Mennonite CentraL Committee Appalachia SWAP
Using the efforts of volunteers SWAP addresses sub-standard housing in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. Participants will work with and for local homeowners "In the name of Christ", sharing the message of God's love and building relationships that serve to enrich all involved.
We understand service and missions
to be essential to authentic Christian faith but also recognize that we often don't know how to truly minister. Therefore we will endeavor to:
Challenge participants to view ministry as a lifestyle inseparable from their Christian faith and, therein, seek to establish and/or deepen their walk with God. a) be genuinely and practically helpful to local people, and b) develop a deepened understanding of Christ, faith, service, and evangelism. Help participants to process their experiences and become aware of issues of: mutuality, listening, importance of relationship, and causes of poverty as it relates to caring for and about God's people and creation. Challenge participants to consider one week of ministry per year as insufficient, encouraging them to explore full-time missions/service as a natural outworking of their faith to be exercised both at home and away.
Prayerfully, 1 John 3:17,18 (see our home page) and these statements will guide all aspects of the SWAP program, from the choice of clients we serve, to the actual work at local sites, the recruitment and selection of staff and the content of our evening worship and teaching sessions.
We embrace God’s requirement of us "to act justly and to
love mercy and to walk humbly with your God."
We are Christ-centered in our disaster relief, sustainable
community development and justice and peacebuilding
responses. We follow Jesus as Jesus proclaims good news
to the poor, freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight
for the blind; and sets the oppressed free.
We serve in Christ’s name because, as a worldwide ministry
of Anabaptist churches, we are connected as a branch to
the true vine of Jesus Christ and dependent upon God the
gardener.
Through Jesus we claim our interdependence. We celebrate
being part of the rich diversity of the body of Christ.
With the assurance that God is working out God’s pur-poses, born out of God’s triumph over the power of sin
and death through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus,
we are freed to till the soil through our work with others,
waiting upon God to bring good fruit from these efforts.
Micah 6:8; Luke 4:18; John 15:1-8
