Mission Stories: Wesley reaches out!

·         Six men traveled to Gloucester, Virginia to cut trees and burn brush to clean up after the tornadoes hit the area.

·         special care given by our Administrative Assistant to help a local man do his banking, receive all possible social services, and keep his meds straight, and keep him fed.

·         Partnered in a notecard/artwork business with an under-employed person from the streets of Winchester. That man now has a home, a job, and sells his artwork.

·         Give away groceries for the Wesley Food Pantry: always available whenever the church office is open.

·         Several members read with the children at Virginia Avenue-Charlotte DeHart Elementary School, across the street from the church, every week.

·         Worked with First Presbyterian Church and other agencies to provide a community Thanksgiving meal for 700+ people.

·         Wesley held a community health fair to help connect recent immigrants with the available agencies and social services.

·         Collected tents, sleeping bag, warm clothing for local homeless persons who had no night time shelter with the closing of the WATTS (Winchester Area Temporary Thermal Shelter) Program.

·         Partnered with a local elementary school to send 187 school kits to Annual Conference.

·         Gleaned a bunch of apples, which the Wesley Church youth distributed to home in our community as part of a Sunday School Local Mission team to help people in our immediate area repair their homes.

·         Mission Team working on a trip to Central UMC, Richmond, to do structural repairs as a way of showing love for that congregation and its Kingdome Building Work in inner city Richmond.

·         Goal for 2012 is to have three mission opportunities for the children of Wesley Church.

·         We took responsibility for a neighbor as he dealt with trips to court and serving a jail term. We took care of his mail, banking, and bill paying, and visiting him as he served his sentence. If no one pay your bills and deals with you mail while you are locked up, you will lose everything.

·         We use the space behind the church building as a community garden. We plow the space, mark the spaces and allot spaces to all who want to have a place to garden. The client gardens and keeps the produce of that garden. Three persons have joined this church after first entering inot a relationship with us through the gardening ministry. Pat Watkins has used this garden as an example in much of his work across the denomination.

·         The members of this congregation provide ministries on their own initiative outside the ministry of the church, which builds the kingdom one person at a time!