INDEPENDENCE – Noland Road Baptist Church here has partners with ministries around the nation and around the globe to reach people with the gospel, but they also come alongside more than a dozen local ministries to help transform lives in their own community.
On the local level, these “Global Focus Ministries” include Lullaby of Hope, a member-started ministry that reaches out to women who struggle with infertility or who are grieving because of a miscarriage, still birth or infant death (see companion story, page 1), as well as a “care portal” for reaching orphans, a refugee ministry, a ministry for reaching out to women impacted by the abortion industry, and a ministry for homeless and battered women, among others.
The church also supports two public schools in the community—for example, by preparing meals for teachers during parent-teacher conferences or by volunteering to read books to children in the school library. The church has also been able to help a family in the school system who lost everything they had through a fire.
As this suggests, Noland Road Baptist isn’t content simply to send money so that others can do the ministry.
“Our goal is to put boots on the ground,” Associate Pastor of Discipleship Wes Wakefield said. “We want to send people along with our money.”
For each ministry they support, Noland Road Baptist has at least one church member who serves as a “champion,” raising awareness about the ministry’s needs and finding church members who can become involved with the ministry. Also, the church occasionally schedules the “Noland Road Serve Day,” a Saturday or Sunday dedicated to doing projects for these ministries and for fulfilling needs in their community.
According to Wakefield, the church’s goal is, in a sense, to reach beyond the walls of the church and make such an impact in the community that people would feel a loss if the church were gone.
As a result of this service, he added, not only is the community transformed, but the church’s members are transformed, as well.
“They go to help and change people’s lives, and they come back changed.”