What’s this all about?

This past Sunday (February 21), our church, Brentwood United Methodist Church (www.bumc.net), unveiled something called the “Living a Better Story Experience.” During worship services throughout the weekend, $25,000 in 5’s, 10’s, and 20’s was passed out to the congregation. After telling the story of the feeding of the five thousand, where Jesus took small amounts of bread and fish and multiplied it to feed over 5,000 people, our pastor challenged the congregation to take one of these packets of money and figure out a way to multiply it.

The one string attached to this money was this: it can NOT come back to the church. It must be invested in a ministry or person OUTSIDE the walls of our church. My wife Amanda grabbed a packet, and we had one of the $5 bills.

Something that we’ve discussed recently in our house is the fact that most diseases in the world come from a lack of access to clean drinking water, an issue that could easily be solved, and is being solved by different organizations who dig wells in third world countries. Typically, the cost of digging one of these wells is around $5,000.

Jesus took five loaves of bread and turned it into enough food to feed five-thousand people.

And we have decided that we are going to take our five dollars and try to turn it into five-thousand dollars to dig a well in sub-saharan Africa for an entire village of people who don’t currently have access to clean water through an organization called Just Hope International. It’s that simple. Five dollars to five thousand dollars. Ambitious? Maybe. Possible? Absolutely!