Thank you Note from Ella and Brian

Just wanted to say hi and let you know how much Brian and I appreciate every thing you and the guys did.

Any time you are in our area stop by and have a po boy with us.

By chance do you have the names and addresses of the other guys. I would love to drop them a line.

The walls are coming along just fine. They have been sanded, primed, and textured. Hopefully paint will applied tomorrow.

Again, thank you so very much. You have no idea what it ment to us to have y'all help us so much. The laughs ment as much as the work you did.

Thanks A Million,
Ella and Brian

Everyone involved in this effort has helped make this happen, but special thanks from me to the guys who spent most of our January week in Louisiana drywalling Ella and Brian's house so they can get back home. This and a roof job are the first reconstruction that has been done through Tammany Oaks. With the completion of this job we've turned a corner from cleanup to reconstruction. It makes me very happy to know we have helped complete the cycle for one family to get them back home.

Lets fill out those spring break trips and GitRDone some more!

For use in your church bulletin or as appropriate

I wanted to encourage you to further promote the existence of this group to potential volunteers. I continue to find people who have wanted to go and help since the hurricane, but didn't know of a venue. God will bring them, but we have to let them know where to find us. The following is the text I wrote up about Servants Unite for our mission bulletin this month. It is also a half page insert in our Sunday bulletin and was emailed to our congregation list. Please use this to reach as many people as possible through similar channels:

Servants Unite is a multi-denominational, nonprofit, Christian organization uniting the churches of central Ohio and the surrounding region in disaster relief efforts. We have formed out of a group of over 200 people from over 30 churches in our area who came together to volunteer in Louisiana and Mississippi over the last 5 months. We are working to organize our church congregations and reach out to others in the region to continue to support ongoing relief efforts on the Gulf Coast and plan our response to the next need. With tornado season and the next hurricane season approaching in a few months, time is of the essence.

You can find up to date information on our web site at http://www.servantsunite.org. Our blog, http://servantsunite.blogspot.com, details our work with several updates per week. Be sure to check out the postings from the week of January 16th when we were there and follow the links on the 1/22 posting to all the pictures we captured of our experience. Our entire history is in the blog. We had a very successful week and helped many people who really needed to know that we and Christ still care about them. There is a huge demand still for people who can go and do that. Volunteers are the most sought after resource, even above food and cash, and will continue to be for months more. Your time working or financial support sending others down will have a huge impact on the lives and hearts of some very hurt, but hopeful people who are victims of this storm. For more information any time, email me at john@servantsunite.org or
call the home number at 614-523-3996. Thanks for your continued support!

Servants Unite Update Email

This was mailed out last night. If you are not on that list and wish to be, please send email to john@servantsunite.org.

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)

If there is any interest from those in the Worthington school district we can run a trip April 1-7.

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

Team 7 Returns

Team 7 has returned from Louisiana! The bulk of the team returned to Spring Road Church of Christ in Westerville at 11:00 Saturday night 13 hours and 4 rest stops after leaving Mandeville. This, no kidding, has been an amazing group of people. I've grown so close to them over the past week that I'm already feeling withdrawl. Thank you to all who supported our run and continue to work to build this organization.

I have pictures from 4 of the participants including mine. You can see and download all of them at the following links:
John McGuire's Pics
Bill Niess' Pics
Kyle Schneider Pics
Sue Hayes Pics

Thanks for a great week guys!

John McGuire
Servants Unite!