Community 4:12

"The Poor" Serving the Poor

I spent the past two days at East Aurora High School at a mobile Feed My Starving Children food-packing event.  Great organization that provides meals for starving children around the world.  East Aurora HS implemented a brand-new service graduation requirement this year for incoming freshmen, and they wanted to kick it off with a huge service event.  Unfortunately, it costs about $17,000 to bring an event like this to a school/church . . . not a price an under-resourced school district can support.  So often the kids in this community are the recipients of service, so a few of us thought it would be great to help give them an opportunity to serve the "poorest of the poor."  So, four Naperville churches pooled resources to sponsor this two day event.  It was a fantastic experience.  658 volunteers (mostly high school students) packed 102,600 meals that will feed 281 children a nutritious meal a day for one year.  I thought the Beacon news did a great job of capturing the event.  Click here to read it.  

Kids Hope USA

I spent the past 2 days with our new Kids Hope Director, Carolynn Fulford, being inspired and empowered to run a Kids Hope USA mentoring program.  Started in 1995, this faith-based, school-based mentoring program now operates in 27 states with over 470 programs.  Their philosophy?  One church partners with one school and each mentor works with one child for one hour/week during the school year.  We heard story after story of life change and impact that results from this program.  Here's my favorite . . .

Noami seemed strangely lethargic during the entire hour. Normally talkative and eager to interact with her mentor, this first grader said fewer than five words today. "It's time for you to go back to class, Naomi," said her mentor as the hour came to an end. "I hope you enjoyed our time together." Noami's response was surprising. "May I go vomit?" she asked. "What?! Have you had to throw up this entire hour" Why didn't you tell me that you had to use the bathroom?"  "Because," said Naomi, "I don't want to miss even one minute of my time with you."

CCC has been working with Brady Elementary in East Aurora for six years, but this will be the first time we have done this kind of 1-1 mentoring.  I'm excited for the life change that is going to happen this year . . . in Brady kids and in CCC volunteers who serve as mentors.  If you'd like to learn more about how to become one of those mentors, let me know! 

VBS Highlights

We sponsored our first VBS in East Aurora this week at the Lighthouse.  Terrific week all the way around, but here were some particular highlights for me . . .

• Watching Josie take an idea/vision and make it happen.  She came to me last spring and asked if she could do this, and with her right-hand arm, Betty, created the entire VBS experience. They did a phenomenal job.
• Seeing so many new volunteers---especially the junior high and high school students who got up early every morning to come love on these kids.
• Seeing such a multi-racial group of kids from Aurora, Naperville, and Oswego making friends and playing together.
• Hearing Kristen, Lisa, and Kathy make Jesus come alive for these kids.
• Meeting parents of kids we've been driving to church for months for the very first time, and seeing them smile as their kids sang about Jesus' love.  

Coming to School Ready to Learn

As we have for the past several years, we want to help low-income students in East Aurora start the year off ready to learn by helping them get all the school supplies they need.  This year we would like to sponsor all 500 students who receive free/reduced lunch.  Want to help?! Instead of getting a long list of supplies that you need to go out and buy and try to cram into a paper bag, all you have to do is tell us you would like to sponsor a child (or two or three) and we pre-order supply kits. We will still sell them for a fraction of the cost to Brady parents, so the school will earn money as they have in the past.

For $25 you can sponsor a child who will then get all the supplies they need to be prepared at school. For those of you who have purchased supplies in the past, you know that is a great bargain compared to the $40 - $50 some of the grade level kits cost if you buy all the items individually.

If you'd like to sponsor any children, just click HERE to make a donation online or email Ron Kelso at ronkelso@sbcglobal.net.  In the fall, you will receive the name(s) of the children you have sponsored so you can write them a back to school greeting.

East Aurora Art Camp

Thanks to CCC's School for the Arts, we are offering a week long Art Camp at the Lighthouse this week.  I really had no idea what kind of turn-out to expect.  We sent flyers home through the schools before school let out and advertised through our Tuesday night kids' program, but we charged $5/child and offered no transportation, so I knew that would limit attendance significantly.  I really thought we might be lucky to get 10 kids.  But, tonight, 30 showed up!  We had 4 different projects they could pick from, and they will spend the week working on their craft and then we will showcase them for the parents on Friday evening.  All of the teachers are volunteering their time and most of the supplies were donated, but the kids could choose between painting, beading, basket making, and making a bird house.  Cartooning and drawing are optional activities for later in the week.  Parents seemed very appreciative of this opportunity for their children, and the kids were all so engaged and excited.  I can't wait to see how proud the kids are to show off their completed projects on Friday!  

A John 17:23 Campus

For six years we have been praying for the right time, place, and person to launch a CCC campus in East Aurora.  And we finally feel like we are ready.  We've got the person . . . Obe and his wife Jack are nothing short of a gift from God.  We've set a date . . . the weekend of January 9.2010.  And we have a place (we think) . . .our new Lighthouse office space in downtown Aurora.   But now that it is becoming real,there are a whole list of new questions and uncertainties.  What day and time is best for a service in this community?  Will the heavily tradionally, yet non-practicing, Catholic community be interested and open to a new way of discovering God?  Will the Lighthouse, with it's modern and very non-traditional feel be a place that people will come for church?  Will a fully biingual service really be effective?  Will the 75 kids enrolled in our Kids' City program be able to get their parents to come and give our style of church a try?  What does it really mean to "contextualize" our CCC style, content, etc.?

There are so many questions and uncertainties, but there is one thing we know for sure.  We want this campus to be a John 17:23 church . . . "May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me."  Our vision is that this campus will be a truly multi-ethnic church.  That our Hispanic and Spanish speaking neighbors in East Aurora will be to worship with and alongside people like me . . .non-Hispanic and non-Spanish speaking.  We may not have a lot of answers or a proven strategy, but we will hold fast to John 17 and trust that Jesus' final prayer for unity in the body of Christ can actually happen.

East Aurora StuCo

Tonight we piloted our first East Aurora StuCo.  Thanks to some missional folks from the Yellow Box and Montgomery Campuses, we had a great team of people who came out to help us begin to reach the junior/senior high age group.  Since most of our work has been with Elementary Schools, we had no idea what to expect in terms of turn-out.  We had about 10 junior high students that came, but we also had a group of 5th graders that are part of our Kids' City Tuesday program show up.  These are kids who are so ready to be in junior high!  And they loved this new experience!  It was very hard to read the more hardened current junior high kids, but these emerging junior high students can't wait for our next event.  And that is really exciting to me.  We hooked these kids in elementary school, and if we can keep them hooked as they head into middle school, that feels like we have a huge opportunity.  We certainly have some things to keep working on to provide the best StuCo experience possible, but in these kids' eyes, we've got a great thing going, and that is what's important!

Lighthouse Update

The vision of bringing the Lighthouse, a community center that will catalyze cultural, economic/artistic, and spiritual development in Aurora is moving forward!  We made the big announcement at CCC last weekend, that in January, 2010 we will launch our bilingual East Aurora Campus!  We have been building and preparing for this for six years, so the energy and enthusiasm in the room when Dave Ferguson shared the news at Leadership Community literally brought tears to my eyes.  Led by Obe and Jack Arellano, I can't wait to have people of different cultures worshipping together in the same service!

And we just wrapped up a meeting with the Mayor's office where we began to strategize about the much bigger Lighthouse vision of restoring a historical building to create a community center.  We are making progress . .. not nearly as fast as my timing would have us move, but it is a good and constant reminder that this is not in my control.  And that creates a very healthy and necessary dependence on the One who is in control!   

Kids' City Tuesdays

We had our first Kids' City Tuesdays at the Lighthouse meeting tonight.  We are approaching the launch of our East Aurora campus in a different way than we do most of our campuses.  We are STARTING with the kids ministry and will add adult celebration services later.  We have a lot of contact with kids in the neighborhood, and when we offer to drive them, we can get more kids than we can fit in our two vehicles to go to church in Naperville on Saturday nights.  For this program, though, we wanted to start off by not acting as the neighborhood bus service to see how many kids would come on their own.  We sent flyers home to all 3rd - 5th graders at Brady and Bardwell Elementary Schools.  My boys came home from school telling me how many kids were talking about it and wanted to come.  But, we knew the reality of kids getting there would bring the number who actually showed up way down.  I had prepared myself that we might only have a few kids, and probably only ones we already knew.  But, we had 15 kids, and all of them but 1 were kids we'd never seen before.  Kids whose parents read the flyer, thought the program sounded worthwhile and brought them.  And several of the parents actually stayed and had coffee and dessert while their kids were in the program---which is exactly what we hoped they would do so we can get to know them, too.  I am sure we will end up bringing other kids in the future, and hopefully the ones that came tonight will tell their friends and we'll slowly grow the program.  But we are finally on our way to helping people in this community find their way back to God!

Kid Pal

I am so proud of Bob Lowe and the Community 4:12 programs he is developing in East Joliet.  This is a banner his team designed to promote one of their new initiatives.  The purpose of Kid Pal is to get adult volunteers into the Joliet schools to help kids develop academic skills, self-esteem, and various life skills.  We held our Neighborhood Team lunch at our Shorewood Campus today to share the Community 4:12 vision for Joliet, like we did in East Aurora last weekend.  We had about 150 people join us, and Bob did a tremendous job sharing his heart and vision for Joliet.  And we had many, many people sign up to be a part of Kid Pal and some of the other Joliet programs and events.  I am so encouraged by the number of people who refuse to let economic challenges stand in the way of loving the poor!