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God Can Use Anyone

Banner of Christ Church "left the building" and served their community...

October 7, 2007 was an unseasonably warm day in Byron Center, a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was also the Sunday that Banner of Christ Church “left the building” and served their community on their first Faith in Action Day.

“Luckily the weather cooperated, and one of our service actions was to hand out bottles of water all over town in our bright orange t-shirts,” recounts Jerry Caley, senior pastor at Banner Church. “In our church of 200, 150 showed up to serve that day.”

Projects had been well-planned in advance. However, when young Max, a 16-year-old confined to a wheelchair due to a rare muscle/nerve disease, also showed up to serve, “we hadn’t thought about what Max could do to help,” Pastor Jerry recalled.

So Pastor Jerry took Max along with a group headed to a local nursing care facility, to minister to both the long-term patients and those in short-term rehab. As residents headed into the large room where they were meeting, Pastor Jerry realized they were all in wheelchairs. “God opened my eyes: the best person to minister to these people was Max. He was on eye-level with all of them, and made his way from table to table, engaging nearly everyone in conversation.” He continued, “I had a lesson to learn that day: God can use anyone. Often we think that if we’re not fully functional physically, that God can’t use us to minister. God showed me how wrong that was,” he said.

Afterwards, Max admitted that he hadn’t been sure he’d be comfortable talking with the elderly group, but then realized that, like him, most of them will never leave their wheelchairs. And Max fully understood what that was like. Pastor Jerry pointed out, “He was truly on their level and had, so to speak, earned the right to speak into their lives. He could minister in ways that the rest of us absolutely couldn’t.”

Other Banner of Christ teams served by picking up trash along a two-mile stretch of road near the church, ministering in a hospice facility, power-washing and doing yard clean-up in two mobile home parks, and more. One team visited three Laundromats with packages of quarters, pre-filling the machines, handing out bottled water and talking with customers. “Our eyes were opened to the fact that a lot of the people frequenting Laundromats are single parents who are really struggling,” explained Pastor Jerry.

Other groups worked in two nearby discount grocery stores – the kind where you have to pay for your bags and then bag and carry your own groceries. The teams pre-purchased nearly 400 grocery bags and then offered to bag and carry groceries to cars. Another team worked at a local medical clinic that serves the poor and homeless. They power-washed the building’s storefront and washed windows, for both the clinic and the clothing pantry next door.

“Our celebration lunch afterwards took a long time because there were so many good stories to share,” Pastor Jerry said. “It was one of the best celebration services we’ve had in a long time. Most everyone said that we have to do this again – at least a couple of times a year.”