Church Makes Big Difference in America’s Hungriest Zip Code
October 14, 2014
October 14, 2014
“Red Shirt Church” Rallies to Serve Hungriest Zip Code in America
by Warren Bird
Pastor John Siebeling knew that he and his church couldn’t look the other way when they read the hunger statistics and heard the stories.
The front door of The Life Church of Memphis, TN, was only 15 minutes away from an area where more babies were dying than in some Third World countries. On top of that, The Life Church was a short drive from a zip code known as the “hungriest zip code in the United States”—where 74% of children went to bed hungry every night.
“When I told the church that, they were like, ‘How could we let that happen?’ ” John says. “We talked to school teachers in our church, and they told us some of the children show up Monday in the same clothes they wore Friday and they hadn’t eaten all weekend. Their stomachs were growling, it was impossible to teach, and the kids were not learning.”
What People Want in Their CityWhat makes a community a desirable place to live? What makes people happy to live where they live? What attaches a person to his or her city? The Gallup organization and the Knight Foundation launched the Knight Soul of the Community project in 2008 with these questions in mind. They interviewed nearly 43,000 people in 26 communities over three years and discovered there are three thing that most people want in their city are:
• Social Offerings — Places for people to meet each other and the feeling that people in the community care about each other
Jay Kranda of Saddleback ChurchSocial Media Podcast: Episode 98
Listen in on a face-to-face conversation with Jay Kranda, Online Campus Pastor of Saddleback Church, and host DJ Chuang on this episode of Social Media Church. Jay shares about the lessons learned in pastoring an Online Campus, running 167 online worship services every week (that’s almost one every hour on the hour), how they make online-to-offline connections through Extensions, sneak preview about future developments, and more.