Dear Solid Rock family,

For many years, our Thanksgiving outreach has been a wonderful expression of generosity to our community. Under the leadership of Jim Peterson and his team, many of you have given generously, contacted people throughout our community, packed boxes, organized food, and delivered meals. Thousands of boxes have gone out from Solid Rock over the years.

We are grateful for that legacy and for every person who has faithfully served. We thank God for the gospel seeds that have been planted through salvation materials and personal conversations, and for all the fruit, seen and unseen, that the Lord has produced through this ministry.

We want to carry that legacy forward by putting more of that ministry into your hands!

We want more members of Solid Rock personally loving, serving, and building relationships with the people God has placed around them.

Last year, we paused our Thanksgiving Box Ministry to pray and consider how we could build upon what has been done while creating more opportunities for personal ministry and ongoing relationships.

As we've considered what that could look like, Jesus' words in Luke 10:27 have helped shape our thinking:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

This year, Thanksgiving boxes are returning with a renewed emphasis:

Give generously. Love personally.

We don't just want to meet the need. We want to meet the person.

We want to continue the generosity that has characterized this ministry for so many years, while creating more opportunities for you, the members of Solid Rock, to personally engage with the people God has placed around you.

We want you getting face-to-face with your community. You knocking on your neighbor's door. You learning someone's name and hearing their story. You praying with them. You making room at your table. And, as the Lord opens doors, you sharing the hope of Christ with them.

And here's what can happen when you personally get involved: Thanksgiving gives you a reason to begin a relationship that can continue long after the box is empty.

Once you've stood at someone's door, learned their name, heard a little of their story, and prayed with them, they're no longer just a name on a Thanksgiving list. They're someone you know. When Christmas comes, you can check in and see how they're doing. When you drive past their house, you know who lives there and can remember to pray for them. You can invite them over again, invite them to church, or simply continue being a Christian neighbor who knows them and cares about what is happening in their life.

The Thanksgiving box becomes a bridge. It gives you a simple opportunity to take the first step toward someone, and that first step can open the door to an ongoing relationship.

We don't want follow-up to simply be another church program. The relationship itself becomes the follow-up.

Thanksgiving can be a small catalyst that helps us do something much bigger: be the church to the people God has placed around us and love our neighbors as Christ has called us to.

We've seen the value of this kind of deeper relationship before. In 2019, we adjusted our missions strategy by focusing our support on fewer missionaries while investing more deeply in those relationships. Our overall missions giving did not decrease. Instead, our partnerships grew stronger. Today, we communicate more regularly with our missionaries, know their ministries more personally, and enjoy deeper partnerships in the gospel.

That experience showed us the value of intentional investment and deeper relationships.

We believe Thanksgiving gives us another opportunity to pursue that same kind of depth, not by leaving behind the generosity of the past, but by building upon it and inviting more of our church family to participate personally.

This year there are four ways you can participate:

PROVIDE

Provide a Thanksgiving box for someone you know.

Think about your neighbors, friends, coworkers, or others God has already placed in your life who could benefit from a Thanksgiving box. You can purchase and provide the food yourself, or you can sign up for the church to provide the contents. Either way, you personally deliver the box and use it as an opportunity to strengthen that relationship.

CONNECT

Connect with someone in need through Reach Out.

Maybe you want to participate, but you don't personally know someone who needs a Thanksgiving box. That's where Reach Out can help.

When you sign up to CONNECT, we will provide you with the name of an individual or family in need, ideally someone who lives near you, who has connected with our Reach Out Benevolence Ministry. The church will provide their Thanksgiving box and their contacts, and you will provide the relationship.

You'll contact them, introduce yourself, deliver their box, pray for them, and begin building a connection. Then, after Thanksgiving, you'll already have a bridge to check in again, see how they're doing, invite them to church or into your home, and continue loving them personally.

HOST

Make room at your table.

Consider inviting a neighbor, coworker, student, church member, or someone who might otherwise spend Thanksgiving alone into your home. Remember those who are homebound or living in care facilities as well.

Sometimes loving our neighbor looks as simple as making room for one more person.

GIVE

Help make it possible.

You can give financially to help provide Thanksgiving boxes that members of Solid Rock will personally deliver throughout our community. Your generosity helps equip others in our church family to build these relationships.

IT ALL STARTS WITH SIGNING UP!

No matter which way you decide to participate, Provide, Connect, Host, or Give, we're asking you to begin by going to the Thanksgiving webpage and signing up.

Please sign up as soon as you know how you'd like to participate. The sooner you register, the easier it is for our administrative team to purchase food, organize boxes, connect people with families, and prepare everything needed for Thanksgiving.

Even if you are providing the entire box yourself or hosting someone in your own home, we'd still love for you to sign up and tell us about it. We want to know how our church family is serving so that our elders, staff, and church can be praying for those relationships and for the people you are reaching.

Our goal this year is not simply to count how many boxes leave our building. We want to celebrate relationships being built through those boxes. People known by name. Conversations around a table. Prayers offered together. Follow-up phone calls. Invitations into our homes and church. Opportunities to share Christ.

We believe this honors the heart of the ministry that so many people have faithfully built over the years. We want to continue that legacy of generosity by inviting more of the body of Christ into the work and making our outreach increasingly personal.

So as Thanksgiving approaches, begin asking:

Who has God placed around me to love?

Who could use a box? Who could use a friend? Who could use a place at my table?

Provide. Connect. Host. Give.

However you participate, our prayer is that this Thanksgiving will help all of us take another step toward becoming a church that gives generously and loves personally.

-Solid Rock Elder Team