Volunteers drilled holes in the bottom of buckets, then layered pea pebbles and on top of them, soil for growing a container garden.
INDIANAPOLIS — Boards in neat stacks. Buckets in rows. Bags of pea pebbles and topsoil.
In assembly line fashion, a group of Nazarene volunteers made container gardens Tuesday, building wood frames that hold several buckets filled with dirt for growing tomatoes, peppers, or whatever foods city residents wish to grow. Then they loaded them onto trucks and drove from Shepherd Community to deliver them to more than 50 families who’d requested them.
Volunteers from Fortville Church of the Nazarene were among those offering help through Love Your Neighbor, a community service initiative connected to the worldwide Church of the Nazarene’s General Assembly, which took place this week in Indianapolis.
“Community outreach is just really, really important,” said Teresa Fisk, one of the Fortville Nazarene volunteers. “With these portable gardens, there’s areas in Indy that are food deserts, and you’re helping feed people. It’s just what, as Christians, we’re supposed to do, because you can give all the lip service you want … but if you don’t take care of what people need …”
“… They’re not going to hear the Gospel if you don’t meet their physical needs first,” said Laura West-Baldwin, a General Assembly delegate from Ohio. Though church business kept her and other voting delegates busy for much of the week, many took time on Tuesday to join the teams of volunteers serving.
“This was my day to come and help,” West-Baldwin said. “I’m happy to be here.”
The volunteers had been busy before Tuesday. On June 10, the group from Fortville spent the day sprucing up Indy World Sports Park. On Monday, they went to Christian Park on English Avenue, where the team weeded, spread mulch, cleaned the playground, trimmed bushes, and painted benches and picnic tables. They did this work alongside other Nazarene church members from other states, including Ohio, and even from other countries, including Brazil, Fiji and Tanzania.
There were more than a dozen sites around Indianapolis, where about 175 volunteers total offered acts of service — in addition to other projects going on around the globe, where Nazarenes who could not travel to General Assembly offered service in their own communities, from Los Angeles, California, to Seoul, South Korea, to other U.S. cities and foreign countries.
The church’s General Assembly convenes once every four years, typically, though the last such gathering was in 2017, also in Indianapolis. For a long time, community service in the gathering’s host city has been a tradition.
“We always show up in the community not just to take, but to give,” said Allen Southerland, chief recruitment officer for Shepherd Community, a ministry that took shape nearly 40 years ago from the seed of a Nazarene church’s Thanksgiving meal for the community.
The Church of the Nazarene’s 2.5 million members worldwide chose 1,800 delegates total, Southerland said, coming from 164 world areas. They gather at a General Assembly to choose leadership and conduct church business, and other non-delegate members of the church come to share in times of worship as a global church. He said a service Sunday with Communion drew about 15,000 to the Indiana Convention Center in downtown Indianapolis.
This is the seventh time Indianapolis has been host city for Nazarenes’ global gathering (1989, 1993, 2001, 2005, 2013, 2017, 2023). Community service has been part of past turns as host city, too. Southerland said in 2017, Nazarene volunteers carried out 150 projects in the 46201 and 46203 zip codes of the city.
“We show up not just to celebrate as a church, but also to serve the neighborhood we’re in,” he said.
After loading the wooden frames and soil-filled buckets onto trucks, twins Emma and Ella Coy awaited instructions on delivering them. Ella sat in the driver’s seat of a pickup truck and talked about also volunteering in 2017.
“It just amazes me how everyone can come together and like, accomplish so much,” said Ella, who with her sisters served with fellow Fortville volunteers. “… Look at all the people just showing up of their own free will to pay it forward to the community.”
