Dear Ministry Friend and Coworker,
Caleb Ministry’s* outreach with His Branches into the 19th Ward in the inner-city of Rochester began by prayer-walking the community. This provided us with an awareness and sense of the “spiritual needs” within the neighborhood. After the initial two weeks of prayer walking, our teams began conducting surveys with the people they met while prayer-walking. The survey was a list of questions which when answered would provide a clearer understanding of the “felt needs” within the neighborhood.
The importance of this information is expressed by the following statement, “In order to effectively reach a community and lead them to change, you must know how a community thinks and also what a community needs. Knowing how a community thinks and what the community needs will help you know what motivates and stimulates the people in a community.” We believe that by addressing the felt-needs of the people, we gain the confidence and the trust of the people to address their spiritual needs. In many cases, the expressed felt-need and the discerned spiritual need were the same.
Attached is the analysis of the surveys which were conducted in one-on-one interviews over a three-week period. The findings of the survey are a telling picture of a community that is in crisis and a community which is crying out for help. We are thankful to Mr. Carl Facciponte who did the analysis and provided the attached report.
The analysis and implications of this survey constitute a Call-to-Action! We ask that you pray about being a part of the solution to the problems in the 19th Ward by joining our ministry team, which is composed of believers from different churches and ministries, using their God-given gifts and abilities to bring salvation and transformation to a community in crisis. The harvest is truly ripe!
Please don’t hesitate to call (585) 314-1614 or email me in response to the survey.
In His Service,
Gary Ham
*Caleb Ministry Launch
In 2009, 11th Hour Christian Initiatives launched Caleb Ministries, a home-based missions outreach. This began when a small group of believers from different local churches came together with a shared burden to evangelize the lost and disciple new believers who live in high-need, high-poverty, and high-risk areas within the city of Rochester, New York.
