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Around the World
Singing Oaks Carried Faith in Action Around the World...
While many churches made October 12, 2008 a Faith in Action day, Singing Oaks Church of Christ in Denton, Texas took their service to the extreme. Their Faith in Action started locally on that October weekend, but it continued for two more weeks in Tanzania and Kenya.
“We concentrated on local and national community service on our Faith in Action Saturday, and then we traveled halfway around the world to culminate our service in Africa,” explained Bob Bentley, outreach minister for Singing Oaks.
He attended the National Outreach Convention in San Diego in 2007, where he first heard about Faith in Action. “We had tremendous buy-in for the event,” he recalled. They used Outreach’s “Be the Church” banners, the small group materials and sermon ideas.
“We decided to hold our service day on Saturday rather than Sunday – which didn’t work as well,” he added. “Too many people had schedule conflicts – they had other things already planned for Saturday. Next time we’ll use the Sunday morning slot for our ministry projects; most people already have it reserved for church time.”
Still, two hundred people showed up on Saturday and served in a variety of ways. One group worked at Spirit Horse, a therapeutic riding center for children with various handicaps (emotional, mental and physical). There, they helped build a new paddock, painted fencing and built an erosion dam. Another group worked at nearby Newton Rayzor Elementary School cleaning a central teaching garden. The garden had long been neglected and overgrown, and the team repaired the garden to make it usable to the school again. Another group painted “an endless number” of trash cans in a local park. Other teams divided their time between eight homes that needed various degrees of repair. These groups painted exteriors and interiors, repaired a mobile home exterior, cleaned up yards and performed other minor maintenance tasks.
During the days leading up to Faith in Action Saturday, the kids at Singing Oaks took home burlap bags to help collect money for an African mission. “We encouraged our kids to put their belongings in the burlap bag and then to think of it as their pillow,” Bentley explained. “It helped them understand what living on the streets is like for hundreds of children.” The money gathered was used at Made In The Streets, a farm just outside Nairobi that helps children get off the streets, gives them a home, teaches them the Bible, improves their English and, depending on their age, teaches them a trade or gets them back in school. The team from Singing Oaks also spent time training the mission’s teachers in current math, photography, basic business and other techniques. They also worked with the children.
Another team went to Mwanza, Tanzania to help with construction projects. This team helped build a clinic, helped two churches construct buildings and laid a concrete foundation for a third. “One area was experiencing a severe famine,” Bentley recalled, “so we purchased huge bags of corn and delivered it to them. Afterward, we helped lead a worship service there.”
From painting fences in Denton, Texas to building a clinic in Mwanza, Tanzania, from repairing a mobile home near their home church to offering hope to hundreds of young street kids in Nairobi, Singing Oaks Church members learned the value of being the hands and feet of Jesus.
“Will we do it again? Oh, absolutely,” said Bentley. “Our people are ready to commit to doing this on a regular basis.”
Church Information:
Singing Oaks Church of Christ
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