Emmanuel Church members, from left, Tyler Henkle, Molly Brough, Beth Brock and Sue Wyatt help assemble Blessings hygiene bags on a Jackson County backpack for distribution to county schools of Jackson as part of Seymour Church’s Week of Service.
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Emmanuel Church made Impact Week an annual tradition, giving Impact Team members the opportunity to complete projects to make a difference in their community.
All four of the church’s campuses — Greenwood, Banta, Franklin and Garfield Park — had participated in recent years.
Last year, a fifth campus opened in Seymour, so members of that congregation were recently able to participate in what is now known as the Week of Service.
Between the five locations, more than 1,000 Impact Team members served more than 50 organizations and committed 130 hours of service. That included 135 people from the Seymour campus, which was the most from one location, campus pastor Andy Schroeder said.
“First and foremost, we want to establish our congregation locally as a presence in our community, that we love and care for our community and want to support and help in any way we can, and that’s just a big part of our DNA of who we want to be like a church”, he said.
The church service began Sept. 9 by joining a group from Seymour High School for a tent and tailgate event with booths, bounce houses, food, giveaways and other activities in front of the school’s gymnasium. school before a varsity football game.
Emmanuel’s director of student ministries, Keia Blair, oversaw the project with the school committee.
“We got to love the high school kids. There were a lot of kids,” said Jess Ritz, the church’s host ministry and director.
Then, on September 10, Emmanuel had 35 members split into three teams to participate in The Alley’s annual Thousand Ten project. The idea is to have teams of 10 people with each individual investing $10 and going out into the community and using the money to make a difference.
One of the teams helped a family in Seymour.
“They just had a house fire in Columbus and they moved here,” said Lea Ann Schroeder, the church’s children’s director.
“They moved here, they had nothing, they were behind on some bills and we were able to take care of some of them,” Andy said. “We bought them groceries, we bought them a grill and a bunch of other things.”
Another team bought groceries for seniors at a local apartment complex. Kelsie Rieker, pastor of worship and groups at Emmanuel, was part of that team and said the goal of the Week of Service was to be the hands and feet of Jesus and to follow the motto of the church: ” Come to Christ and grow in Christ.”
“We are growing as a church. We want to be able to invite people to come to church,” he said. “It occurred to me that it’s hard to invite people to church, to come to Christ, to grow in Christ if their basic needs are not met, and that’s why it’s important that we take care of them like humans before we can share them. the gospel with them or invite them to come to Christ. We just wanted to love people while we’re in our community.”
For other projects to wrap up Serve Week from September 12-14, Emmanuel hosted a breakfast with local leaders to see what their needs were. Funding from the sale of Serve Week T-shirts helped them carry out these projects.
One was assembling 686 hygiene bags for Blessings in a Jackson County Backpack to distribute to local school children. Rieker raised $1,600 and Emmanuel put in $200 to cover the cost of needed items.
“They had a request for about 700 hygiene kits this year from school systems, which is just a very high number,” Rieker said. “Pam (Kindel) was a little concerned that they weren’t going to meet it, so we said, ‘We’re going to do everything we can to help you get it.’ from the community and I got a lot of financial donations, but I got a lot of item donations. A huge blessing.”
Church members also volunteered at the Jackson County Clothing Center in Seymour, helping organize clothing donations and cleaning the interior as well as washing windows, pulling and spraying weeds and doing other chores around the house. outdoor.
Working with the city, Emmanuel members painted two chambers at Kasting Park, removed old playground equipment and padded at Shields Park, and cleaned the running track and disc golf course at Freeman Field Recreational Complex.
“They’re adding nine more (disc golf baskets), so literally all day, we cleared brush, took down trees, so this is going to be a great addition to Freeman Field,” Ritz said. “It was great because this is going to be something that our young people can use because they’re doing Frisbee golf, and they have all of that right here close by.”
Searching the Seymour Shares TimeBank, a church group also partnered with the city to demolish a shed on a resident’s home.
The other projects were helping a single mother and her children move from an apartment to a rental property and the 1824 Young Adult Group volunteering at the Seymour Museum Center.
“Our goal was 100, and when the Lord gave us 135, we said, ‘OK,'” Ritz said of the congregation’s response to the Week of Service. “People in this community want to serve, they want to make a difference, and here at Emmanuel, I think what we really strive for is making a difference in the community. We want them to know they’re loved.”
Pastor Schroeder looks to the Seymour campus to continue participating in the Week of Service each year.
“We really feel that next year, we can improve and develop more relationships with organizations in our community,” she said, noting that the groups will also do community projects and fill needs throughout the year outside of the Service Week.
Rieker said the goal is for the community to know Emmanuel as a church that not only loves its members well, but loves the community well.
“It’s very easy for our inner-city churches to love their congregation well, but we hope our churches will see this and realize that we need to do more outside our walls, regardless of whether those people will come or not. in the church here,” he said. “We just have to love our Jackson County well.”
