Bags of Hope
Read this letter from our Mission Committee about a new outreach project.
Hello SCCC Brothers and Sisters from your Missions Committee,
The Lord has been putting our community on our hearts for many years now, with a desire to reach out to our neighbors and let them know we care for them. We have wanted to go and just ring doorbells, so that we could announce God's love to the world and to offer to pray or help in whatever means we might. With Covid this has been a closed door, but at the same time it has opened new ones.
The missions committee has been in discussion with an organization (aligned with the Gideons) called "Bags of Hope" which leaves bags on peoples' doorknobs containing a Bible, an explanatory pamphlet, and a treat.
The Bags of Hope folks left 900 such bags on doors in the Cedarbrae area a few years ago, but did not cover the area completely. We are considering working with them to get more bags on knobs around our church.
There is a cost to the materials, there is also a need for volunteers to place the bags so we are working out the logistics...however this really seems like the hand of God to us.
In addition to the Bags, we believe that Covid has made a few new things possible now that were not so easy before. Our church has an online presence that people can attend risk free - so whereas they had to physically come to the church to try it out, now they can try it out from the safety of their own computers.
To make this even easier, we are contemplating having a landing page on our website, specifically for those people who get a "Bag of Hope" on their doorknob. On the pamphlet, we would include a QR code (and the URL for those people who are "uncomfortable/not up to speed" with those) that would take recipients to a webpage on our website that ensures they are properly welcomed. On that page we would explain why we left the materials. what our mission is in Cedarbrae, what services we offer, what we believe, and how we might help. We can also take prayer requests right on the page, and direct them to our online and in person services.
As part of SCCC's Bags of Hope pamphlet, we are also planning to include an article George Ridley wrote on dealing with fear and COVID, which we suspect would be timely and helpful for people...
Please pray for us, as we work towards this goal. Right now, our hope is that God will enable us to place bags in the May 2022 timeframe.
In Christ,
The SCCC Missions Team.