The Church: The Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, Georgia
The Challenge: Encouraging church members to get more involved with local ministries.
One Big Idea: Create an Adopt-a-Ministry program.
Church members from The Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, Georgia, spent a day doing home maintenance at an elderly widow’s home through Hope Works. Other members helped with food, games and crafts for children of incarcerated parents through Heartbound Ministries. Another group of church volunteers organized a family-portrait day at Good Samaritan Health Center.
These are just some of the ways that members can get involved in the Adopt-a-Ministry program. Each small group “adopts” a local ministry for one year, during which they learn about their chosen ministry, commit to pray for it and serve with it three times.
“To learn about the ministry, we encourage church members to visit the ministry or have one of [the ministry’s] volunteers come in and speak about the ministry,” explains Dave Hubbard, community outreach coordinator at The Church of the Apostles. “Then, our small group of volunteers needs to ask the ministry an important question: ‘What can we do to help?’”
Church members get involved in ways that truly benefit the ministry. “During one site visit, we noticed that the furniture in the waiting area needed to be replaced,” Hubbard says. “Helping with new furniture was an easy way to help that ministry in a concrete way.”
This 3,000-person congregation is serving Atlanta’s most needy people through local prison ministries, food banks, homeless shelters, crisis pregnancy centers and ministries that serve elderly and low-income people.
“We want to help our members get connected to many different kinds of ministries,” Hubbard says. “Our hope is that people will fall in love with their adopted ministry and just keep volunteering there.”
The church has a process to choose the ministries participating in this program.
“All of our partner ministries must share the gospel in some fashion,” Hubbard says. “We want to make an eternal difference in people’s lives.”
THE CHURCH OF THE APOSTLES
Atlanta, Georgia
Apostles.org
