Does Jesus want you to clean toilets, weed a neighbor’s garden and hand out bottles of water to those along the nature trails in and around S.E. Wisconsin? Well, if you are a part of Southbrook Church, the answer is Yes! Starting in the middle of June, Southbrook will be kicking-off our Seventh Annual Compassion Week of Service.
Eight years ago we asked ourselves a difficult question: ‘We do a great job at loving people when they come into Church, but what are we doing to actively go out and model Jesus’ love to our Community? We realized the answer was ‘not much;’ and from that time -Compassion Week was born.
During this last decade we have partnered with the local public schools, nursing homes, businesses, Police and Fire Departments along with regional hospitals and local Health Departments in an organized attempt to model Christ through planned acts of service.
To be clear, our sole intent is to use service projects to model the love of Christ to our local communities. We do not do this in order to get more people to come to church, or to try and distribute literature about Southbrook. Rather through these intentional acts kindness, we are actively taking Christ into areas traditionally viewed as off-limits to the Church.
Once, I cleaned the bathrooms at a local Coffee Shop for 3 months; as a way of modeling the ethos of Compassion Week. The owner was a Muslim man who I befriended through my patronage of his business. When I asked him if I could clean his bathrooms- he perplexingly asked, ‘Why?’ What a great opportunity for me to lay out the gracious gift that Jesus provided to humanity, and how my service was just a reflection of what God has done to us!
How have you seen other model Jesus through acts of service?
