Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Services Projects

It definitely took a lot of prayer and evaluating to come up with a Linkfa project.  This last semester Matt and I really tried to motivate our core into getting involved in our investigative group but found our group was really not ready for that commitment.  During our last Focus meeting, one of our core members mentioned that he really wanted to see Focus involved in more service projects.  This was something in the past that our ministry has been more consistent in, but with expanding into new areas of ministry by adding the Linkfas which would focus on outreach, it seems this was something we were not able to coordinate.  Last year Ricky and I tried to take our core on a couple service projects and we were always blessed and brought closer together in these experiences.  Nothing better than a couple of guys lifting heavy objects on a Saturday morning, and especially knowing we were helping great organizations such as Shoes for Orphans Souls helped motivate us to work hard.  After recalling these experiences, it really seemed like this was what our core really needed.

Matt G. and I both came to the conclusion that service is what our group and ministry really needed.  I felt this was a great idea for getting our core more active and would help create community.  Matt has coordinated service projects in the past, so he is definitely passionate about them and has been looking for an opportunity to get our ministry more involved with service.  After discussing our goals for service for both our core and the entire ministry, we have identified two areas we would like to lead the ministry in service.  The first is through biweekly service project which would be on Saturday mornings and would be open to the entire ministry.  We would like to get our core involved in coordinating these projects and participating as well as getting more people to participate.  Our goal is to get more people involved in service, thinking about what service means and how Christ served us in so many ways and asks us to do the same for others.

The second area of service we would like to get the ministry involved in is through spring break service projects.  We would like to take the lead in creating our own service projects that would involve more work and allow a great number of people to help in coordinating the projects.  As before, we will have a project each day of the break, but instead of going to volunteer service to find work, we would find places of need ourselves and oversee the completion of the project.  This will allow us to incorporate more people in the planning and execution of a project since we are not going through a third party agency which would do all the project management itself.    

2 comments:

Brandon said...

I think this is a great idea. I'd encourage you to consider only creating your own project for one or two days. I think you are probably underestimating the size of that task and the difficulty of getting access to real needs. I'd like to see more specific details posted as you come up with them. I'm excited!

Stef C said...

I like the service project idea, especially the spring-break project. Its really important for students to be able to spend some of their break giving back instead of just working on their tan. Especially since no one wants to see a bunch of skinny, white, computer nerds lying around in swim trunks.