Reaching out to our neighbors

Our new neighborhood of our church has opened up many more doors for our congregation to offer things that help the community. We have already started to serve a free lunch two Saturdays a month to our neighbors. We are continuing our biweekly English class as well. But we have really begun to pray about other ways we can make a difference in this neighborhood.

Our church just spent 40 days of prayer and fasting asking how we can be a part of what God is doing in this area. We went door to door asking people how we could help and how they already saw God working in their neighborhood.

The answers were quite revealing:
1. People that were already Christians and active in churches said we need to do more evangelism (Good! We plan to do that.)
2. People that weren’t part of a church talked a lot about security, making the neighborhood safer and doing things that help people get jobs or be better trained.

Through my 40 days the idea came to me to offer a computer class through the church. Most people do not even know how to type on a keyboard, let alone have any knowledge of computer programs. The class can start off small, just 5 or 6 students. The class has great outreach potential.

If anyone has any ideas on how we could get a few “old” laptops (towers and monitors will be too heavy and bulky to bring or send to Brazil). We would need just basic word processing programs like Word for use for our class. This will be awesome, a great blessing for our church.