To Serve – These two little words are on a tab on the church’s newly revamped website. While the words might be small, the results from our church’s efforts are significant, positive and ever growing.

As we move into this month of Thanksgiving, we want to show our gratitude for the Outreach and Mission Ministry Team and all of the many volunteers who share their time and talents to serve God’s people throughout the world.

The Outreach and Mission areas are divided into four distinct areas:

Grants and Special Offerings Ministry Team: In the last fiscal year this ministry team evaluated grant requests from dozens of agencies and extended $182,239 in funding to over a dozen agencies including Sheffield Place, Kansas City Care Clinic, Harvesters Community Food Network, Kansas City Women’s Employment Network, Micah Ministry as well as Disciples Mission. The 2015 Christmas offering of over $27,000 was donated to aid refugees through Week of Compassion. The Easter offering of over $12,000 was donated for missionary sponsorship. The team is chaired by Lance Jessee.

Metro Mission Ministry Team: Metro Mission is involved in local volunteer opportunities through ongoing service projects like Micah Ministry, Cross-Lines Community Outreach, Hartman Elementary School, Grace at Work, the Virginia Reed Food Drive and Collection Connection. Volunteer hours number in the thousands for the last fiscal year, which translates to thousands of clients receiving help.

Over 100 volunteers spent 600 hours tutoring at Hartman Elementary helping over 800 students.

Over 100 volunteers spent over 500 hours cooking, purchasing groceries and serving lunch the first Tuesday of each month to more than 2,100 grateful recipients. Through offsetting donations the total cost to the Metro Mission budget to do this was $1,268 or .60 per client!

Over 10,000 meals were served at Micah Ministry the second Monday of each month by a team from our church. Over 1,000 hours were spent cooking, purchasing food, delivering food and serving. During the same period almost 150 hours were spent working in the Micah clothes closet helping clients find much needed clothing.

The Virginia Reed Food Drive serves five food pantries in the area with a combination of donated foods, purchased foods and credit to purchase food by the agencies by donations to Harvesters. Seven volunteers are active in this mission spending many hours ordering food, delivering food and taking care of the collection baskets at the church.

Grace at work is the all-church half day Saturday morning volunteer event held twice a year, in April and October. Over 100 members head out to local agencies and do needed volunteer work. Teams also do projects on our campus.

Collection Connection is a long standing monthly campaign to help deserving agencies and our International Mission groups collect much needed supplies to support their work. This program is highly regarded by all the recipients and members have been generous it making it a ongoing and growing success.

The Metro Mission Ministry Team is co-chaired by Ed and Carol Pasley.

Mission Trip Ministry Team: Our church convenes teams to travel to areas in the United States when disasters strike. Teams have traveled to New Orleans, Joplin and Moore, OK among others to aid in hurricane relief and tornado relief. Teams also go on international mission trips twice a year and currently those teams travel to India and Nicaragua. See much more detailed information on both of these international mission opportunities on the website.

Northeast PartNErship:  PartNErship is an initiative focusing on developing relationships in the Northeast Kansas City community and working collaboratively to make an impact. The initiative targets the area on the Independence Avenue corridor near Benton Boulevard. Currently we work with four agencies in that area and many volunteer activities are available. The agencies are: Della Lamb Community Services, Grace United Community Ministries, Sheffield Place and Jerusalem Farm.

For new information on the Northeast PartNErship, the agencies and the volunteer opportunities coming soon and all the other areas noted in this article please click here.