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January 2025

January 30, 2025
in Church, Food Backpack Program, HCC, Jesus, Local, Outreach, Safe Families for Children, School Outreach, Serve Teams, The Sharing Shed
by cefiggins
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Local Outreach Updates:
God was glorified when HCC hosted the (EWR) Warming Center on January 19-25. We were activated four nights and provided a total of 115 beds to our unhoused neighbors. I couldn’t believe it when I saw three of them on Sunday morning in services and chatting with Warming Center volunteers! We will start planning to provide a cooling center this summer when the temperatures are not safe for humans to be outside for extended periods of time. Let me know if you would like to be a part of that planning.

Our Safe Families/Foster/Adopt Serving Group is really coming together. This group is made up of HCC families who already serve as Host Families with Bethany Christian Safe Families or who are Foster/Adoptive Families. The group also includes Family Friends who may provide physical needs such as formula or clothing but they can also help provide meals, transportation, or babysitting to our HCC families.

Food Pantry and Food Backpack Volunteers are just beasts! They have continued to serve in ridiculous weather situations. Talk about discipleship at the cost of comfort. Thank you so much for your dedication and commitment!

 

FOR THE ONE VISON NIGHTS: We’re just over two weeks away from launching our FOR THE ONE Campaign, and we want to make sure you’re in the loop about this!! This campaign is all about boldly reaching the lost in our region through our third campus in O’Fallon and updates at our Troy Campus. To help everyone catch the vision and understand how we can all be part of it, we’re hosting three identical Vision Nights in February:

  • Tuesday, February 11th @ 6:30 PM (STC)
  • Wednesday, February 12th @ 6:30 PM (Troy)
  • Sunday, February 23rd @ 6:30 PM (STC)

Childcare will be provided for all three nights, and you only need to attend one. Please take a moment to sign up for the Vision Night that works best for you by clicking the link.

 Upcoming Service Opportunities

School Outreach Monthly Pray & Prep
Monday 2/3/25 6:30 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. HCC St Charles Campus Annex Door 10
Join us each month to pray for our local schools, teachers, staff, families, and children. We also use this time to assemble simple appreciation gifts and write thank you notes to local school staff. Click  to RSVP here


The Sharing Shed
Saturday 2/15/25 9:00 a.m.-11:00 a.m. 923 East Terra Ln. O’Fallon, MO 63366
Our HCC Sharing Shed crew serves every 3rd Saturday of each month from 9 a.m.-11 a.m. Volunteers are needed to receive donations, clean them. and occasionally help deliver the items or serve as personal shoppers to Sharing Shed Clients. Volunteers are especially needed who can lift and deliver heavy household items. Sign up Here

LO/GS Spring Training
Thursday 3/13/25 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Mission Cafe
This training is for anyone serving in Local Outreach, Food Pantry, or Guest Services. We will be focusing on safety. SCAAD will be here to demonstrate basic lifesaver CPR. We will have a brief training from our Security Team on what to do in the event of an emergency. We will also have tips and tricks on how to de-escalate and manage difficult conversations. RSVP here

Safe Families Training #1 & #2
Safe Families Core Training Monday 3/24/25 6:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Mission Cafe
Host Family Training Monday 3/31/25 6:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Mission Cafe

Bethany Christian- Safe Families is hosting two in-person trainings at HCC on March 24th and March 31st from 6-8:30 p.m. in the Mission Cafe.
For anyone wanting to serve as a Family Friend either for Safe Families or to support HCC families, you need to complete Safe Families Core Training on March 24th. Click this link to sign up for Core Training. For anyone wanting to serve as a Host Family for Safe Families, you will need to complete the Core Training on March 24th and the Host Family training on March 31st. Click the previous link to sign up for Core Training. In addition click this link to sign up for Host Family Training.
The Sexual Abuse Prevention Training for Family Friends and Host Families will need to be completed online. Email Madison Witte to enroll in the Sexual Abuse Prevention Training.  Feel free to email Madison Witte from Safe Families, mwitte@bethany.org, for any additional information about what Safe Families is, what a Host Family does, or the critical importance of a Family Friend.

Prayers
Pray for one specific neighbor to be curious about your faith.
Pray for God to provide an opportunity for you to share a message of hope and love.
Pray for God to raise up a HCC member to serve as the Hackmann Rd Early Childhood Crew Leader.
Pray for HCC members to form a consister serving crew at Hackmann Rd Early Childhood.
Pray for God to raise up a HCC member to serve as the Becky David Crew Leader.
Pray for the health and healing of so many of our Local Outreach and Food Pantry volunteers.
Pray Local Outreach volunteers will not slip into humanitarian tasks but will boldly unleash the hope of Jesus through justice and generosity.

Resources for you to grow in your faith and Become more and more like Jesus through service

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More Ways to Stay in the Loop

  1. Like and Share posts from HCC Outreach- St Charles Campus Facebook Page
  2. Like and Share posts from HCC Food Pantry
  3. Subscribe and follow HarvesterCC Outreach Blog
  4. In the Harvester app: Log into the app. At the bottom right hand corner click “More.” On the next screen click “Groups.” Click on any group you are assigned to see the calendar, and messaging about needs, events, or serving opportunities. If you would like to be added to any group such as Food Pantry, School Outreach, EWR Warming Center, Safe Families/Foster/Adopt, Natural Disaster Food Backpack Ministry, Elections, or Sharing Shed, please email our Ministry Coordinator Jillian Hohensee at jhohensee@harvester.cc

 

 

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January 25, 2025
in Alleviation of Poverty, GiveHope, HCC, Jesus, Local, Outreach
by cefiggins
1 Comment

Reflections after our first Warming Center Experience

I don’t know if there are human words to express what we experienced this week hosting the overnight EWR Warming Center for our unhoused neighbors. Over 4 nights that dropped below the threshold of 20 degrees, HCC provided 115 beds to our homeless neighbors. As the temperatures plummeted outside it forced some of God’s most beautiful creations to come inside to us I’m not even sure how to organize my thoughts here to share our experiences.

I sway between being in awe and humility of God entrusting us with these people. I am grieved and saddened that God’s creations are so marginalized and so unseen. I swing back to being so proud of our volunteers stepping into the unknown and the uncomfortableness and watching them love and serve.  I am blown away by God’s provision not only for us in the facilities that we have, and services we have and the generosity of Harvester Christian folk through our Give Hope campaigns to His provision and our volunteers of providing energy, stamina, and love. We had young adults to retired folk provide hot meals and drinks. We had our neighbors at O’Fallon Christian help us with all the pounds of laundry and packing the trailer. We had Harvester volunteers in the thick of their own battles step in to serve. We had volunteers sacrifice sleep all night and then go work a full-time job the next day.

I don’t want to say that we provided shelter for our homeless neighbors because I think that puts a worldly understanding of a human being in your mind which is probably inaccurate. When I say the word homeless, I think we tend to jump to preconceived ideas and judgments about why someone might be in that situation. I could tell you that we served addicts. I could tell you that we served convicts. I could tell you that we served the mentally ill. I could tell you we served veterans. I could tell you that we served women who had experienced horrific sexual abuse and domestic violence but those are labels that limit and do not give honor to God’s creation. These are His people who were fearfully and wonderfully made who are just as lost and wounded as you and I. I will tell you instead that God provided us the opportunity to serve men and women and sons and daughters and husbands and wives. I can tell you that God provided the opportunity for us to serve someone’s child.

The final night that we were activated I was running on fumes. I’d had extremely little sleep all week long. Every day I was struggling to find the right number of volunteers, and food, and replace things that we had run out of while trying to take care of myself and my family as well. I rushed around getting the laundry and trying to have things ready for our volunteers as they arrived. As I pulled into the church parking lot the song “Gratitude” by Brandon Lake came on Joy FM. If you know me at all you know that this song absolutely wrecks me and brings me to tears. I reached up to turn the volume down and said “Lord, Really? Gratitude?  I cannot do this right now. I cannot break down. I have to keep going for the volunteers, our guests, and you!” The Lord’s response to me was,

“Baby girl, you know that you were never meant to do this on your own. I need you to remember to start and stop with gratitude. Don’t be just grateful that you are not homeless. Don’t be grateful that you do have a warm home to go to. Don’t be grateful that in the event of a major life crisis, you would have safety net after safety net after safety net. Don’t be grateful that you have insurance and that you are healthy.  Don’t be grateful that you don’t have to sleep in your car. Be grateful for who I am and who I say I am and the things that I have done and will do.”

Talk about perspective.

The coming days, weeks, months, and potentially years will be challenging as a community to provide resources to serve a variety of people. Whether it’s people dealing with mental illness, homelessness, job loss, a family with a child with autism or cerebral palsy, or people trying to acquire job skills. It will be tempting to hunker down for all the things God showed me I was holding onto.  It will be tempting to allow Satan to convince us to shield our eyes, to guard our hearts, to proceed in ignorance and judgment, to ignore the issues, and to go along with the status quo. My prayer for us after this week is that we won’t be able to help ourselves in serving others no matter the cost.  My prayer is that we will all cooperate with the Holy Spirit and not assume it is the church’s responsibility to provide an event or program. My prayer is that when it is the most uncomfortable, when it is the most unknown we will turn to God first and trust him to guide our steps and to provide wisdom and discernment. I pray we will be obedient to the Greatest Commandment of Loving God and Loving Others. I pray as Harvester Christians that we would continue to live out justice and generosity in our families, literal neighborhoods, in Saint Charles County, and across the globe.

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From the HCC Outreach Team:

Thanks so much for stopping by the Harvester Christian Church Outreach Team’s blog! We hope you find this resource helpful, insightful and encouraging as we strive to Unleash the Hope of Jesus back into our world!

This resource belongs to Harvester Christian Church in St. Charles, Mo.