Our Vision

The first week in New Orleans was packed with planning. We showed up knowing very little about how the summer project was going to work. The housing for the first session was only nailed down as the directors were driving there! The single girls actually stayed with Marie's home church pastor that week (she is from New Orleans and the pastor had 4 empty bedrooms while he waited for the rest of his family to move from California). So we met, talked, prayed, and hashed out what we wanted our mission, vision, and values to be and what we wanted to see the students walk away with from their time on project. We started on Tuesday, and by Friday we had a schedule and a plan. Then we just had to run around town to make sure we had everything we needed to make that plan work before students arrived on Sunday!

Here are the basics of what we came up with:

Our Mission: To help rebuild the city of New Orleans both physically and spiritually.

Our Vision: In the context of a spiritual community, we want to experience the gospel in a holistic way while helping to rebuild the physical and spiritual infrastructure of New Orleans through intentionally investing in relationships that will have a long-term impact.

We prayed that the students would leave the project having learned about and understood how to walk in the Holy Spirit and would get a chance to share their faith...maybe for the first time. We planned to split out time fairly evenly between doing relief work and doing campus ministry. In addition, we would have small groups for Bible study and discipleship. We wanted everything we did to have a purpose and to follow the mission we set forth.

So, the only thing left was for students to show up...and we were as ready as we could be.