I attend a Methodist church in Richmond Virginia, a church that ten years ago the members wanted to close due to the bad neighborhood. The district council decided the church should remain open as a mission church and reach out to the community.
To help achieve this the church built a gymnasium to provide a safe place for neighborhood youth and the necessary space for many other programs.
Some of our local schools did not have adequate space for their own graduations and as a result of this new gymnasium they now do. The gymnasium is basically open for any legitimate cause in the neighborhood.
This was done through the great efforts of the congregation and at great expense to the church that has resulted in some financial distress, however at the end of the day everyone knows it was worth it.
In the past ten years they have added many programs such as “upward basketball” for local youth, tutoring programs, and mentoring. In the area of Hispanic ministries they have added a Spanish language service, free ESL classes, a computer lab utilizing “Rosetta Stone” programs to teach English. They have also opened there doors to the Mexican Consulate for the purpose of helping people renew or acquire legal documents to remain in America.
They are also involved in the “CARITAS” program that provides shelter for the homeless by recruiting local churches to host these people for a week at a time. By rotating them through churches in this manner they can provide food and shelter for them. This cooperation between churches brings me to my point.
If this cooperation can provide food and shelter for so many in need what could we achieve if we joined forces on other worthy projects?
I did a Superpages.com search for churches in Richmond, the results came back with an astonishing 834 churches listed in Richmond alone. I will be using financial and volunteer example for the purpose of this article.
Since I attend the Methodist church lets start there. Lets say the church I attend wants to raise funds to help fight poverty in Richmond. For the purpose of this example we will say that the church can only afford $50 this time. We will not accomplish very much with this so we ask the other local Methodist churches to match our $50. There are 54 Methodist churches listed in Richmond so now we are up to $2700, this is a start but still not enough to put a dent in the problem. Let's invite the 69 non-denominational churches listed in Richmond. Now we have $6150. If we continue this until we involve all of the 834 churches listed in Richmond we have a whopping $41700.If repeated once or twice a month imagine what the combined denominations can achieve.
The same principal applies to projects requiring large numbers of volunteers, or church may be able to produce 5 to 10 volunteers at any given time do to the fact that people always have there daily lives to attend to and can't always fit every thing in.
Again for the purpose of this example we will say 5 volunteers from our church, now let's have 5 from the other 834 churches. We now have a total of 4170 volunteers. How many neighborhood play grounds can we clean and repair? How many homes can we repair for the poor and disabled? How many tutors and mentors do we have? Again, if we repeat this once or twice a month the possibilities are endless.
For the purpose of this example I have used financial and human resources as, imagine what could be accomplished if the denominations sat down together and combined all of there assets with other churches. Imagine how many lives could be changed.
These examples are based only on churches listed in Richmond city; on the state wide level we now have 12541, $627050 and 62705 volunteers. I could not get accurate search results on a national level but I believe on that level we would have had the resources to re-build New Orleans in a relatively short time.
