Sunday, August 27, 2006
New Life for Haiti
We started this new church, Via Christus, with a vision of transforming lives and transforming the world with God's love. In other words we wanted to be a "missional" church, one that sees it's primary purpose in reaching out beyond itself. Mission, for us, has three dimensions: personal, local, and global. In the local sphere we do things like the food drive for our local food pantry that we did just last month. In the personal sphere we encourage each individual person to find their particular ministry passions and callings. Some people have gotten involved in Big Brothers/Big Sisters, others in the local Therapy Dogs chapter, others share their musical or artistic talents, etc.
In the global sphere, we have decided to get on board with a partnership created by our parent church, LifeSpring Community Church in Plainfield, called New Life for Haiti. As it says on the website, "The vision of the Partnership is to love the people of Haiti by initiating several community development projects designed to make life better and reduce hardship in and around Gatineau, a much neglected part of Haiti in the mountain "villes" above the port city of Jeremie." The first project will be to build a medical clinic. Eventually there will be other projects, such as building schools, sponsoring and training teachers, providing a school lunch program, developing local micro-businesses, and the like.
In order to raise money for this initial project we are taking part in a fundraising banquet held at Benedictine University in Lisle on October 28. It will be an elegant affair, and our goal is to invite friends, family, neighbors, whoever. We want to extend this partnership to more than just church people. If you're in or near the Chicago area and you'd like to attend, please let me know.
I'm really excited about this mission. It will provide me and the people in our church with opportunities to serve people with enormous need (Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and by some estimates, the poorest in the whole world). We could never pull off something like this by ourselves this soon, but by plugging into what LifeSpring is doing, and tagging along on trips that they are organizing, we'll be able to become globally missional right away as a new church. I might even get a chance to go to Haiti this coming November! How cool is that! :)
BTW, if you'd like to hear an interview done recently at LifeSpring with some of the missionaries and doctors that we'll be directly working with there in Haiti, you can download it here.
In the global sphere, we have decided to get on board with a partnership created by our parent church, LifeSpring Community Church in Plainfield, called New Life for Haiti. As it says on the website, "The vision of the Partnership is to love the people of Haiti by initiating several community development projects designed to make life better and reduce hardship in and around Gatineau, a much neglected part of Haiti in the mountain "villes" above the port city of Jeremie." The first project will be to build a medical clinic. Eventually there will be other projects, such as building schools, sponsoring and training teachers, providing a school lunch program, developing local micro-businesses, and the like. In order to raise money for this initial project we are taking part in a fundraising banquet held at Benedictine University in Lisle on October 28. It will be an elegant affair, and our goal is to invite friends, family, neighbors, whoever. We want to extend this partnership to more than just church people. If you're in or near the Chicago area and you'd like to attend, please let me know.
I'm really excited about this mission. It will provide me and the people in our church with opportunities to serve people with enormous need (Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and by some estimates, the poorest in the whole world). We could never pull off something like this by ourselves this soon, but by plugging into what LifeSpring is doing, and tagging along on trips that they are organizing, we'll be able to become globally missional right away as a new church. I might even get a chance to go to Haiti this coming November! How cool is that! :)
BTW, if you'd like to hear an interview done recently at LifeSpring with some of the missionaries and doctors that we'll be directly working with there in Haiti, you can download it here.
Labels: social justice
