Special Haiti Offering at Five Oaks Services this Weekend

We will be taking a special offering for Haiti this weekend in all of our services. This special offering will go directly to provide for tens of thousand of additional meals to be produced through our Feed My Starving Children event in early March (over and above the funds raised through Opportunity Awaits) and all the food from that event will be shipped to Haiti. This food will arrive when the needs will still be great but when Haiti will have likely moved off most people's radars.

We believe that we have an opportunity, due to the current situation, to extend the Feed event beyond the weekend, engage more people from our community and, most importantly, feed thousands more children in Haiti. Feed My Starving Children depends entirely on donations for the meals and on volunteers to pack the meals. The greatest limiting factor Five Oaks faces for expanding our Feed event is funding it. This offering will help expand that effort. (Donations at the event last year covered only 25% of the costs and our order for meals needs to be in one month in advance.)

We also encourage you to give to other relief efforts.  Our partner in Haiti, GVCM, works directly with dozens of churches in Port-au-Prince and their needs will be great in the coming days and months. Other opportunities to give include the EFCA Haiti Relief fund and World Vision.

We are still waiting for official confirmation from FMSC that all food from our Feed Event will, in fact, go to Haiti, and that we can extend the days and hours of our event. In the unlikely event that FMSC cannot accommodate us, the proceeds raised from this special weekend offering will go directly to faith-based Haiti relief efforts. We will keep you fully informed.

They're Coming Home!

This afternoon, while Amy Schwartz was being interviewed by channel 5 (KSTP) on camera, a call came in from Jeff who is on the Haiti team. The team will be on a transport plane tonight or tomorrow to Miami! No other details yet. You can likely see the actual call coming in and Amy's reaction on the 10pm news tonight.

I got the same word about the team's return from Mike and Jan Mularoni's son, Mike. We have so much to be thankful for!

Please keep praying for Haiti, especially for the families of the orphanage workers and the pastors associated with GVCM, most of whom attended a training event we offered almost three years ago. Pictures from that event are below. These are some of the guys I'd like you to pray for.

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