Thanksgiving Serve @ Los Olivos

Sunday November 24, 2-5 p.m. @ Los Olivos Community located south of 13th St. on Campus Ave. in Upland 

By Russ Parker, Pastor of Administration 

This year we have an incredible opportunity to bless others and build friendships by preparing and serving a full Thanksgiving dinner for our neighbors in the Los Olivos Community. Our event will be held at the Los Olivos location.

The Los Olivos Community is in North Upland, located on Campus Avenue, just south of 13th Street. It was constructed in the 1940s and has been under the care of the Upland Housing Authority (UHA), providing Section 8 affordable housing to 96 families.

We’ve been invited by the UHA to partner with them in connecting and caring for residents of Los Olivos! What an invitation. UHA is already spreading the word and communicating our Thanksgiving Serve to their residents. They’re excited about our partnership.

Providing a cooked Thanksgiving dinner with all the fixings is a huge opportunity for LBF to serve with Love in Action! It embodies the values of Love in Action: moving beyond our church walls, engaging with our neighbors life-to-life, elevating the dignity of others, and partnering with other organizations to make a greater impact.

Our goal is to prepare and serve a full Thanksgiving meal for 300 people. We will need volunteers with serving hearts to help make this Thanksgiving Serve successful. We envision people planning and preparing the food; people helping to set up tables, chairs, pop up tents, and other logistics; people serving and replenishing the food; people engaging with kids; and people coordinating games and activities.

Would you help us serve this Thanksgiving? Bring a dessert this Sunday to church.

Would you pray for this effort? We want God to move powerfully through us as we bless families, and we want God to move powerfully in us as we come face-to-face serving those in need. May God stretch us out of comfort zones and may God be glorified as we live out Matthew 25:35-36:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Thanksgiving Serve Recap

No doubt most of us have grateful hearts for how God has blessed us. We are grateful and we are thankful for God’s provision. We can give thanks to God and we can give to others. So this Thanksgiving we wanted to express our gratefulness by giving to others. But we also wanted to take it up a notch –take it to the next level –and as a result, we wanted to serve others. We went to be with people we give to, showing them love and serving them. We took our gratefulness to God and expressed it back to God by loving our neighbor.

How did we do this? We partnered with GAP Food Bank in Rancho Cucamonga. GAP literally handed us over the keys to their food bank…. and we used their location to bless the families they support. We collected foods for 400 Thanksgiving dinners  –frozen turkey and all the fixings –and then Saturday, November 17, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we organized and distributed these Thanksgiving meals.


 

Thanksgiving: Coming Together to Put “Love in Action”

By Gary Keith, Lead Pastor, and Russ Parker, Pastor of Administration 

Two men were walking through a field one day when they spotted an enraged bull. Instantly they darted toward the nearest fence. The storming bull followed in hot pursuit, and it was soon evident they wouldn’t make it. Terrified, one guy shouted to the other, “Hey, send up a prayer, John. We’re in for it!” John answered, “I can’t. I’ve never prayed in public in my life.” “But you must!” begged his friend. “The bull is catching up to us.” “All right,” said John as he was breathing hard, “I’ll say the only prayer I know, the one my father used to repeat at the table: ‘O Lord, for what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful.’”

Are you laughing? I hope so.

If the month of November is remembered for anything, it would be Thanksgiving. You know it’s that time of the year where we eat way too much turkey and sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.

In the past, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we traditionally held a Thanksgiving Love Feast. This is a time when our church family and others come and enjoy a Thanksgiving-type meal together. In light of our new mission statement, we will be changing the focus of this event. Instead of our church coming together and enjoying a meal, this year we will go out into the community and serve the poor or those less fortunate. We will enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday by putting “Love into Action.”

And we are going big! Each week GAP Food Bank feeds 400 families who are struggling to keep up, pay the rent, and provide for the their families. This year we are taking up the challenge to feed 400 GAP families a Thanksgiving meal – turkey and all the fixin’s. We are challenging our church to provide these 400 Thanksgiving meals, but we’re not going to stop at giving and providing these meals. We are going to take over GAP Food Bank (literally we are getting the keys to the facility) and run the entire operation where we organize, pack, and give out these 400 meals, blessing these needy families. We desire to show our thankfulness to God for his provision and goodness by giving back and blessing others – that they might also be thankful. It’s going to be quite the undertaking, but we know you, LBF, will rally to help people in our community. The Saturday before Thanksgiving, Collecting Food + Distributing Food = Loving Our Neighbors.

 Our hope is to bring into some people’s lives in our community the words of Jeremiah who said: “I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss. Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The unfailing love of the Lord never ends!” Lamentations 3:19-25 (NLT)

As we approach another Thanksgiving, I pray that we will be able to bring some hope into the lives of people who need it the most.