Written by Johnny Aho, pastor of Dearborn Covenant Church
Maybe you have heard of hosting a Hope Sunday – the Covenant’s plan to have churches sponsor kids in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What if instead of hosting only on a Sunday, your church hosts this event for clusters of churches for an entire weekend?
On Saturday, November 10, Dearborn Evangelical Covenant Church will host Curt Peterson, executive minister of World Mission, as a regional kickoff for Covenant Kids Congo powered by World Vision. Usually our congregation uses this time for our annual Fall Harvest Dinner. We invite all of the churches in the Detroit area to share in this dinner with us. Instead of what we normally do, which is raise funds for our own local ministry, the church will instead be raising funds for Covenant Kids Congo. For about 18 years, Dearborn Covenant used the Fall Harvest Dinner as a way of raising funds for a shortage in the budget while also giving 10% to a mission project of our choice. This year 100% will be going outside the church to be used by Covenant Kids Congo. Our goal is to raise $25,000 to support this unprecedented need in the DR Congo.
Since making this commitment, an interesting thing has happened. Giving is up. I have been amazed at our church’s sacrificial giving. We’re seeing numbers this summer that we usually only see around Easter and Christmas. It just seems that any time we give for something outside of our ministry, people get behind it and give more to our local ministry.
All the churches in the Detroit area have been invited to attend. The Detroit cluster of churches has grown from two churches almost ten years ago to fourteen.
Saturday’s festivities will be followed by a time of worship and an international potluck the next day, because Dearborn Covenant has made inroads into the lives of people from 15 different national backgrounds through community outreach including Arab Muslims, Chinese doctoral students, and Brazilian engineers from Ford Motor Company. The church’s hope with its “Weekend of Hope” is to be more vitally connected with what the Covenant is doing from around the corner to around the world, and to connect the Covenant in missions right here in our own country.
