It’s been a few weeks since we sent out an update and if you haven’t been following the blog you may be behind on activities with Servants Unite. Our organizational meeting went great. More than 20 people have come forward to continue helping to build this organization and new churches are being represented in our ranks all the time. We are in the process of incorporating as a nonprofit and continuing to build our ranks as a multidenominational Christian disaster relief ministry in the Ohio region.
23 people spent last week in Louisiana. We really had a productive week! Mucked 10 houses, tarpapered and framed in walls in a church in Chalmette, built an engineering plan for the partially complete disaster relief center and set about building footings to support the structure, drywalled a house in Slidell (including finishing), reorganized the entire "warehouse" space in Joy Fellowship church, helped the cook reorganize the facilities after being out for three weeks, repaired the men's showers, and various other odd jobs.
Tammany Oaks is quite short on volunteers for the month of February. Please ask your church leadership to send a request to your congregation's email list and mention the need during announcements, in the bulletin, or during services. We have a trip scheduled for February 4th with two participants so far. Let’s see if we can’t build that up and have another great week down there!
We’re moving the March 4 trip back a week and scheduling other tentative dates for spring break trips to align with area schools and colleges as well as a group from the University of Buffalo who are coming through our effort. Here’s the schedule:
- March 11-19 University of Buffalo plus any interested local additions
- March 18-25 OSU, CSCC, Hilliard, Grandview Heights, Bexley
- March 26-30 Dublin, New Albany, Johnstown Monroe, Olentangy, Marysville, Xenia
- April 8-15 Pickerington, Big Walnut, Westerville, Springboro, Reynoldsburg
- April 16-23 Gahanna, Columbus (with New Life youth group)
You represent the members of dozens of churches in our area. Please get with your youth leaders about these trips to build up interest and participation. And of course we need all interested volunteers even if you aren't a student or youth leader :-)
We need to assign team leads to these trips. If you’ve been there, done that, and can take one of these weeks to lead a team, please let me know as soon as possible.
We also need to do some fundraising for these. Gas money can run around $2,000 for each of these trips or more if there are a lot of participants. We need at least $10,000 to cover those. I set up a convenient Paypal account to accept donations from the link on our web site or interested donors can get hold of me at my usual contact info below.
Be sure to check out our exploits last week on the blog entries below. As I experienced personally last week, the need continues to be immense, but still, there's a lot of visible progress. We are making a difference and shining the light of Christ in the gulf coast. God’s been using you all in remarkable ways. Thanks for all you’ve done for this effort so far and for all you continue to do!
John McGuire
www.ServantsUnite.org
614-523-3996 home
614-404-8610 cel
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