Love Week Recap

Good morning, everyone! I hope everyone had a great fall break. As you all know, we just finished our 2nd annual outreach project: Love Week. Before we launched GC, we had a vision to serve our community in a huge way. One way to do that was to have an all-out community service week to reach the needs of the city. Last year, we logged just over 1,000 hours of community service. This year, we set an audacious goal of 2,000 hours. Let's recap the week:

Light the Night: We kicked off Love Week with this event to pray for our city. We had LED balloons with prayer requests attached to them. We let them go into the night sky as they lit up the night over Portland. Over 350 people came out to kick off the week!
• Elementary Schools: This year we were able to do much more inside the schools than last year. We were able to help with some much-needed painting, cleaning, and touch up work at a few of the elementary schools. This is an ongoing project that we hope to be able to use to serve our schools.
• Other Projects: Each day we had projects that filled up with people willing to serve. Some people took vacation days and sick days just to be able to serve. We did projects like building a ramp for an elderly disabled woman, Habitat for Humanity projects, love projects for single moms/dads, clean up crews for highways and neighborhoods, city park projects, helping shut-ins with food, a free clothing and food pantry, and much more. We even had kids who were willing to be out at 6:00am to hold up encouraging signs last Monday morning as people drove to work.
• The Hours: This year, we totaled 1,904 service hours! Just 96 hours short of our goal, but what an amazing increase from last year! THANK YOU, church!
• Block Party: We finished off Love Week with a Block Party in the middle of town. We had inflatables, free food, cotton candy, and prize giveaways. It was a huge success! We even had VIP's yesterday who came because of the Block Party, and a few of them gave their hearts to Jesus! Let's celebrate, church! 
Love Day?: One of the ideas that sparked from Love Week is possibly doing a Love Day once a quarter each year. This would enable us to focus on one or two projects and complete them in one day. We could actually do larger projects with more people. Stay tuned for more info on that! 
The People: Of course, I want to thank each and every person, business, school, or church that helped in some way to help make Love Week successful. Special thank you to Shelly Gregory, our outreach coordinator, and her team for a phenomenal job of organizing and serving the projects. 

My prayer is that we continue to inspire people to step up and serve their city. We live in a culture that would rather complain about the way things are instead of stepping up and doing something about it. Let's always be a church filled with people who will step up. Thank you all for making this outreach a huge success. We are just getting started - the best is yet to come. I love you all, heart and soul.

Pastor B