OUTREACH

Faith PCA Community Outreach

The overall goal of Community Outreach at our church is to reach out with the Gospel to Oconee County, the greater Athens area, and the world in word and deed. Our prayer is that God turn our hearts toward becoming a “missional” church in every aspect of our lives, living as joyful captives in the world, changing it from the inside out through our love and example.

Within our church, the Community Outreach Ministry Team or committee currently has two distinct major ministry areas: 1) Community Service Outreach focusing on reaching out and serving un-churched people in the local community; 2) Church Hospitality Outreach focusing on church visitors and seekers.

Following the Forward with Faith II strategic plan recently developed by our congregation and Session, our geographic areas of emphasis include neighborhoods within 5-7 miles or our church property, and the neighborhoods where our congregation members live.

Our church property is strategically located amid many housing subdivisions – we would like to be the “neighborhood” church for people living in these subdivisions. But the church is not a building or property, rather, the church is a group of people following and serving Jesus Christ. Thus, we also desire to see our church reaching out to and serving people in neighborhoods throughout the local community through congregation members who live in those neighborhoods.

Community Service Outreach

The mission of Community Service Outreach at Faith PCA is to actively involve congregation members in reaching out to and serving the local community by helping to meet physical, emotional and spiritual needs of people in our own neighborhoods, neighborhoods around the church property and throughout the local community in our various spheres of influence.
We seek to achieve this mission by encouraging personal (e.g., one-on-one) outreach efforts, gospel community small group involvement, and church-wide service projects and events.

Community Service Outreach functions include encouragement, assessment, equipping, and leadership as appropriate. Further, three levels of strategic support allow us to focus energy and resources as follows:

Key Strategic

Part of the key mission goals & objectives of the church or ministry team.

Typically involves significant funding, staff time, and several members of the body

Examples include special worship services (including at Oconee County Jail), Fall Family Festival, and special service projects designed to help meet specific physical, emotional or spiritual needs in our local community.

Heartily supported

Often enthusiastically encouraged, but scope and resource limitations preclude significant church-wide involvement in personnel or funding.

Examples include small group projects (e.g., A.C.T.S, Hispanic Ministry, Jireh’s Community, Loaves & Fishes Weekend Meal Ministry, Mercy Health Resource Center, Snow’s Mill Guest House, Sparrow’s Nest) and individual participation (Athens Pregnancy Center, Celebrate Recovery, UGA RUF Campus Ministry).

Allowed/encouraged

Approved and encouraged - often publicized – but not part of overall strategy as far as full adoption by the body (Butterfly Dreams Farm, Foster Kid’s Connection, Meals on Wheels Weekday Meals Ministry).

In the area of Community Service Outreach, we have set the following specific objectives for the next five years:

1.  Embrace one major event each Semester/quarter, Fall & Spring, with a short-term
domestic mission trip scheduled for the summer:

Fall: Fall Family Festival

Winter: Embrace Christmas Eve worship service(s) as outreach opportunities joint with Christ Community Church and involving gospel community small groups. Training, encouragement, and support resources provided by Community Outreach ministry team including leadership as appropriate.

Spring: Spring mentoring and training of Oconee County residents through seminars, workshops and one-on-one interaction in cooperation with other local churches and Oconee County government.

Summer: Local community special service project, local community service week with multiple projects, and/or “domestic mission trip”.

2.  Embrace and encourage outreach opportunities in cooperation with other existing ministries including:
Mother’s Morning Out
Vacation Bible School
KidsQuest, Doulos, and Cross Training

3.  Provide assessment tools and equip and encourage members of the body who wish to serve, but are not certain just where to start, join, or fit in.

4.  If it be His will, we fervently pray for God to provide us an opportunity - and for
us to mobilize the body - to plant a church to witness to the lost. The timing,
venue, ethnicity decisions will be His exclusively. We needn’t even be the sending
church. But we’ll own it just as much as He owns us.

5. Consider the possibility of starting a Community Resource Center in conjunction
with the Deaconate that would serve as a mercy and outreach portal of our church
to the community (like the County Extension Service office does for UGA). We
would initially need to raise a substantial amount of the money needed to fund the
center outside of the church budget. The center would be located in Oconee
County (e.g., Butler's Crossing) and focus on providing resources to suburban
families struggling with physical, emotional and spiritual problems.

6. Encourage “non-traditional” community outreach small groups focusing on reaching out to non-Christians, the un-churched, and church-disenfranchised Christians. These groups, for example, may include Christians and non-Christians, church members and non-church members, and cross-denominational members meeting in non-traditional church group settings (e.g., coffee shops, etc).

Church Hospitality Outreach

The mission of Hospitality Outreach at Faith PCA is to help visitors and regular attendees move towards closer relationships with Jesus Christ and other people in our church family.

We seek to achieve this mission by warmly welcoming newcomers, and encouraging a closer walk with Christ and personal relationships with others that motivates regular church service attendance and active, meaningful participation in church ministries and a gospel community small group.

Some of the Hospitality Outreach ministries we invite congregation members to become involved in include:

1. Welcome Center and Greeter Ministry

This ministry involves staffing a Sunday morning welcome/greeting center for church visitors and weekly capture and dissemination of information to a church body that is eager to reach out and follow up with visitors.

2. Visitor Luncheon Ministry

Sharing a simple meal and “breaking bread” together over lunch is a great way reach out to visitors and seekers. We encourage these luncheons to be held in the home of a member with support on a small group – ideally rotating around several outreach oriented groups. Asking a visitor or visitor family out to lunch is also a great idea!

3. 8@8 Dinner Party Ministry

Attending a visitor lunch is more of a one-time event for a church visitor or seeker. The purpose of the 8@8 Dinner Party Ministry is to get the same group of people to share “pot luck” type shared dinners together multiple times over 2-3 months so that folks have more of an opportunity to really get to know each other. Ideally, groups are composed of long-time congregation members, church visitors, un-churched people from outside our church, or someone who has not been “connecting” with the church family for some time.

4. Visitor and Congregation Information Ministry

It is hard to reach out to people and get to know them better if we don’t know who they are or what’s going on in their life with respect to being a part of our church family. In short, we need to keep up with people! To help with this need, we seek to: 1) maintain an up-to-date list of visitors and email information about these visitors to the church email list to help introduce visitors to the congregation; 2) maintain an up-to-date list of congregant participation in gospel community groups and other church ministries to facilitate people getting “plugged into” the church family and long-term; maintain an up-to-date church congregation directory with photos.