This past Saturday our Lakeview and Lincoln Park locations had about 35 people serve with the Lakeview Food Pantry.  This was just one of the many opportunities we’ve had to serve together as a church.  After the event two of the volunteers approached me and talked to me about how wonderful an opportunity it was to be able to bag groceries and then deliver them to the people.  They were touched emotionally through the experience and want to do it on a more regular basis.  Other people’s eyes were opened for the first time to the needs in our community that they didn’t know about.  Lakeview and Lincoln Park’s communities are very wealthy and sometimes it’s easy to not see the need. 

I think it’s good to get out into the community and to see that even though we live in a very wealthy area there are still people here that are in deep need.  As Christ followers we’re called to serve those in need and as we serve we have the opportunity to show the love of Christ to others.  Sometimes it can be in a tangible way serving at a food pantry.  Other times it is intangibly praying for someone you’ve met while delivering food for them and learning about their specific needs.  As we serve in the community we are given the opportunity both tangibly and intangibly to make a difference.

This past year we have been developing how we organize opportunities to serve.  At the beginning of the year we started to experiment with a concept called Second Week Serve.  The experiment involved consistently presenting opportunities the second week of each month to help create a rhythm that people in the church got used to in plugging in to serve.  Every second week of the month we provided new and ongoing opportunities for New Lifer’s to get involved.  We also developed a logo to help promote it:

Over the first six months of implementing this concept we saw many New Lifers desiring more opportunities to serve throughout the entire month.  At this same time we as a church were preparing for our all church serving project on Saturday June 6 called Serve our City.  This project involved organizing about 600 volunteers to serve in various ways throughout the city of Chicago.  We also developed a logo to help promote this event:

After the successful all church outreach we decided that it was time to put Second Week Serve to rest and since June we now have been promoting serving opportunities throughout the month with the Serve Our City logo.  Lincoln Park and Lakeview people have continually jumped in to serve in tangible ways when opportunities have presented themselves.  It’s a joy to see people serve with Christ’s love and desire to be out in their communities serving others.  What I’ve seen in my own life as I’ve served in the community is that I’ve grown more compassionate towards others and have grown in my relationship with Christ while serving others.  I have also seen people come to know Christ through our outreaches and even some people that signed up to serve were drawn to a relationship with Christ through it. 

We’re currently in the next phase of our outreach planning and we’ll be recruiting teams of people from Lakeview and Lincoln Park to help plan and promote various outreach opportunities to the church.  What we’ve seen is that there are a number of people that are plugging in and desiring to serve but there are also many people in the church that have passions for various ministries in the community and would be willing to help organize and lead teams of people out into the community throughout the year.

I’m excited for this next season of outreach at New Life.  I believe that God has brought us to the point where we’re ready to move forward with the next phase.  The church has consistently rallied together to help people in the community and as more and more people have the opportunity to serve more and more people have experienced what it means to Serve Our City.