For most missionaries, when they leave their field for home assignment, they also leave the bulk of their ministry behind them. For us, however, our time on Home Ministry Assignment (HMA) over the last 3 months has been the opportunity for huge growth and connection in our ministry in Serve the City International.

Carlton & Shannon reporting on STC to home church in VA

We of course wanted to spend time reporting on all our activities to our home churches while in the US. And of course we also wanted to encourage those same churches to engage or expand their participation with Serve the City, both in their own cities and abroad. And we had a great chance to do just that during February, meeting with all the pastors of our supporting churches and most of the missions pastors and missions committees. This was especially exciting as a couple of our main churches, Peninsula Community Chapel and Tabernacle Church of Norfolk, were in the middle of pastoral transitions. We were excited to spend time with the new guys, Garrett and Craig, to hear their heart for their churches and to bond over their vision of how serving could benefit both their congregations and their cities.

It also gave us a lot of joy to connect face to face with active City Leaders here in the US: Newport News VA (soon to be called STC Peninsula), Chesapeake VA, and South Jersey NJ. We were also supposed to return this month to South Jersey for an STC event and podcast interviews, and to Baltimore to meet with US City Leaders and their teams at the STC USA Forum. But unfortunately COVID-19 caused those plans to be called off. However, we still met with US City Leaders online for a couple of hugely encouraging hours during the time the Forum had been scheduled.

Perhaps the most surprising and exciting development of our time in Virginia, though, was how STC Norfolk, after being dormant for a number of years, started to come together again. Jessica Daly (daughter of former team member Linda Allison) has stepped up as the City Leader, and has been able to make contact with many associations interested in partnering with STC. A preliminary meeting of interested people (pictured below) numbered 20+ people, including pastors from 3 churches.

First gathering of people interested to start STC Norfolk

The wealth of contacts in the room turned out to be broad: public schools, the police, and social services, as well as numerous non-profits. One that they were particularly excited to partner with involved an enormous housing project that is due to be demolished—the largest gentrification project in the country—necessitating volunteer help for all the people due to be evicted from their homes and resettled. The group met again two weeks later and set their first event for May 9, Serve the City’s Global Volunteer Day.

Now, in the wake of COVID-19, they are trying to come up with some creative volunteering opportunities for that date that take government stipulations into account. And other STC City Leaders around the world are doing the same kind of creative thinking with their teams. We are praying that in spite of limitations, participation in the Global Volunteer Day will be more than usual, not less. It is our goal to have people serving in every time zone around the world!

This goal seems closer all the time due to work Carlton has been doing since January. Every New Year, Carlton likes to make a list of all of his contacts and plan for how to stay in touch with them (a mammoth task when you think of how many people my husband knows!) This year he was particularly focused on City Leaders in all our cities around the world. Carlton wrote a “City Leader Resolution” that he sent out to both active and potential City Leaders on every continent, that asked them to commit to action this year in their city according to our mission and values.

The response has been amazing! Some people that have been interested for a long time but had not yet initiated anything in their city committed to action, as well as others that had been moving slowly. So far, 88 City Leaders have signed the Resolution in every continent (except Antarctica—Carlton doesn’t know any enterprising penguins).

Marc Vetty (center) with STC Haiti volunteers

One group we are particularly excited about is a new Serve the City Caribbean cohort of City Leaders. Serve the City has been active in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, for around eight years, under the leadership of Marc Vetty. Unlike many other non-profits in Haiti, STC has operated there entirely run by Haitians and with no funding from any other countries. Marc has wanted to see this model implemented in other Caribbean countries, and has been developing relationships for some time with other potential City Leaders. Some of these are in other Haitian cities, but he has also connected with guys from Jamaica, Guyana, St. Vincent & Grenadine, and the Dominican Republic.

I was supposed to go (again!) to Haiti in March to record podcast interviews about their efforts. We were also trying to put together a STC Caribbean Forum the same week that would bring together these new City Leaders for training and fellowship. For obvious reasons, that has become impossible—but we are hoping to reschedule it for this fall and that both Carlton and I will go. And Carlton raised 1000 euros with a birthday fundraiser to make sure that the various leaders would be able to travel to it.

We are super excited about the community that is being created among City Leaders around the world! Most of them are active in a WhatsApp group that Carlton has created, sharing cool things that are going on in their city with volunteering, and encouraging one another. Who would have thought that time spent back in the US would create such global synergy?