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The Harvest House of Hope (HHH) located in the inner-city of San Bernardino, Ca offers a mission services ministry to their community, they had become inactive in their community outreach missions. The ministry concerns of HHH surround the subject of spiritual transformation and the role of the church in community outreach. The purpose of this project is to educate the men, women, and children of Harvest House of Hope on the value of mission services, in hopes to drive them towards the spirit of community outreach. The proposed educational component included a theological structure built upon the Holy Scripture, as it pertained to caring for the homeless, underprivileged, and poverty-ridden community, built on the foundation of love, compassion and commitment. This project will investigate the effectiveness of the preaching, teaching, training and implementation of the intervention design. The results of this project gained through research of books, journals, Scripture, and data from focus groups, interviews and questionnaires will enable HHH to redefine the specific causes of inactivity as it pertains to community outreach and project the need for further study.

With globalization, there has been an explosion in travel by academic institutions and the church. For the church, this growth has been in short-term mission trips. Unlike traditional missionaries, most short-term travelers are untrained or lightly trained laypersons. The purpose of this phenomenological qualitative study was to understand how local poverty assistance programs could be leveraged to prepare the church today for global engagement. This study provided ten church volunteers with training that included a Scripture overview of the poor, the multidimensional factors of poverty, reducing harm in poverty programs, and the skills for affirming dignity during an interview. Following the training, each church volunteer participated in two interviews with individuals receiving assistance at a local food program. The open-ended interview questions were designed to understand the food program recipient's personal story, physical and social needs, and faith background. Data collection from the interviews and subsequent analysis through coding resulted in multiple themes, including the willingness of individuals to share their stories, the humanization of the poor, changed stereotypes, and the value of working with the local poor. The transferability of local experiences on global engagement and topics that deserve more in-depth study are discussed.

Businesses that are operated by Christian workers can make a difference in ministering to poverty-stricken communities around the world. Poverty is a major social problem that has existed for all of history and will continue to affect the lives of millions in the future. A number of business initiatives such as social business, macro-government initiatives, and transformational development have experienced success in helping reduce the problem. It is imperative to approach the issue of poverty recognizing the spiritual component along with the physical. The ministry of Jesus Christ serves as an example for meeting the needs of the impoverished, and going into the work with a heart like His will demonstrate a love that is able to give life to the broken. The Christian non-profit operates with a purposeful ministry with several areas of impact, and examining one particular company called IBEC Ventures in detail will reveal a practical way the work is being done.

This project explores the responsibility of the local church to the poor and the process of establishing a ministry to the poor. Over a ten week period participants were shown the importance of biblical mercy within the storyline of Scripture and given practical insights as to how the local church can address the problems of poverty. Chapter 1 sets forth the goals of the project and its historical and contextual setting at Faith Family Church. Chapter 2 lays a biblical foundation that emphasizes the church's obligation to the indigent through an exegesis of key passages from the Old and the New Testaments. Chapter 3 addresses the issue of mercy as a stewardship of the gospel. Chapter 4 provides a description of the project's implementation with analysis and results. The final chapter evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the project, and offers some personal and theological reflections.

There is a plethora of statistics concerning how many un-churched people there are in the United States and the socioeconomic ladder does not discriminate who fits this lost category. Yet, the concern of this project deals with the gang member, drug dealer, drug users, pimps and prostitutes. The intent is to take outreach to the street through cook outs, Holy block parties, street revivals and the like. The rationale of this project is to show how one can reach, teach and keep this group of people, the potential dangers, and positive consequences associated with it. The potential value of this topic is to reach a mass of potential leaders for Christ who will be able to bring others of like class to the Lord and make mature disciples of them. This project will reveal several types of evangelistic efforts such as surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and new member classes.