By Pastor Rick Duncan, Founding Pastor/Pastor of Missional Living and Leadership Development
Cuyahoga Valley Church is partnering with Building Hope in the City, Bay Presbyterian Church, and Trinity Lutheran Church to come alongside persons in poverty in order to not just give them a handout but give them a hand up. We want to actually help lift someone out of chronic poverty. What is The Open Table? Find out more at theopentable.org
VISION
A movement of servants restoring people in poverty to our communities through relationship and the investment of our own vocational and life experiences and personal networks.
MISSION
Train congregation members, through the Open Table Model, to form communities – called Tables – that transform their vocational and life experiences into tools our Brothers and Sisters in poverty can use to develop and implement plans that create change.
THE MOVEMENT
A collaboration of faith communities, government, business and non-profits working through Open Table, a shared community model, to transform poverty.
COMMUNITY
The Open Table process is the catalyst for the deployment of a Missional Community committed to the transformation of a family or individual in poverty. However, the servants themselves are often the most transformed. When the Open Table process is complete, these Missional Communities, having brought each other through the wilderness of poverty, where they collided with society’s false beliefs about the poor, become a new community in which the family or individual they helped is now unrecognizable from those who did the helping. In many instances, individuals helped in Open Table return as servants helping the next family.
Although the ministry is still relatively new at CVC, the lives of participants are already changing. We are helping a woman who has gone through The City Mission: Laura’s Home and who is attending Gateway West Church.
Wednesday’s post: read the testimonies to see how transformational the Open Table has already been.
