District Board of Missions Festival

Tonight was the BIG event for the District Board of Missions - the night that the grant recipients share their plans and goals for their projects. The District distributed funds of $29,200.00 for the 2010 calendar year through 18 projects. Many of them were projects that request and receive grants each year such as the Native American Mission Team (to the Blackfeet Nation for the past 6 years), the Navajo Mission Team, H.E.L.P., the Wesley Foundation of William & Mary, etc.


I was really impressed by a couple of the new projects - particularly the Leonarda's Home of Hope, Inc (Honduras). They currently have 64 orphans living in three rented rooms ($500.00 per month) of a hotel (with an active bar). The team supplies education and health care services to these children. They have bought land and have plans drawn up for an orphanage to move these kids into. They take a medical mission team over about three times a year.
Another new project is Caretakers of God's Creation which is exclusive right now to the Peninsula District but is an initiative of the Virginia Conference. Pat Watkins couldn't be there so we didn't hear much about this project except that it has been developed to aid district churches in going green and care taking of the Earth.


The District Mission Project will be a three part project which will be to service the underpopulated persons of the Peninsula District. Phase one (if you can call it phases) is to help the young people in our communities. The district plans to do this in three ways: 1) mentoring at risk youth to keep them from going down the path of destruction that could cause them to end up in jail, 2) FamilyLink - a program that will allow family members to video chat (or Skype) with their incarcerated children (those that are in prison not jail), and 3) work with Seton Homes in Virginia Beach to aid at risk children that have no resources (right now this is happening through Phoebus UMC). There is much about this project that I really like. I hope that I can get my home church involved in any of these three projects ... we aren't very good at offering programs for children and youth ourselves and while we have a TON of kids in our church we have very FEW youth and nothing really to mentor to them or to provide services to any of them (except a pre-school that is proving to be pretty successful!).


Well, that was my evening at the District Board of Missions Festival.