizing and leading. He reported that in addition to the gardensoxx projects, we completed over 100 other projects throughout the city! Is that incredible or what?

My goal was to serve at the most projects and encourage the most people throughout the city. So as Pastor Jamie, my wife Andrea, and I traveled from site to site and encouraged, we helped out and loaded and unloaded gardensoxx, worked on landscaping projects, raked leaves, helped insulate and rebrick the foundation of a mobile home, cleaned up trash, and heard one person after another talk about what a great day it was.

One lady who I’ll call Judy, because that’s what her name is, cried when we helped her with some yard work and fixed her roof and said, “I can’t do any of these things anymore and I didn’t have anyone who could help me. I can’t believe what you all are doing today. Thank you so much.” (more tears.) I told her we just wanted to show her the love of God in tangible ways. She said, “well you did. Thank you.” (more tears.) Then I found out that one of the couples in our church who was up on her roof also left her a check to help out with expenses!

Another guy, I’ll call Ryan, because that’s what his name is, has only been coming to our church for about a month. He was out serving today and said to me: “this is what we’ve been looking for, a church that serves.” What a statement.

You know what? I think God is looking for a church like that and so are people in the community. Let’s continue to be that church!

2 comments:

  1. I think this was one of the most exciting days for me as a member of Open Door. Of course, today (Sunday) was probably even more exciting as we saw so many surrender to Christ!

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  2. I thought it was an awesome day serving together as a church. Our life group had a blast and we can't wait to do it again.

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