“We spread mulch. God spread joy”

Despite the dire predictions of dark clouds, cold and rain for their Faith in Action, “Make a Difference Day,” Grace Community Church of Wesley Beach, Fla., prayed for, and got, sunshine. Then as part of spreading God’s neatly provided sunshine, pastor Jeffrey Olsen and his then 75-member church found something they could spread besides sunshine—mulch.

On Super Bowl Sunday, Grace Community was bowling over the local elementary school and the rest of the community with purposeful acts of kindness—showing that the church really could be super caring and involved. By getting “down and dirty” –spreading mulch over the school grounds, painting picnic tables at a Home for foster kids, assembling AIDS caregiver kits and cleaning up yards for seniors—Grace Community sent a clear message that God’s Word is much more than a metaphor for sowing, reaping and tilling the hard ground of life. If we do it right, loving our neighbor goes hand-in-hand with rakes, shovels, hoes and lot of sweat.

Not surprisingly, when Grace committed to doing the Faith in Action campaign, the leadership asked, “Great, this fits in with our vision, but how are we going to pay for it?” They soon learned that there’s provision in the vision. Miraclously, two days before Make a Difference Day, they received a financial gift from a person who was not only not a member of Grace Community— but he lived several hundred miles away.

“The Faith in Action campaign is aptly named because it takes faith that God will provide both the funds and projects to act!” says Olsen. “And for us, well we were literally living out Ephesians 2:10: ‘For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.’ We had only one month to prepare those ‘good works’ but what we discovered was that at every step of the way, things were already lined up for us…and through it all we saw that it really was God’s project—all we had to do was respond.”

Today, Make a Difference day is morphing into Make a Difference week, month and perhaps, Pastor Olsen hopes, the rest of their church life. As a result of the campaign seven new families have joined the church. Some were previously churched; the rest had never been to a church. “For us, FIA was not a one-time thing,” says Olsen. “What this campaign really did for our church was give us focus for our existing vision: “Building a better community by God’s grace.”

(HT: Faith In Action Official Website)