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.

World Vision, Bill Hybels & Max Lucado Pastors Phone Conf

Brian Burquest just sent me this summary of a phone conference this afternoon for pastors with Richard Stearns (Hole in the Gospel author and president of World Vision), Bill Hybels (President of the Willow Creek Association and Senior Pastor of Willow Creek Church) and popular author/pastor Max Lucado.

• Now is NOT the time to start your mission or mission trip to Haiti. Leave it to the professionals
• The biggest thing you can do at this point is to give and give as much as you can.
• The effort will be a phased effort...Initial phase needs money, money, money....later phases need expertise and man power with the use of partnerships
• Hybels said “pastors this is a teaching moment to your churches...it is not a time to let off, but a time to step up with our support of existing partnerships and professional organizations
• Hybels spoke from Zechariah 7:9-10

“This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies says: Judge fairly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. And do not scheme against each other."

• It is time to “DO WELL at DOING GOOD”