Community Makeover in Paulding County, GA

I was noticing some interesting tweets from Stephen Parris last week about an event that his church was involved in. I’ve been reading Stephen’s blog for a while and thought I’d send some more of you over there in case you haven’t seen any of the info about the “Community Makeover” that a bunch of churches in Paulding County, GA pulled off this past weekend.

(If you click the Community Makeover link above here you’ll be taken to Stephen’s blog and all of the posts related to that event will load in your browser.)

From reading the info on his website this is what I think happened – a bunch of churches decided to work together to organize work projects across their region and unleashed people to be the hands and feet of Christ on the morning of Sunday, July 27th. Yes, Sunday. Yes, churches agreed to do something other than “church” on a Sunday morning. Take a deep breath – the world did not cave in on itself.

Here’s quick recaps of three different work projects they took on together -

A group of men from West Ridge brought in loads of dirt, a bobcat, a trencher, and lots of shovels and string backs to fix drainage problems in their yard. It was a massive project that Jim had begun, but completing the project was not an option. These men are taking the load off of Melissa’s shoulders. They couldn’t be more excited.

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This weekend, teams from West Ridge and a local football team are building a retaining wall (80-feet long) to make possible a future covered arena, and to keep the current barn from washing away. They are also trenching to improve water drainage from the riding fields.

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Right now they only have room for 2 or 3. But today, scores of volunteers arrived to change that. They added a screened in porch, a storage shed, a basketball court, paint throughout the house, a computer/learning room, picnic tables… The list goes on.

Also, because we know that worship is a lifestyle AND worship is also gathering, singing, celebrating, remembering, honouring God, these churches decided that they shouldn’t do one at the exclusion of the other so they agreed to gather together on the evening of that same day for a joint outdoor worship service. There are a bunch of photos of the joint worship service on this post.

I’m sure that there are churches doing this all over the country but this stands out as such a unique event to me – maybe because this is the exact kind of thing that we’ve been dreaming about launching in our own region, maybe because I know how hard it is to get churches to work together on something even as great as this. Regardless, I am so impressed with what these people have pulled off and that they did it in the name of Christ – they were literally the hands and feet of Christ all over the county.

I’m excited to hear more from Stephen about the things that God did on that day and how He is taking the efforts of those people and multiplying them for greater impact in the Kingdom.

Of course, no recap of a great event would be complete without a video, so here you go!