Wednesday, September 21, 2011

New National Love INC Heads

Nancy VanDyken, Executive Director of Gallatin County Love INC, has been selected as one of three people to co-lead the national Love INC organization.  She is serving in this position along with two other individuals as Co-Directors of the national Love INC movement.  She will continue to serve, also, as the Executive Director of our local Love INC here in Bozeman.

To lead the national organization, instead of one person as CEO, Love INC decided to put in place a three-person top Executive Team, each with a primary focus.  Nancy will be responsible for new affiliate development -- bringing Love INC's to reality from conception to actual operation in communities around the county, and, as God provides, internationally.

As part of her responsibility, Nancy will travel to Nairobi on Sept. 22-Oct. 9 to provide equipping and training for five affiliates that are forming there, involving many churches and denominations.  Once trained, these affiliates will run themselves as their own grassroots organizations, without external monetary or personnel involvement.

As many of you are aware, the National Love INC headquarters and organization has undergone a complete restructuring.  As a result, new people were hired to provide leadership.  Nancy was hired in mid-June and intends to focus a portion of her efforts on forming Love INCs in other Montana communities.  Please keep her in your prayers, and contact her if you have any friends or contacts in other Montana communities that may be interested in starting a Love INC in their area. 

Pray for Livingston!  The initial work has begun to form a Love INC there.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Help Love INC & Have Fun at the Bozeman Maze!

 
Love INC Benefit Nights at the Bozeman Maze!
Date:  Tues., Oct. 11 (full moon); 3-8:30 p.m.
          Weds., Oct. 12, 6-8:30 p.m.

Bring your family and friends to the Bozeman Maze just off of N. 7th Ave. in Bozeman for a great time and support Love INC.  On these dates, 50% of the ticket proceeds will go directly to Love INC!




The fun includes:
Straw Bale Maze
Mini Train for kids to ride
Pumpkins
Kids Maze
Straw Bale Tractor for Kids
Corn Box (like a sandbox)
Photo Opportunities
Refreshments
New!  Bungee Trampoline!

Maze admission: $6/person.  Children 4 and under are free with an adult.  Some activities and refreshments are sold separately.

Location:  At the end of Mandeville Lane behind Murdoch's off N. 7th Ave.

Idea!  Youth Leaders and Groups:  Let's get together!  Join with other youth groups from around the valley at the Love INC Benefit Night at the Maze on Wednesday night (Oct. 12)!  Win a special cake for the being the youth group with the most people who complete the maze!



For more info about the Bozeman Maze, visit http://www.bozemanmaze.com/ or call 388-7818.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Be a Friend and Change a Life!

Change Your Life, a self-help ministry program of skills training and one-on-one mentoring coupled with tangible rewards and incentives, is gearing up for the fall! Each participant needs a Christian friend - someone who will walk alongside them, support them with prayer and encouragement, hold them accountable, and help that person clarify their own goals. We call these Christian friends, "mentors."

Mentors are asked to serve for about 8-12 weeks, depending on the class that the participant/student is taking. The time commitment is about one hour, once a week. Change Your Life meets on Tuesday nights in Bozeman; mentors meet with their participants from 7:30-8:30 p.m., following the participants' attendance in their classroom instruction. Training is provided; all mentoring occurs in a structured environment under one roof.

Can you serve Christ, share your Christian worldview, encourage someone who is learning news ways of approaching life, and who is waiting for you to be their mentor? We have a waiting list of participants/students who need you!

Course offerings this fall: Finding Financial Freedom (money management), Becoming a More Powerful Person (character development), and Divorce Care for Kids (emotional recovery from parent loss through divorce or abandonment) with an accompanying course for the parent. Mentors are needed for the adult participants of these courses who are counting on Gallatin County Christians to be there for them.

Call Love INC (587-3008) or email rmloveinc @ yahoo.com (no spaces in the email address), put your faith in action and help change a life (it might even be your own!).

Note: All Love INC ministry workers, including mentors, are volunteers who must be members or regular attenders of a local Christian church and agree with the faith expressed by the Apostles' Creed (which includes faith in the Trinity, the two natures of Jesus Christ: fully God and fully man, and the bodily Resurrection of Christ). All Change Your Life mentors must pass a criminal background check.

Clothes Closet: Clothing Only, Please

The Love INC Clothes Closet is a ministry designed to provide wearable clothing for men, women, youth and children as a way to help during hard times. This ministry provides a needed boost for many people by providing the clothing for free.

YOU can help us out! A trend is developing that endangers the continuation of the Clothes Closet ministry. We want to keep it running! Last year the Clothes Closet served more than 7,400 people -- our neighbors right here in Gallatin County!

Here is the threat to the continuation of the Clothes Closet: people dumping at the door during off-hours.

As one example: this week, someone dumped many heavy bags of unusable "stuff" that they wanted to get rid of, leaving it at our door. The "stuff" even included open paint cans and their yellow footprints. Someone -- a Love INC volunteer! -- had to make a special trip, pick all this up, load it into their personal pickup truck and haul it away. This "stuff" filled their entire pickup, leaked paint into the truck, and the volunteer spent his evening hauling it all away for whoever left it at our door.

YOU can help us out in countering this threat to the continued operation of the Clothes Closet. First, please, please, do not dump at our door. The Clothes Closet is only open with limited hours, and people just like you come and volunteer their time to make it run. We have only volunteers who run the Closet during those limited hours -- there is no staff, nor anyone else around to sort through and dispose of "stuff" dumped at our door.  Can you spread the word, too?

We appreciate and welcome the good-condition clothing that people donate so we can run the Clothes Closet. This is a blessing to hundreds of families and individuals in our area. However, again because only a small team of volunteers do all the work during just a few hours per month, it is very difficult for those people to sort out all the unusable clothing and other "things" that people have begun to drop off at the Clothes Closet.

Stained, torn, ragged, well-worn and seriously out of date clothing are not usable. The volunteers who come to work for a few hours end up personally bagging up unusable clothing, and everything that is not clothing. They then have to haul it to their own garbage cans at home, or take it somewhere. Please, help our volunteers out. They volunteer their time.  The job of sorting out really poor, unusable clothing (and non-clothing "stuff") is becoming a very heavy burden.

Please spread the word to people you know. Love INC's Clothes Closet is not a thrift store. It is not a place to dump non-clothing items a person no longer wants. It is a special clothing ministry to demonstrate tangible love to people who need good, wearable clothing and cannot buy it. Please, help the Love INC volunteers who enjoy their work but don't want to drown in throw-away "stuff."

Thank you for making the Clothes Closet possible! This is a wonderful ministry touching thousands of lives! Our volunteers love serving there and we want the Clothes Closet to continue to thrive!