POTOSI – For Keeli Singer, missions is homegrown and local. She’s a member of Potosi Community Church in southeast Missouri and a public school art teacher. When she heard a minister say that missions was every Christian’s responsibility, she came up with His Hands and Feet, a local compassion ministry for her community.
The church is currently in a pastor search, so Keeli says a visiting preacher mentioned that “as members we need to not wait for someone else to do something. God wants us to do things for people to show His love.”
She says, “it sounded like an invitation to me.
Before the sermon ended she had outlined several ministry projects for the women in her church. “I had written it all out while (the preacher) was talking. I had the first six months ready to go.”
She’d also come up with the group’s name. “That’s what God calls us to be, His hands and feet.”
The women began their monthly projects last November. They first made and distributed lap blankets for a local nursing home. A personal note was attached to each blanket to remind residents “you are loved.” The group then baked cookies for a local boys’ home, distributed backpacks to foster children, appreciated nurses in two medical facilities by providing them cookies and personal notes, supported a pregnancy center, and assembled bags of make-up and personal items for residents in a shelter for abused women.
It might sound like His Hands and Feet is a large group in a sizeable church. Singer says Potosi Community Church runs between 45-50 during their Sunday morning worship, and His Hands and Feet consists of only six to eight women. Their ages range from “Ellie, who is five, she comes with her mom…to probably 80.”
The May activity will be hand-made bracelets for mothers of deployed military personnel. Singer says she finds contacts through school and community activities. Service personnel families will be invited to church, where “our church will pray over the bracelets…for the safety and protection of the soldiers.” The bracelets will then be distributed to the parents.
His Hands and Feet is taking a mid-summer break but plans in July through the church’s VBS to support an overseas ministry: the Juanita Girls School in Kenya. The school helps girls who would not be educated beyond the eighth grade and might otherwise be sexually trafficked, sold into marriage, or led into menial labor, or who might commit suicide.
(The school is the newest ministry of George “The Shoeman” Hutchings, who earlier drilled water wells in Kenya and was supported by the Potosi Community Church.)
In August, the group returns to local missions by distributing backpacks filled with school supplies to families at the Washington County Fair.
The projects include evangelical components through Bibles, tracts, or handwritten notes of encouragement added with the items.
Singer says she would like to see the group expand. “Right now, this is our little church but we talked about expanding it and inviting anyone from any churches. This isn’t about ‘I’m trying to get people to come to our church and not yours.’ We just want people to know the Lord.”
Area church women’s groups wishing to partner with His Hands and Feet can contact Singer at keelisinger@yahoo.com.