From March 10th-14th a team of 21 people from Ames, Iowa and 13 people from West Lafayette, Indiana converged on Rochester for a five day Mission Trip. We’ve done mission trips with these two sister churches in the past. These dear saints sacrificed part of their Spring Breaks to serve us and labor alongside us here in Rochester.
During their stay, the team participated in various service projects. As a church, we are still working on getting people settled in. Many Living Hope Church families have only just moved to Rochester within the last several months. Thus, many of the projects involved helping these families around their new homes. Service projects included helping move boxes and furniture, taking larger pieces of debris to the dump, replacing gutters, resealing work in a bathroom, and taking out a broken fence.
In addition to these service projects for our church, the crew from Ames babysat 18 Living Hope children all day on March 11th. Having the team available to babysit gave us the flexibility as a church to have a retreat together that day with fewer distractions. During this retreat, we sang together, prayed together, laughed together, and learned together. It was a sweet time of fellowship for us as a Church. It was especially important for us to have this time to connect with one another, as there were 17 people in attendance who will be a part of our Church planting team, but have not moved to Rochester yet. We want to be unified as a Church and the 8 hours we had together during this retreat were crucial for us to continue developing that.
Other service projects were focused on serving our community, specifically Bear Creek Church and Camp Victory in Zumbrota. At Bear Creek, we helped renovate and paint several rooms at the meeting space they own. This meeting space is the same place that Bear Creek has graciously allowed us to rent out for our Wednesday night service each week. At Camp Victory, we helped deep clean several of the cabins and meeting areas, did inventory of their audio and visual equipment, and various other projects around the camp. Camp Victory is the camp where we housed our teams during the duration of this Mission Trip. They were a huge blessing for us during our trip and it was a joy to be able to serve them in return.
The team also had the opportunity to get out into the community and share the gospel. Several teams went downtown and prayed for people. One team even got creative and had two people play tunes on the piano, while the other members handed out gospel tracts and prayed for those who stopped to listen! Other teams went over to the Community College campus at RCTC. These saints took spiritual interest surveys, handed out pop, and invited students to a “Tough Spiritual Questions Discussion” that we host each week.
Overall, these teams were a huge blessing to our church and are helping us to establish a reputation as people who love God, love others, and are safe people to talk to about hard things in life.