Ministry impact can be a difficult thing to measure and can be looked at in many different ways. One way of looking at a ministry’s impact is to visualize a clear, still body of water then suddenly someone drops an object into it and a splash occurs, then the ripples produced from the splash goes on and on to places many times we will never see.
There is no greater impact than lives changed, lives transformed because of Christ. We can see ministry impact as activities, results, lives changed. Here are some of the ways we have seen this ministry impact lives:
- The Love INC Clearinghouse assisted 7,529 individuals in 2007. Love INC works with hundreds of churches and many agencies to meet the clients’ needs.
Love INC received requests to help people from 185 different churches and 110 local agencies in 2007.
- Through the week of April 27-May 3, 2008 WOW JAM evangelistic ministry proclaimed the good news to approximately 14,000 people in five locations, 1,474 people responded to receive Christ. There were 47 churches involved and over 1,200 volunteers made this week long outreach possible. ESA’s role is to coordinate a team of leaders who support this process year-round.
During the summer of 2008 Christian dentists from Love INC’s Christian Health Network will go out to rural San Joaquin Valley communities and minister with one day free dental care all during the month of August. This outreach draws crowds of needy people to receive, in some cases, dental care for the very first time in their lives.
- Our Hispanic ministry (CHEV) hosted their first Pastor Prayer Summit in April 2008. Twenty-one Hispanic leaders went to Calvin Crest to seek God in prayer together. CHEV will host a Healthy Relationships Conference at Northwest Church fall 2008. The past two years CHEV has held leadership conferences in the fall and over 100 Hispanic leaders attended each one.
- Valley Communities for Christ (VCC) has successfully connected and helped to build long term relationships
between rural churches (“the mission place”) and larger churches in larger communities. The “ripple effect” from these connections is huge. We saw thousands of pounds of food given away. The larger churches supplying materials and volunteers to do joint VBS programs in the small rural churches. Youth groups doing mission trips and projects of service to Del Rey, Parlier, Dinuba, Raisin City and Sanger instead of just Mexico. We are now scheduling marriage training, dental outreach and taking the gospel to people in parks, ’ripple, ripple, ripple.’ Our focus for 2008 is an additional twelve communities to connect to and build relationships in.
The list goes on and on. You can read about the ministries of ESA and see more detailed impact stories by going to the home page and entering the individual ministries there.
