“I know God sent you to me today.”
Those were the words spoken by one Montgomery-area school administrator to Candace McIntosh and her Serve Tour team March 10.
“At two of the three schools, as we were praying over the administrators, there were tears shed,” said McIntosh, executive director of Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union. “It was a vivid reminder that these people are on the front line with these students, and they have a hard job. We need to come alongside them and love them and encourage them in any way we can.”
Dozens of projects
Visiting, supporting and helping out at local schools was one component of Serve Tour Montgomery, held March 10–11. Serve Tour is a missional experience organized by Send Relief, the compassion ministries arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, in cooperation with state and local Baptist leaders and volunteers from across the country.
During the two-day event, more than 900 volunteers spread out over four counties in the River Region — Montgomery, Elmore, Autauga and Lowndes — to help with community-building projects, serve in hunger-related ministry and meet other needs.
Overall, those volunteers — who came from 79 churches across 12 states — completed 50 projects and served nearly 3,000 people, not including the 10 schools and eight churches where they worked.
Projects ranged from serving an appreciation dinner for nurses to running a medical and dental clinic to building a privacy fence at a men’s shelter. During the weekend, 13 people also made decisions to follow Jesus.
Picture of cooperation
Neal Hughes, director of missions for Montgomery Baptist Association, said it was an “amazing” event.
“It was about Jesus and about the local church engaging their communities with the gospel, and the Send Relief family handled the big picture so well. They just wanted to be a blessing,” he said. “If you want to see a picture of the cooperation of Southern Baptists, this past weekend was it.”
Davey Lyon, pastor of Imago Dei Church at the 45 in Lowndes County, said the weekend bolstered the church’s relationship with area schools.
“We do a lot of work with the local schools, and so when we heard about Send Relief and how they were offering to send volunteers and projects, we wanted to pick projects that strengthen our relationships with the community and especially the schools,” he said.
Group effort
His church hosted five projects, including installing a playground for a local elementary school and helping build out some rooms at a local high school’s field house.
The volunteers who came in “really blessed us in what we’re already doing in a way we couldn’t have done without their help,” Lyon said. “If you have a consistent presence of loving on the community and serving the students and teachers and staff in the schools, God will open doors.”
He said one student volunteer from Tennessee told him that serving in Lowndes County had encouraged him to think about his own local area differently.
“He was inspired to look for him and his church to be involved in similar ways when they got back home,” Lyon said.
‘Answer to prayer’
Kristy Kennedy, who directs community ministries for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said she was encouraged by a team from Florida who came to help a widow she knew of who needed major work done on her home.
The woman’s roof was leaking, her floor was starting to cave in and she needed a ramp built outside her home because of her mobility issues, just to name a few.
“Within three days of posting the project description on the website, a group from Immanuel Baptist Church in Pace, Florida, had filled up all the spots,” Kennedy said.
When she and a man from her church who knew the widow in need reached out to the team to make sure they had the skills needed for all the projects, they found out quickly that they did.
“That was a shock and a huge answer to prayer that we had a team with the skills to do what needed to be done,” Kennedy said. “We got to talk to her about her faith and hope to continue that conversation more in the future. It was a great experience.”
More Serve Tour events this year
Four more Serve Tour events are set this year for the U.S. in New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Owensboro, Kentucky, as well as three international locations — Bangkok, Thailand; Nairobi, Kenya; and Athens, Greece.
For more information about Serve Tour, visit sendrelief.org/serve-tour.
Share with others: