Minnie Goes to Heaven (128)

(a novel continued)

That Sunday the invitation went out in every church in Haven. In some congregations they handed out flyers at the door. In others, team member gave a short testimony. In every church at least two people responded. At Rockwood fifty people wanted to be part of the venture. Most of these were men. The entire youth group at Minnie’s church volunteered. All told by Monday morning the discipleship group had 120 new volunteers.

Monday evening Minnie and John pulled out their set of maps. They prayed that the Lord would direct their decisions. Then they went to work. They decided to assign three new teams to each area. They gave the youth group from First Church, which was Minnie’s church the downtown. They put married couples together. There were at least four of those. Beyond that they put women with women and men with men. “Better not give the devil opportunity where there wasn’t any before,” Minnie said.

The next evening at their regular meeting at Nan's Minnie showed the discipleship group the breakdown. They prayed over it, approved it and each took the names and numbers of the new volunteers in their areas. Then they spent an hour assembling packets for the 120 new volunteers with material that Minnie had gathered that morning. They put bags, pens, markers, notebooks, and maps of the entire city on the table and circled round each picking up a bag and filling it with the other items as they walked around the table. When they had 120 packets, each one took six of these and added a map of their specific area to each. Then they tagged the bags with the names of the new volunteers. Jill took packets for the youth group assigned to the downtown and promised to deliver them to the church in time for their Thursday night meeting.

When all the work was done, the group gathered in a circle and prayed. Nan began, “Dear Lord, thank you for all these volunteers. Give us all courage and boldness and protect us from the works of the enemy. We pray it in Jesus name.” Others followed with specific requests for their areas, requests they had written in the notebooks.

After the prayer, Shirley piped up. “I thought we were going to give these requests to the churches to pray over.”

Minnie felt convicted. It was beside the point that her notebook was still blank. In her spirit she heard ‘follow through.’ Out loud she said, “That is something we should be doing. Any ideas about the best way to go about it?”

“Obvious,” Jill said, “The representative from each church should be collecting the requests from each team member in her area and reporting them to her church.” They opened up the bags again and wrote a note on the front of each notebook with the name and phone number of the church representative.

“Really, the church representatives should be at these meetings,” Jill said, “It would make it so much easier.”

“We don’t want to overload anyone,” Minnie said, “We might lose them.”

“Well we are all still here,” Amie said.

“For one thing, we couldn’t have the meeting in my house if there were 32 of us,” said Nan.

“Maybe we should just meet at the cathedral every Tuesday. Then we could invite as many people as are involved,” Melissa said.

“What and miss out on Nan’s tea?” Hannah said.

“Small sacrifice,” Nan said.

Minnie said she would ask Father George.