From our pastor, Chris Nafis.
About a month and a half ago, I posted a fairly desperate plea for help with the overwhelming need for food in downtown San Diego. Many of you (so many of you!) responded that I thought it was past time for an update about how we (Living Water Church of the Nazarene) have been managing.
The financial help that you all offered was enough to cover our food costs for the last month and a half, to pay for extra staff hours to help manage our volunteers and hotel placements, to hopefully buy a used van to help us pick up food more efficiently (looking now - let us know if you are selling!), to help an unsheltered family travel to a new place where they had better opportunities to be housed and safe, to get a couple of people away to hotels for a few nights (people who did not qualify for the county hotel program), and to help with countless little things (gas money for this unsheltered volunteer, food money for this person, etc...). Trying to be faithful to the spirit of your giving, we budgeted most of the money to be used for Covid-19 response issues in April and May, and added a smaller portion to our general fund to make sure that we can continue to keep the doors open.
With the financial help and with help from those of you who have volunteered, we have continued to increase our food ministries. We are now delivering large, customized boxes of food to about 100 households per week, many of which are multi-family households and have 6-10 people living in them. We are also giving out ready-to-eat food for those on the streets two days per week, serving around 100 people each of those days. With help from Voices of Our City Choir, we are hosting a device charging station daily from 10am-2pm (there are almost no places to charge devices downtown right now - I even had a Parole Officer call me this morning to ask if her parolees could charge their ankle bracelets with us (yes, of course they can)). We have supported 4+ county hotel placements with food and social support (we placed four of them and helped with food for several others placed by other organizations). We are continuing our call check-in ministry, trying to stay in touch with our more lonely and vulnerable friends, and we have even started 6 new zoom small groups. To help our folks stay connected, we've given out a number of borrowed chrome-books to both small group leaders and participants so that they can participate in zoom meetings. And we have continued to worship the Lord faithfully on Sundays at 5pm (join us on zoom!) and host Bible Studies Tuesdays at 6pm.
If you don't know, we are a very small, low-resource church. We had 65 attendees on a good Sunday before all of this, at least 1/3rd of whom were experiencing homelessness, and another 1/3rd of whom were on fixed incomes and living in supportive housing. It is truly remarkable that we have been able to carry this heavy load for as long as we have. It would have been impossible without your help. Thank you.
If you want to continue to help, we find ourselves still stretching to find delivery drivers on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 1pm. It is a very low-contact volunteer opportunity where you get to deliver food to very grateful households who need the food badly. It took me an hour and a half today. You can send me a message for details on how to sign up to volunteer. If you can't volunteer, we would still love to have partake in our efforts through financial support. We have taken very seriously the responsibility to be faithful with what is given to us, and we commit to continuing to do so. You can give online here: https://www.aplos.com/aws/give/LivingWaterNazarene/general
Maybe more than any of that, if you do not have a church home, we would love for you to join us in our life together. This work, for us, is more than just charity. It is where we come to encounter God. It is an expression of our faith, a demonstration of trust and gratitude, and it is the work and calling of our communal life together in Christ. This is what we do because God has loved us. If you want to know how you can come and get to know the amazing people in my church, please reach out and I'll show you how you can join us on a communal journey of faith, hope, and love.
Thank you for all that you've done to help - as difficult as this season is and has been, we are excited to see how God continues to work in our midst.