Thanksgiving Offering

Morro de Meio is a community in Southern Brazil where child abuse and violence against women is the worst in the state of Santa Catarina. Our missionaries, Lee and Regina Bloch, have been instrumental in establishing a pilot after-school program that began with a handful of children in a small one room church-plant.

Today, thanks to the ongoing support of The Moody Church, the pilot program now has one classroom, a small computer learning room, a playground, and kitchen, and is able to serve 40 children each weekday. In the program, children are cared for physically and spiritually, with many coming to saving faith in Christ.

But there is a growing waiting list of more than 100 in a community with thousands of children.

The funds from the campaign would allow the after-school program to purchase the adjacent property (see image below) and expand the physical footprint of the building site so that the ministry can accommodate another 100 children on the waitlist.

Family Empowerment Centers

Family Empowerment Centers (FEC) is at the forefront of creating pathways of opportunity for under resourced individuals and families to experience greater joy and therefore greater hope in their future. We do this with a passionate desire to honor God and love our neighbors, training up the next generation of leaders, providing programming for children to make educational advancements and have safe social/recreational opportunities, adults to learn English, and families to gain the food resources they need.

The Thanksgiving Offering will help FEC with the following:

At the start of the pandemic, FEC responded to the needs of its vulnerable community by renting a storefront that would become home to our food pantry. This pantry has become a staple program for us in our community as we serve hundreds of people each week who reside in our community from places around the world. Today, FEC finds itself at a crossroads of need. They have entered our second year of operating the pantry and the demand continues to increase, especially with the increase in food prices. There is a need for more regular distributions of food (currently only 2 hours a week), greater networking for food resources, and the potential to expand the influence we have into other communities, Albany Park being one of them.

Funds from the Thanksgiving Offering campaign will allow them to quadruple the resource impact the pantry can deliver, expand its footprint into new neighborhoods, and open new pathways to share the Gospel.

More information about this ministry can be found here.

Sabka Sahaara is located on Devon Ave, one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods on Devon Avenue, right in the heart of the Little India neighborhood. They are a global community of Christ followers proclaiming that Jesus is the hope of the world.

Since opening in 2020, God has blessed the ministry of Sabka Sahaara, and their church is now bursting at the seams.

Funds from the Thanksgiving Offering will enable them to expand their outreach and ministry in the following areas:

1. Launch and support a second service in the Telugu Indian dialect, doubling the number of people who can be served on Sunday mornings.
2. Multiplying 6x their local outreach capacity through their after-school kids program, Friday night church ministry, and grocery service.
3. Finish building out the second floor of their church building to better equip the church’s youth ministry.

More details about Sabka Sahaara are available here.