Imagine receiving a free meal while visiting a local fast-food restaurant or being presented with a gift card to purchase a week’s worth of groceries. For the 4PB program by Fellowship Church, this is not simply an idea but a program utilized every year.
Senior pastor Byron Beck of Fellowship Church discussed the foundations of the volunteer program and the local projects it has helped to build.
“The background to it is just this — every year we look for creative ways to bless our community, to show the love of Jesus in practical, meaningful ways to people,” he said. “And that’s kind of the overarching mission.”
Originally, the church created a program called Salt and Light on Sundays where congregation members participated in different ministries for the community. But then in 2018, Beck attended a conference in Orlando and heard about an accelerated program for extended community service.
“There are three basic categories of things we do,” Beck said. “The first one is called the pay it forward type, or blessings. The second category is service projects. An example of a service project would be mowing someone’s yard, cleanup projects, or something along those lines.”
One of the most recent service projects was building a deck for a disabled veteran and his wife.
The third category is what the church calls appreciation meals. “We look in our community at groups of people who may be overworked and underappreciated — people who don’t always get recognition,” Beck explained. “We take a meal to them and just say thank you for what you do, and let you know that God loves you. We appreciate what you are doing.”
Each year, church members are tasked with creating something new. “We have done the usual things, like going into gas stations and offering to clean the bathrooms,” Beck said. “You know it’s a job that nobody wants.”
This year, one of the projects included a partnership with the nonprofit Sleep in Heavenly Peace. Dave Elledge, a coordinator with the program, said they are a national organization with aPoplar Bluff chapter.
“We have public build days where we typically have 30 to 40 volunteers,” Elldege said. “We build in an assembly line fashion and then we deliver the beds.”
Elldege explained it is a community effort, with people donating money towards the lumber for the beds and mattresses.
“The quilting groups also help supply blankets,” he said.
“It’s easy to get folks to come out to our build days,” Elledge said. “Our deliveries are where we could use the most help.”
For the members of Fellowship Church, the planning for these community projects dates back to August.
“We start letting people know that these are the ministry outreach opportunities which you can sign up for, and then we start doing some training and getting people organized to help with that,” Beck said.
The final projects come every year during the first week of October. Beck explained on Oct. 1-7, the projects move forward within the community. These projects range from love packages, yard work, prayer stations, providing sports teams with snacks, help for the homeless community, military boxes, nursing homes, truck driver boxes and many more.
“We hope that it empowers people to see, you could do this all the time and there’s some things you can do on your own,” he said. “We just provide a kind of organized version of it.”
Approximately $31,000 is spent on the church’s projects. Beck highlighted a local family that has continually blessed Fellowship Church.
“One of our groups within our church had blessed them at a time of need, so they remembered that and gave us a gift,” Beck said. However, he added, “You don’t necessarily need money to do something like service projects.”