There are several things about ministry that are not glamorous and exciting. I will tell you this, serving people is one of the things I love about ministry. Last week in Tennessee I shared with a group of people that I am having more fun now than I have ever had in 17 years of ministry. In 1986, I went on my first mission trip and it was to Romeo, MI where we worked with a small church that was struggling, but wanted to reach their community. It was then that I got the vision that the church needed to be externally focused. It wasn’t until 8 years later that I really understood how to lead a church to be externally focused and began to hone my skills and talents for the task that we are involved in today in planting Bridge Church at Perry.

I want to say a big thank you to the college students from Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, Mississippi and the high school students from Faith Promise Church in Knoxville, TN. These teams of students served over a period of two weeks, both using their spring break to come and be part of what Bridge Church is doing in Perry, OH. Through the efforts of these two teams we were able to serve 1,818 people in the communities of Perry and Painesville Twp.

Bridge Church was blessed to have students from the college ministry of Morrison Heights Baptist Church in Clinton, MS with us March 12-15. The students were part of a PowerPlant-College Mission trip for Cleveland. There were several teams from across the country in Cleveland that week to work with Cleveland Hope’s new church plants including Bridge Church. The team from Clinton worked with Pastor Darin and Julie on several servant evangelism projects as well as surveying two areas. Their work brought immediate results as two new families attended the Sunday service after they had done their work in our community.

We had 25 high school students and leaders from Faith Promise Church in Knoxville, TN. with us serving in the community for Bridge Church March 18-21. They started out by giving out nine volt batteries door to door on Sunday. Monday it was cold and snowing, but they were out there prayer walking three neighborhoods. They also went to two Marathon gas stations and filled up customers windshield washer tanks and gave out free coffee. They surveyed the neighborhoods they had prayerwalked. Tuesday the rate of people home for the survey was about 8 out of 10 and they were very receptive. The students were able to pray with dozens of people and share the gospel also. On Wednesday they went to businesses in Perry and Painesville Twp and washed the outside windows for dozens of businesses. They were able to pray for most of the businesses they served and several of the businesses allowed the students to leave information cards about Bridge Church on their counters for their customers to take.

I am an adherent to Paul’s writing to fellow Christ followers in his letter to the church at Ephesus, ““We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” I believe that loving is about serving and serving is about loving. You cannot seperate the two! To serve as Jesus served required humility. It requires sacrifice. It means taking the lesser role for the benefit of someone else.

Thank you students for serving!