Is your church or non-profit is looking for a way to get involved, right here at home? If so ,then Adopt A Block may be the right choice for your group. Building community ties. Deepening personal relationships. Caring for people. That’s the heart of any outreach. Especially this one! Here’s how to start an Adopt A Block outreach.
What Is Adopt A Block?
You’ve heard of Adopt A Highway? This is an outreach based on the same principles. Accepting the responsibility for a particular area by maintaining it, patrolling it and assuming care for it. With Adopt A Block you ‘adopt’ a block of your street or a neighborhood in your area. Consistent care and attention is given to the area by members of the outreach team. It’s a powerful ministry and can really overhaul a community. For the better!
Giving Credit
Adopt A Block was started by father and son team Pastors Tommy and Matthew Barnett at the Dream Center in Los Angeles. They’ve been ministering to the inner city of Los Angeles since 1993. Adopt A Block is being taught to evangelists all over the this nation and others. You can visit the Dream Center website here.
What To Do?
Adopt A Block is a ministry that once taken on should be continued in a consistent way. You can’t visit an area just once a month or quarter and expect to make a huge difference. You’ll find the people indifferent and your group’s influence small. This outreach is based on relationship building with the residents of the area. You’ll need to be dependable and reliable! And you’ll need to consider how many committed workers you have. You might think about recruiting help from other ministries or non profits. But what to do when you show up? Here are some ideas. Cut grass! We showed up every Saturday around 10: 00 AM. We cut grass and picked up trash. Every door got knocked on but not with a Bible in hand! We said hello and introduced ourselves. We asked if there was anything we could do for them or the neighborhood. Our teams delivered food, clothes and did odd jobs for single moms and widows. Other things we did was paint houses, plant flowers and take out the trash. Odd jobs and car repairs were a normal minsitry for this outreach.
The Gifts We Gave
Besides loving on people we brought gifts every week. Sometimes it was just a newspaper. Other times it was a pack of lightbulbs or even in some cases a hurricane preparation kit. Getting donations to give was pretty simple. Local businesses seemed more than happy to donate to this worthy cause. Even members of the church and community gave to make Adopt A Block work.
With a solid team or just a few committed people, you can use Adopt A Block to build bridges in any community. It is a valuable and worthy endeavor with the reward being life changing. It even changed those of us who worked in it.
