Love In the Name of Christ is preparing to launch its third annual Love Your Neighbor campaign fundraiser for the month of September. Susan Justham, executive director, said the fundraiser is a great way to impact the community by spreading the positive message of love. P-J photo by Timothy Frudd
Love In the Name of Christ is launching its Love Your Neighbor campaign for the month of September.
Susan Justham, Love INC’s executive director, said people can order signs on the website (loveincSCC.org) for a $15 fee to remind people they are loved and cared about. Each sign is delivered with a personalized card to someone in the neighborhood for a week, before the sign is sent to another household the following week. Love INC will make weekly deliveries each Tuesday throughout the month of September.
For Love INC’s third year of the Love Your Neighbor campaign, Justham’s goal is to deliver 400 signs to people in the community. Justham said the volunteers at Love Inc enjoy having the opportunity to surprise people by letting them know someone cares about them when they deliver the signs and personalized cards. She said the fundraiser is a great opportunity for community members to let each other know that they care for one another.
“It’s something that God put together in my mind,” she said. “It came as a result of ideas about marketing and ideas about fundraising that just merged together with our mission statement to transform lives and communities with the love of Christ.”
The Love Your Neighbor campaign was started during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided a way for people to show people they cared without a high risk of contact between people.
“It was definitely a God-ordained thing for that timing,” Justham said.
Justham said the signs not only encourage the people they are delivered to, but they also impact people driving by through the positive message of the signs.
HOW LOVE INC STARTED
Justham said Love INC was started in the 1970s as an opportunity for churches to be more active in the community by serving as a united body. The nonprofit organization is a multi-denominational ministry that connects churches with people in need.
The Jamestown branch of Love INC was started in 2008, joining a group of about 120 affiliated Love INC programs.
“Each affiliate has their own flavor,” Justham said. “Their goal is to never have a duplicate of services, so it’s always looking for those opportunities of things that are different. It creates an opportunity for the churches to have a ministry that they can house within themselves but also partner with the ministry.”
While Justham said Love INC is not a church or para-church organization, she explained it is a “partnership organization” that works with different churches to change lives. Love INC harnesses the gifts, talents and resources of various churches to serve and positively impact the community.
Love INC partners with many churches in the area. Justham said some churches are financial partners and others are resource partners. Love INC’s job is to connect people in need with the right volunteers from the supporting churches in the community.
“Our neighbors in need in our community will call us up, and they’ll need assistance of some kind,” she said. “We have several different churches that are working directly with our clients, and then we have multiple churches supporting us in various ways.”
HOW LOVE INC WORKS
Justham explained the intake process at Love Inc is thorough because it is not an emergency relief organization. The process involves reference verification of family members, landlords, friends and caseworkers.
“We’re here to establish relationships with them,” she said. “We ask a lot of questions, because we want to get to know them. What that does is it provides clarity for us.”
Once the intake process is completed and Love INC approves a need in the community, the organization utilizes volunteers, partner churches and community resources to provide aid to individuals and families.
However, Justham said the resources Love INC provides people with are merely a “tool” for change.
“Our mission is to get their life changed with the love of Christ,” she said.“We’re always pointing to God and we’re always encouraging them to get involved in a church. The bed is just a tool. If they need toiletries, it’s just a tool, but it’s a way to get to know them, to get them connected with churches, to show them the love of Christ.”
Justham hopes by constantly encouraging those in need, loving them, praying for them and helping meet their needs, Love INC will be able to stand out from other agencies.
“We just want to be different; we don’t want to be like everybody else. I want them to see something different with their interactions with us from any other agency they’ve been involved with. They won’t know what it is, but it’s God’s love and it’s us trying to show them that in what we do.”
WHAT IS AVAILABLE
Some of the ministries Love INC supports include a furniture ministry, a toiletry and cleaning product ministry, a towel ministry, a household item ministry, a baby ministry, a yard work and snow removal ministry, and a minor car repair and home repair ministry.
While Love INC connects people in need with the resources they require, the ministry does not want people to become dependent on external help.
Rather than make people dependent on external aid, Justham said Love INC trains people to become independent over time so they can see visible improvement in their own lives.
According to Justham, the impact Love INC has on the community can be seen in individual success stories.
“Our impact is basically a lot of one person at a time kind of impacts,” she said. “It’s impacting lives a person at a time or a family at a time. It has a ripple effect.”
Whether Love INC is helping women who are coming out of domestic violence situation and having to start over, families dealing with various issues or someone who needs a specific item, Love INC finds ways to connect people in need with churches that can help meet the need.
“It’s kind of like we have two clients,” Justham said. “We have the churches with an opportunity to serve, and we have the clients that are our neighbors in need. We try and match the two things together to allow us to show the love of Christ.”
Justham said she is privileged to be a part of impacting the community through the ministry of Love INC.
“I’m blessed to be serving here,” she said. “It’s so much fun to watch God at work.”
Justham explained people can support the ministry of Love INC by participating in the Love Your Neighbor campaign or by donating resource items, by volunteering and through prayer.
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