Provide Us Our Daily Bread
Steve and Joyce Neubauer went to Greenfield thinking it might be a few days or a couple weeks of coaching a church through a tornado response. Instead they found Cornerstone Fellowship Church, a church body eager to reach out and connect with their community following a terrible storm, and they ended up working alongside the church for three months to serve in the mission field created by the tornado.
ReachGlobal Crisis Response had staff on the ground in Greenfield within hours of the EF-4 tornado that swept through town in May. Pastor Norby was already inundated with calls from organizations calling with offers and requests to use the facilities. He told our team after the fact, "You were here within 24-48 hours after the storm. If you had been here a few days later you would have been irrelevant." Our first response team went in to check on the church and its leaders, and to help them craft a response based on the DNA of the church - who they are and who they want to be. What followed was a multi-pronged response with several levels of outreach into the community.
After some time for prayer and conversations with Crisis Response leadership, it was decided that Steve and Joyce would help run a three month response. A couple other staff came in to support them, and the church hired two young ladies to serve as interns for the summer. Crisis Response started recruiting day groups and local volunteers for the first couple weeks, and half-week or weeklong groups to serve later in the summer- almost three hundred volunteers came to share the love of Christ in Greenfield. In addition to the ministry that Crisis Response was facilitating, the church was also running a distribution center, hosting VBS and a soccer camp for kids and a trauma-based Bible study for adults, and allowing a local woman to use their building for her daycare business until her home was repaired.
Initial volunteers were working as field clean-up, helping to pick debris out of farm fields so that farmers could run their equipment through the crops without risking damage. It may sound a little tedious and far from our goal of discipleship, but this was a huge deal to the farmers who were impacted by the tornado. Later groups were able to focus on a couple longer-term rebuilding projects to really connect with local families and prayer walk through town to connect with other families. Cornerstone Fellowship provided food for four fellowship meals that were hosted at some of the homes where volunteers were serving, providing even more opportunity for connecting with homeowners and their neighbors and having Gospel-driven conversations.
As Steve was reflecting on his time in Iowa, he thought about how God provided for them during the response. "We saw God provide our daily bread of work and of people to complete the work. We partnered with Cornerstone Fellowship church who greatly desired to make a difference in their community after the tornado." God brought just the right people to serve at just the right time.
Our staff have now left Greenfield, all the tools are back in Louisiana being prepared for the next response, but prayerfully the ripple effects of this summer's ministry will continue to spread and flow outward. Cornerstone Fellowship is still there, sharing the love of Christ in their community and building on the relationships that were started through the response.
One of the young women who served as an intern this summer is considering serving next summer through our Apex opportunity. A couple local men who served with our team are praying about if God wants them to join staff with Crisis Response in some capacity. And one family will wake up every day and look out at the willow tree that a volunteer team planted in their backyard and remember how God provided in their moment of need. Join us in praying that God would continue to use Cornerstone Fellowship to share the love of Christ and make disciples as the town of Greenfield continues to heal from the tornado.
Send a Response
Share your thoughts with the author.