*Progress as of April 1, 2017
Featured Video
Latest News
Campaign helps DeafCAN! serve refugees and immigrants
Christ the King Deaf Church, West Chester is a small congregation that has a large impact on its community. Its Deaf Community Action Network – DeafCAN! – provides classes and support for more than 200 hearing-impaired persons across eight counties in Southeastern Pennsylvania.
Last year, powered by a $1,000 grant from the Forward Together in Faith Campaign, DeafCAN! started offering citizenship, drivers education, and sign language courses for Deaf and Deaf-blind immigrants and refugees.
The grant provided start-up funds to pay teachers to offer courses at St. John’s in Northeast Philadelphia. “We used it up quickly,” Pastor Beth Lockard said, “but it gave us a good start.” The classes served 23 refugees/immigrants from Mexico, Bhutan, Cambodia, Nepal, Philippines, Puerto Rico and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Networking:
Working together for The Well
Welcome Church is partnering with the City of Philadelphia, ELCA Churchwide, the Synod, the local presbytery and Episcopal diocese to host a second year of its successful “Women of the Well” program for women who resist traditional homeless shelters. The Well provides overnight shelter for about a dozen women in a local church, with paid staff and volunteers who bring meals and accompany the women. The micro-shelter model has a much higher participation rate than traditional large shelters.
Innovating:
Campaign helps LIFE Ministry find a home
Living Gospel’s LIFE ministry with men and women with criminal convictions in their past expanded when it moved into the Sauer House at Trinity Lutheran Church in Germantown thanks to a $10,000 grant from the Forward Together in Faith campaign.
Communicating:
Review helps Faith grow its communications
The professional communications review they received from the Forward Together in Faith campaign helped Faith, Philadelphia go from “stabbing in the dark” to improving their branding and leverage its social media presence by encouraging members to share its posts to their friends.
Equipping:
“Money, Mission and Media” links stewardship to message
More than 200 church leaders – Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopalian – attended the “Money, Mission and Media” workshop co-sponsored by the Synod to hear Luther Seminary’s Adam Copeland on the church’s emerging paradigm of generosity, campus pastor Rev. Mihee Kim-Cort on a spirituality of social media, and our own Keith Anderson sharing case studies of “reverse engineering” the church.
MAP ‘Changed How We Do Church At University Lutheran’
The Mission Assessment Profile (MAP) offered through the Synod’s Forward Together in Faith campaign “changed the way we do church here at University Lutheran,” says Pastor Fritz Fowler.
The process exceeded expectations. Responses to the survey came from more people that the average weekly attendance, “so we had phenomenal statistical data that the council was able to interpret with a consultant from Kairos [and Associates],” Fowler said.
“We started to dream about what University Lutheran could look like in six months, in a year, in five years, in ten years.”