Vision for Summer Neighborhood Initiative
We’re excited as we are kicking off the Summer Neighborhood Initiative! This year our goal is to Serve Together and Play Together. We believe that doing this will help us work on several of our 5 Goals for the year. Namely, we hope that the Summer Neighborhood Initiative will help: for evangelism to be an explicit value at CoaH, to build prayer into the essential culture of CoaH, and to increase the sense of intimacy between people at CoaH. Our hope is that Summer Neighborhood Initiative is not a series of activities, but a centering of our hearts towards God’s heart for our community.
At its core, the Summer Neighborhood Initiative has four church-wide projects to allow for us to engage with and serve our community:
- Friday Night Movie Nights: On Fridays in July, we will be partnering with Brookline Parks to show movies in the park next to the Driscoll School. This is a great time to meet and fellowship with local families.
- Kids' Summer Adventures: The week of July 20-24, we will be hosting a summer camp for kids ages 3 years-5th grade from 9 AM-12:30 PM. Through their adventures, kids will discover that God’s Big Plan for everyone is Jesus.
- Party in the Park: Saturday August 22 we host a party for our neighbors and the Brookline Housing Authority. It’s pretty much a giant carnival with bounce houses, face painting, food, and more! It’s a great way to have fun and build relationships with the residents of Brookline.
- The Big Move: September 1st is the day in which about 80% of Boston leases start. Community Groups go out in their neighborhoods and help people move. We help others just as Christ has helped us.
In addition to these larger events, Community Groups will be intentional about reaching their communities. Each group is making its own plans, but these could include: game nights, barbeques, park days, baseball games, overnight trips, or whatever they can imagine!
Through all of these activities, our prayer is that through engaging with our community, we can extend grace and love to them just as Christ has shown toward us. Perhaps this will allow some to engage with us on their own personal faith journeys. We also want to encourage and pray for each other in our ministries and will be doing so in several ways. On our blog, you can share your own testimonies of how God is using Summer Neighborhood Initiative to move in your life, your family’s life, your Community Group’s life, and the lives of those around you. We also will be having people sharing testimonies of Summer Neighborhood Initiative on Sunday mornings and praying during our Worship Services for those we encounter this summer. Lastly, next Sunday (June 28) we will have an insert in the Worship Guide to allow you to share who you will be intentional about sharing life with this summer (individuals, neighbors, coworkers, etc.), perhaps who you will invite to one of the events. We will have some members of the church that will be praying for these people, that God would prepare their hearts and make them receptive to His Gospel message.
We are excited in how all of these aspects of Summer Neighborhood Initiative will help us to share the Gospel with those in our community as well as bring together our church to pray for and serve and play with each other!
