Lots of ways to build community

I attended a district-wide United Methodist Church event yesterday that was quite enjoyable. The district my church is in is a combination of two districts. At the service creating the new district last August, the new District Superintendent asked for volunteer churches for a challenge without telling us what the challenge was. She had planned for 20 churches and was caught off-guard when 44 churches responded. She gave each church $1000 (and had to raise an additional $24,000 to be able to do that). She challenged them to spend it on their surrounding community. It could not be spent on themselves, and certainly not to pay the electrical bill.

At yesterday's event, churches had to report on what they did (or will do) with the money. All 44 are documented in a booklet (which I have glanced through). Perhaps a dozen gave presentations. Several churches started by raising additional money to double or triple what they were given. They did a variety of things with the money: stock up their food pantry or clothes closet for the poor, host dinners and invite the poor, buy Christmas gifts for poor families, hold a basketball clinic for 50 kids, provide meals and comfort to the police department, turn an adjacent abandoned building into a youth art center, take housewarming gifts to a newly built shelter for homeless veterans, donate to (and participate in building) a Habitat for Humanity home nearby, provide seed money to another agency to turn junkyard seatbelts and tires into sandals, start a community garden on church property, support a youth work-mission trip to Haiti, and develop a neighborhood literacy program. Every one of these projects served to build community as well as mental health of the participants.