The Lenten Mission Challenge

Let me start with the bottom line: you are all amazing! You really stepped up to our Lenten challenge.

As a reminder, our District Superintendent, Rev. Russ Abel, challenged every church in the district at our joint charge conference in October 2024, to undertake a new mission during the next year, preferably outwardly-focused on our community. At the February 2025 Church Council meeting, the Council voted to engage in a Lenten mission of collecting feminine hygiene products and urinary incontinence products for Covenant Partners Ministries.

Covenant Partners Ministries is a United Methodist ministry, currently under the direction of Rev. Colin & Rev. Heather Cress, who also co-pastor Community of Hope UMC (formed by the merger of Riverside and College Avenue UMCs). When several of the United Methodist Churches in the Muncie area that used to support Covenant Partners disaffiliated from the UMC, they also stopped supporting Covenant Partners.

Covenant Partners, located in our own neighborhood (down Jackson Street), serves those in need through both their spiritual and material needs. They provide a once-a-month worship service along with a dinner, and they offer food and cleaning supplies until they run out. We asked them what they most needed, and they said the number one requested item is feminine hygiene products, along with urinary incontinence products – largely because these items are not SNAP eligible.

We know you all already support our Food Pantry. This challenge would serve many of the same people, and our own community. So during Lent, we asked you to bring in these items, to be donated to Covenant Partners just after Easter in celebration of the Risen Christ. If you didn’t have the opportunity to shop for these items, you could donate toward them. We received $245 in contributions toward the mission challenge.

We’re donating the materials to Revs. Colin & Heather the week of April 28 (because they took the week after Easter as vacation). They’re bringing the Covenant Partners’ van, because you all did so well in your donations and we have A LOT to give them.

Thank you for your support of this much needed ministry for our siblings in need, and for our sister UMC ministry.