A Facebook post shows a teen boy holding a business card with a 20 dollar bill wrapped around it. He’d found it in the receipt slot at the gas station pump. The caption on his post reads, “Today’s going to be a great day.” Senior Pastor Brett Wilson grinned when a teen from Cross Lane Community Church in Terre Haute, Indiana, showed him the post.
Weeks before, Wilson had passed out business cards with the church’s address and service times printed on one side and the words, “Something Extra to Show You God Loves You!” on the other.
“I wanted to put the ball on the tee for my congregation,” Wilson says. “I wanted to make it easy for them to serve our community.”
And they have. This congregation of roughly 400 has distributed more than 1,500 of these cards in their community. Wilson receives frequent emails from church members describing the creative ways they’ve used the cards.
“One family bought gift cards to our local bookstore and then hid them in the books with one of our church’s cards,” he says.
“Another time, one of our members paid for the car behind them in the drive-thru line, and that car paid for the car behind them, and the chain of kindness went on for seven cars total.”
“We take the word ‘community’ in our name very seriously,” Wilson says. “We want to be a hands-on church.”
