Last fall, our family endeavored to begin a food delivery ministry to our children's families who were in significant need. It guaranteed two things: we would see our past kiddos at least on drop off days, and we knew they were receiving adequate food at least once a month.
Enter Grace Klein Community.
As I've said before, ministries seeking to love the broken are popping up all over town. It is wonderful, but where are the spaces we can partner and grow stronger, rather than recreating the wheel, as we often say? Where are the avenues we can study and learn from one another's experiences in loving the hurting, rather than believing we must create something never done before?
Every foster family, social worker and ministry to families in crisis should know about Grace Klein. If you are a reader in these circles, please share so that others can become aware of the wonderful resources available to us through this faithful ministry. Join the Lumpkin Gang as we hit food delivery with them every third Saturday of the month.
So grateful they were willing to provide a post on partnership...
We are commanded to care for
orphans and widows. From our reading and study of scripture, it is not
optional, but rather a mandate, a command from our Father.
“Religion that God our Father accepts as
pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress
and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” – James 1:27
God tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to lay
down our lives for our brother, to put aside our needs for the needs of
another, to let our plenty meet your needs so that in turn your plenty will
meet our needs. God teaches us
that love is sharing. Love is sacrifice. Love is obedience. Love is God because
God is love. And if we have God in us we love like crazy as an overflow of the
Jesus seeping out of our pores and seeping out of every part of who we are in
Christ Jesus. We are hidden in Christ and we no longer live, but praise Jesus
and Christ lives in us.
Grace Klein Community, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization,
exists to serve the poor by providing such assistance as prayer, food,
clothing, furniture and emergency assistance while fostering long-term
meaningful relationships between recipients and volunteers.
We all suffer from some type of poverty whether
spiritual, physical, emotional or financial. When we take off our masks and take away our stuff, we are
all the same and we can be real and intimately relate with one another.
We do not exist to reinvent the wheel, but to work
together with the wheels that are already spinning. Not the busy wheels, headed
in circles or in the wrong direction, but the wheels aligned with Jesus, the
ones following hard after our Father. The wheels are organizations and
individuals with like-minded focus, existing to glorify Christ and obey His
commands for all of us.
We love to work together with our friends of the
Forgotten Initiative. Our hearts understand each other. We serve the same
Father. We are on the same team and we are unified on a mission way bigger than
ourselves.
How do we work together??
1. Grace Klein Community has a food ministry
that uses food as an open door to share the love of Christ and build
friendships. The food boxes are
delivered the third Saturday of each month, but the friendships are far
reaching.
·
Food boxes created through Grace Klein Community
are shared each month with Forgotten Initiative and are used to share Jesus
with the families of the foster care children. We believe in the restoration of the family and these food
boxes open further doors for foster care families to minister to the birth
families.
·
Foster families help pack the produce into the
boxes between 7-8:30am at Asbury United Methodist Church, off 119, every third
Saturday with us. God loves a
cheerful giver and when we share what we have it is pleasing to God. Engaging children in serving is a great
opportunity for them to see their worth and experience the ability to give.
·
Foster families deliver food routes to families
in Birmingham. Children are taught
to be prejudice. If we have a
prejudice to skin color, socioeconomic class, education levels, addicts, the
handicapped, etc., we learned this prejudiced. As children, we are sponges, and it is a delight to teach
the discipline of loving all people.
Jesus loves so we should too.
2. Grace Klein Community hosts community
events such as baptisms, house worship, a gathering at the park, Monday night
prayer, camping at the local state park, etc. Foster families need places where everyone is welcome and
loved and valued. We open all
these community events to everyone and invite anyone to come. God has used these activities for
intentional worship, fellowship, the sharing of a meal and the deepening of
Biblical community.
·
Watch our website at gracekleincommunity.com to
learn of upcoming events and just show up and engage.
·
We all bring and share what we have and we all
have what we need. We all need to
be careful with the resources that God has entrusted into our care and use what
we have. No one will remember what
the dishes looked like or what we ate, but rather who they talked to and who
made them feel loved.
·
We need to feel comfortable worshipping anywhere
and breaking free of our segmented lives.
3. Grace Klein Community has a donation room
that is accessibly Monday-Friday between 7-4pm.
·
No one should ever have to buy clothing or shoes
again. We should be able to share
what we have and we all have enough.
Anyone and everyone should come get the clothing their family needs and
donate back the clothing your family no longer needs. Please come take all you need, not just for your foster
child, but for your own children and for you also.
·
We know you are busy, so if you want, email gabe@gracekleincommunity.com
with your clothing/shoe size needs and our volunteers will pull the needs for
you and we will email you back when they are ready for pickup.
·
When we clothe ourselves from the donation room,
we have freed up our clothing budget, and we can give all that money away. God has given each of us limited
resources so we must be creative with what we have.
·
We receive any donations, from knick knacks, to
household accessories, to furniture, to clothing, to anything in between. We share the items donated with those
in need.
·
God has given us a heart for adoption so we
share our plenty from the donation room to help with adoption yard sales. By God’s grace, we will be helping with
our 9th yard sale this weekend.
We also help with donating items to yard sales
funding mission trips.
·
We help set-up apartments for ladies and men
starting over from rehabilitation centers, Brother Bryan, Jessie’s Place,
Lovelady Center, the Firehouse Shelter, Church of the Reconciler, etc. As foster parents, if you need to help
the biological parent “start over” with an initial home set-up, please email
the referral to gabe@gracekleincommunity.com
and pray with us that God will provide all they need.
·
The Forgotten Initiative does these really
awesome bags that are given to a child when they are quickly removed from a
home and taken into the Foster Care system. We can collect the different items needed so that families
helping with these travel bags can stretch their money farther and help with
more of these backpacks. Often we
have bags donated and other needs that are recommended for these supportive
backpacks.
4. Grace Klein Community loves to engage more
and more people in ministry and give families suggestions on how to serve with
their children. God loves us to
serve as an act of worship to Him.
He even tells us not to become weary in doing good, for at the proper
time we will reap a harvest, if we do not give up. We love to encourage you, as leaders and Christ followers,
to never give up.
·
As summer begins it is good for us to remind our
children to think of others as they think about themselves. Grab some index cards, fold them in
half, decorate them with coloring, stickers, scripture, encouraging notes, and
drop them by our office. We will
give them to nursing home staff members who can put the card on the dinner tray
of an elderly patient and bless their day.
·
Make laundry detergent with your children. Laundry detergent is expensive and this
is a huge gift to families struggling financially. Email gabe@gracekleincommunity.com
for the recipe and swing by our office to pick up some empty jugs. (We collect empty jugs if you can wash
them out and save them for us.)
·
Happy Boxes for Children’s Hospital are also a
great summer project idea.
Decorate all those empty shoe boxes in your house and stuff the boxes
with encouraging notes, toiletry items, small crafts, small toys and books. Drop them by our office and we will
deliver them to children so they can have something to do in their lap while
they undergo treatment.
·
Ask your children to visit all your neighbors
and collect books. We need
pre-reading to adult books. We
give to a variety of purposeful causes.
We are currently collecting for a library in Africa with one of our
ministry partners.
·
Pass out Love Does cards with random acts of
kindness. We can provide you Love
Does cards and also coupons that you can give away at restaurants your family
probably goes to from time to time.
·
Have a cooking day with your kids and make a
bunch of ready-made frozen meals.
We can give you a list of people to deliver the food to or you can bring
to our freezer and other volunteers can deliver the meals. We always know families that need a
home cooked meal for a variety of reasons. What a delightful way to love on families, like foster care
families who are laying down their lives to follow Christ.
·
We always need non-perishable food and toiletry
items. Collect with your kid’s
baseball team, girl scouts, neighborhood friends, your office at work, a small
group, wherever and drop by our office or email gabe@gracekleincommunity.com if
you collect so much you cannot transport it all. We will use every collected item as a tool for spreading the
Gospel.
·
Deliver some food with our monthly food delivery
(the 3rd Saturday of each month) and see if that would be a good fit
for your family. Email gabe@gracekleincommunity.com.
·
Collect appropriate magazines that we can share
as a treat for our food recipients.
·
If you travel, please collect the toiletry items
and donate them to us.
5. Grace Klein Community, Inc. loves to
partner with other organizations.
We are way more effective together than we are alone. If you know anyone that needs
assistance, please let us know so we can see if we might have the resource they
need.
6. Grace Klein Community, Inc. is called to
share what we have for teams traveling on mission trips all over the
world. If you are collecting
anything, please contact us to see if we might have what you need or help you
collect.
We are encouraged by the God-sized love that foster
families give every day. Your
family reminds us of Jesus. Your
family encourages us and spurs us on to love and good deeds. We want to pray for you and help you
and do life with you. Don’t we all
need authentic, true community… people who know us for who we really are and
love us anyway, people who point us to truth, people who are willing to get
into the pit with us to help us get out, people who forget about what anyone
else thinks and just run after God.
Keep looking different from the world; it is BEAUTIFUL.
Your friends at Grace Klein Community
205.390.2211
gracekleincommunity.com
gabe@gracekleincommunity.com
No comments:
Post a Comment