Baskets of Hope Celebrates Third Anniversary at UBC

Volunteers hard at work in the gym preparing our Baskets of Hope.

“For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures…”

 [1 Cor. 15: 3-4, NKJV]

During this Easter season, we celebrate the death, burial, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ -- Jesus Christ, the Hope of the Gospel! What a great time to reach out to our community through our Baskets of Hope [BoH] ministry to share this Good News of the Gospel. In addition, we blessed recipients with food to share with their families around their dinner tables while remembering Easter.

Registration is a great time to get to know new members of our community.

On Sunday evening, April 1^st , we blessed families at Urbancrest and Living Word Baptist Church, our new church plant right here in Lebanon, with our Baskets of Hope [BoH]. We celebrated our 3^rd anniversary for BoH too! We also added our third BoH service. Our Hispanic Ministry, lead by Ruben Calzado, met in room 203 where our guests worshiped and heard God’s Word in Spanish and English; this was a bilingual service!

Our UBC youth praise team led our worship time together [Thanks, Mike Copenhaver], along with our drama team. Our youth were awesome! We thank the Lord for what He is doing in their lives!

Our Youth Praise Team leading worship.

Pastor Tom shared our Easter message with great practical illustrations using his golf club. We had several respond to the Gospel invitation including five [5] who invited Christ into their lives for the first time and several others who made re-commitments or responded in another way to Gospel! Praise the Lord! Pray that these new believers connect with UBC and become Christ-like disciples serving the Lord in their ministry calling.

We served 126 families at UBC and 23 families at Living Word [our new church plant in Lebanon], for a total of 149 families! This is about twice the number of families as we served for our first Easter BoH!

Thanks BoH team for the hard work, calls, and follow-up with our BoH families to make all this possible. The preparation and distribution of our food baskets went very fast and efficiently.

Our BoH team is led by Kristy Purkey with contributing team leaders Nathan Coates, Melanie & Rob Pritchard, Cathy Dwire, Janie Caudill [lead LWBC location], and Sandy Huddleston. Photographs submitted by Dewayne Jeffers. To learn more about BoH and how you may serve in this ministry, please contact Kristy Purkey: ppkp90@embarqmail.com or 937.604.1461.