Dearest Brothers and Sisters,
What an amazing summer it has been for Detroit Hope. I truly know prayer works when so many awesome things have happened in our favor. I just want to take a few minutes and tell you about them.
Most recently we had our first two baptisms in at least 7 years here at Detroit Hope. This is a seed planted, and a growth beginning. David Raphael McCray and Victoria Childs are our first in the time I have been here, but I know because we haven’t had a full strength congregation we haven’t had the conviction and commitment to Jesus as we have been working towards. Now we are starting to feel where all this work has been for.
I wish you all could have seen David, come up out of the water, and give the “Rocky, Champion of the world victory fists” when he came up out of the water. I hope a picture will do but the experience was priceless. I must say, this is a culmination of all the help and support we have mustered this summer.
This summer started out with a lot of goals, a lot of projects with deficiencies, and the need to take care of some of them so our congregation could grow. Our first miracle came from a great youth group from Rachel’s original stomping grounds. Northwest Florida-Alabama Mission Center is where they were from. Several youth, 3 staff and a whole lot of energy came from the south, the many thousand miles up here to come and work, to minister, and to enjoy life in Detroit for a while. Boy did their summer get off to a great start. They worked on about 12-14 projects around the church facility, they worked in ministry capacity, doing visiting with the seniors, visiting in the community, and canvassing the community for an week end festivity that included a talent show, dime sale, bar-b-que and water fun day for the community. When it was all said and done we had a group of 75 plus for Wednesday night pizza church, a group of 120 plus for our bar-b-que, and several people that have joined our congregation merely because of the differences they made in the outside of the buildings exterior. These changes include a sign out front, a community garden, and painting the lines for our basketball goal to help us play pick up games and shoot three-pointers. The ministry, and the projects were accomplished with style and energy, and put us way ahead of our goals, so much so, that we accomplished most of what we had planned for 2007 in about a weeks time.
Next came our annual summer camp, with a starting attendance of 32 youth. This year seemed to run better when we split up the youth and the teenagers, with youth ages 8-12 upstairs with their own staff, and 13-18 downstairs with their own staff. This was almost orchestrating two camps at the same time. It worked for the first two weeks, we had many victories, and a great field trip to the Detroit Science Center. We took a week off for July 4th week, so Rachel and I could go teach Sr. High class at reunion, and she ended up having a gull bladder surgery, and we were covered by Rob Borkowski and Pam Hernandez. After that week is when we rushed back into our first baptisms here at Detroit Hope, and we look forward to making our first trip as staff to SPEC with one of our youth David McCray, and 50+ others from the rest of the rest of the region.
In many ways I want to say thank you for supporting us and praying for us, because in many ways this summer has been a big answer to our prayer. I know because of you out there praying, we have felt God more in our lives. Thank you.
God bless you all,
Jacob Blakesley
