It all started about twenty years ago when a handful of people with a heart for the city of Dayton, Ohio, led by Doug Roe and Scott Sliver, pulled their resources together and went to a local grocery store and purchased enough food to fill seven paper bags of groceries. They set out to bring a little taste of the kingdom to a few hurting families that resided in the poorest communities of the Gem City. Fast-forward two decades and you see the incredible ripple effect of this small-scale act of mercy has had on the region. That small group of caring people transformed into a “pretty good church” that is now one of the largest distributors of emergency food, supplies, and services in the Midwest. Their food pantry alone hands out over 6,000 lbs of food per month.
Doug Roe now pastors the Dayton Vineyard that numbers in the thousands, Scott Sliver is still the worship leader, but also heads the amazing Hope Foundation, an incredible organization that spreads mercy and compassion throughout the region with a focus on kindness and ridiculous generosity. They have an awesome food pantry at their Beavercreek campus that feeds hundreds of families per month. It is not your normal food pantry. The décor is more akin to the showroom of a private buyers club. Guests are served premium coffee and pastries as they wait for their turn to shop for free as well as get invaluable counseling, and prayer. Everything done in this building is done with great love, and just walking through it you can feel the residue of kindness.
The smiles of the people being served is infectious. Suddenly the Biblical phrase “bring the good news to the poor” has a new cognitive traction. The mercy and compassion handed out in this place is tangible. These folks have discovered a way to hand out “good news you can use” as one of the patrons I chatted with explained. I walked from the comfortable client area into the back of the pantry and found that these folks have dedicated a great deal of the floor space of their church to endeavors of mercy and compassion.
In fact, it would be hard for you to walk more than a few steps in any direction on their campus without bumping into resources designed to serve others. These people get it. Not only is an outward focus part of their DNA, it is the very lifeflow of their church. I was not only impressed with the dedication of design and implementation, but also the collective creativity of this “pretty good church.” While the pantry may be at the nexus of their operations, these folks are driven to continuously export the mercy and compassion that is in great supply here far beyond the four walls of their church—well actually they have more than four walls, as they grew exponentially in direct correlation to their generosity to the community to the point that they purchased a vacant Furrow’s Home Improvement store to retrofit both as a place to worship and serve as a depot of God’s grace. Each addition to that original structure has a cornerstone in the blueprint based in mercy and compassion. They are always thinking about new ways to tweak outreaches to better serve the people of the community. The facility is the true essence of mutli-purpose. This is one of the most flexible groups of people I have ever met. They have tapped into the secret nature of mercy. See once you invest your organization into serving the community, more opportunites present themselves to increase and enhance your ability to serve.
What started as a group of friends, with seven bags of groceries that they bought out of their own purses and wallets, has become an epic adventure. There are now several chains of restaurants, grocers, bakers, and butchers that will call them up out of the blue and ask them to distribute extra bread, meat, dairy products, and other supplies.
When your only agenda is serving the community, people you don’t even know begin to trust you with their abundance because you develop a reputation for spreading mercy. From Ken Glassmeyer
