How We Motivate Each Other
By Cara Taylor, Outreach Director
Love is like a magic penny. Hold it tight and you won’t have any. Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many, they’ll be rolling all over the floor!
This song from my childhood captures the way Chapel Hill experienced deeper relationships and blessing even as we gave away $570,641 in “Beyond These Walls” grants last year. How?
Family Serve day this week is a perfect example. Before coming, my friend’s kids were not so interested. But after more than two hours of helping, this family didn’t want to leave! They sorted hygiene items, packed cookies, and colored encouraging notes for people on the streets. We heard some stories of hard lives changed by God, and some kids shared their own hard stories.
Life takes a lot of energy. The paradox is that when we choose to love others, God replenishes us (Proverbs 11:25). Being part of a church family that makes this choice to serve together is how we motivate each other.
Our church leaders sparked this fire of generosity when we paid off the building years ago and turned the mortgage payments into the Beyond These Walls fund. This year it helped spur on 18 member-empowerment groups.
One group is serving at the Key Center today where 50 families sponsored students with clothes and shoes to start the year strong. Another, the Anchor Gathering, is hosting a women’s retreat on Wednesday.
The largest Beyond These Walls grants help expert faith-based non-profits in ways that the church can’t do alone.
- A new CareNet Center is breaking ground next month in Port Orchard. When the director visited neighboring medical offices, all of them were thrilled to have this free clinic for pregnant women and families.
- Over the next couple years, we will help Coffee Oasis open the first transitional housing for youth (including teen moms and babies) in Tacoma.
- Nearly 10,000 immigrants and refugees in western Washington gained a foothold in their new community through World Relief services.
- YoungLife is raising up minority leaders in under-resourced areas of the South Sound so all kids, no matter their background, can meet Jesus.
All of these major gifts are backed by Chapel Hill serve teams who put faith into action by loving the most vulnerable among us.
One of the most unique and impactful decisions Chapel Hill made is to support community groups who love like Jesus even if they don’t yet follow him. This gives us amazing opportunities to bless others and explain why we do it.
I visited Ali’s Prom Project this spring with our gift. The founder works out with Pastor Julie and has a passion to make sure every teen feels beautiful. When the girls come for their stylist appointment, sometimes they are hungry or have a parent who keeps putting them down. Many have never felt such loving attention. To me this boutique was a picture of Christ’s love for his bride, the church…a picture of the how beloved the Bible tells us we are. I told Ali so.
At the other end of life, older adult participation at Cornerstones and the Gig Harbor Senior Center increased by 50% thanks to Beyond These Walls gifts used to reach new people. In a culture that often isolates us as we age, Chapel Hill builds relationships.
If you’ve read this far, I wonder if it’s because the Spirit is stirring your heart to give God’s love away.
Beyond These Walls is also a vision to send leaders and to plant churches. From interns training for ministry right here, to pastors in rural, multi-ethnic and college communities, we are answering the call to the Christian movement…just like we have seen in the Book of Acts Just look at the Spirit-filled community at Kitsap House, our first church plant!
Who has God put on your heart? If you have not yet found a place to spend God’s love beyond your walls, reach out to me or Chandra Hallam. We can connect you!
If you have your own story of how God brought blessing when you stepped out of your own need to meet someone else’s, reach out to us, too. Sharing these stories is how God encourages us all to go when we don’t yet feel like it.
Cara