Cross-Cultural Generosity
This is a great story via Marko of the gospel.com community member Youth Specialities:
I’ve shared before how god worked in and through the middle school ministry at my church to change a community in africa. our kids set out to raise $3000 to build one house for a family of orphans. their goofy little variety show brought in $25,000 the first year. the money went to put in two clean-water wells. the next year, the church responded again with almost $35,000, and a health clinic was funded.
i shared this story at the national youth workers convention a couple times. and recently, i received this way-encouraging email from a middle school pastor, who agreed to let me post it here:
MarkO –
I’ve been meaning to send you a note for a while to say thanks. I’m a Jr. High minister and we were at the St. Louis Believe Conference last year. I had already heard your story about the impact the Jr. Highers at your church made in Africa and shared it with some of my students on Friday night, only to have you tell them all on Saturday. From that story, God sparked our own students to act.
Our story turned out much like yours. We got together and set an ambitious goal of $6,000 to build two wells in Africa (people, including our H.S. guy, later came to me and told me they thought there was no way we’d ever get close). We made “Just Add Water” our summer project and challenged our kids and their families to use their summers for something greater than themselves. Long story short, by the end of the summer we hit over $9,000. In the mean time, our church began a relationship with a ministry in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya and we were able to provide water (plus showers and toilets, which there are almost none of in the entire community of 100,000) for three schools in the slums of Nairobi.
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Read the rest of the amazing story at ysmarko’s blog.
