Christ Our Lord Church finds mission right next door

By Michelle Chase

Many people only think of the mission field as something that we do overseas. And though those missions are very important and Christ Our Lord supports quite a few of its very own missionaries in various parts of the world, God gave us a vision for a mission field right next door to our church. We have a Mobile Home Park literally next door.  This community has absolutely no place for children to play, even the streets are torn up and right now full of very deep ditches because of work they are doing to replace water pipes. We decided to do a VBS for them. We approached the manager and she was very excited about the idea. She informed us that this community is forgotten about and no one reaches out to them. Christ Our Lord has decided to change that! 

The week of July 30-Aug 3 we went out each morning and set up tables, canopies, sound equipment and stations with games, songs, crafts and snacks in a field under the power lines. The first morning we had about 8 children from our own church and two little girls from the community. Our teen helpers decided to go into the community to find kids to bring. They came back with four little boys. So, our first day we went on as planned with 14 children. We had a great day and were blown away by God’s goodness and feeling very blessed to be His instruments to reach these few. These few from the community formed fast friendships with our teens and were excited to come back the next day. We reminded them to invite their friends.

On Day 2, we tripled our numbers! Kids were coming from every corner of the community. Kids from ages 3-12 coming, fitting right in and having a great time! At the end of Day 2 a few of the kids begged our teen helpers (there were five of them) to stay and play with them.  So they did - they stayed for the afternoon and hung out in the community playing with these kids. The teens were on a mission trip and didn’t even have to leave their town! We are so blessed to see God at work in them.

For the rest of the week we had new children every day. Mothers from the community would come out with their babies and sit under the trees and fellowship and watch their kids having a great time learning about God’s love for them. By the end of the week these children were so excited to sing songs about Jesus, to dance and share with us. We gave them each a Bible and were able to give most of the mothers Bibles as well. They were so thankful. The mothers even cooked up some wonderful food and brought it out to us on the last day!

It is a beautiful thing to see the church in action. God’s goodness was just smeared all over all that we did that week. He provided in ways we couldn’t even imagine. The great blessing in all of this is it is just the beginning of a beautiful relationship between us and the community. We already have our next event on the calendar. On August 26^th we will have a free back to school yard sale and school supply drive. We are so excited to see what else God has in store!

Michelle Chase is the Director of Children's Ministry at Christ Our Lord, Lakeridge.