Great Rivers Fellowship empowers churches with community engagement grants

Great Rivers Fellowship, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship regional organization made up of communities in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, has awarded eight Community Engagement grants to local communities. These grants totaled $7,750 and support diverse local initiatives.

Local churches and communities say they felt empowered by the resources these relatively small grants offered them to complete both short- and long-term projects. And the young organization, which had its first annual meeting just two years ago, is now leaning into this empowerment by creatively imagining what the future of community engagement can look like in their regional context.

The grants

Each grant provided funding for unique community needs, such as grieving parent support groups, food insecurity, disaster preparedness, inclusion, the development of helpful life skills and community fellowship. On GRF’s website, they are described as “designed to encourage congregations to actively engage with their local communities, understanding the unique needs and challenges they face.”

To help with this work, GRF has partnered with Baylor University’s Center for Church & Community Impact, known as C3I. C3I is a research center through Baylor University’s Diana R. Garland School of Social Work that was created to equip congregations as sources of strength and support for the world. Their mission is “to equip congregations to create environments of relational belonging that extend to their surrounding community.”

This partnership aims to help craft more sustainable relationships across GRF communities.

Their team is coming alongside the organization to restructure the GRF engagement grant application process and create a system for future grants to encourage local congregations to think more about the different ways funding can be used. Their overarching goal is to help practice longer-term community engagement, rather than fund one-time-only events.

Meals and food insecurity

Like good Baptists, many of the community engagement events funded by GRF grants included food, but two of these grants centered the role of meals in transformative community.

At St. Charles Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, a GRF grant helped provide hot lunches on two Saturdays per month from June through December 2024 for community members facing food insecurity. The church previously researched food insecurity and available meal programs in their area and determined access to lunch was a high need.

At Rolling Hills Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Ark., a grant allowed them to provide a meal for an existing Grieving Parents Support Group hosted by the church — a program Pastor Steve Sheely says members have described as “lifesaving.”

Leaders learned that offering a meal made it easier for parents to attend the meeting, allowing them to worry about one less thing on that evening. Adding that meal brought the highest attendance rates since the COVID pandemic.

Community fellowship

Other grants focused on opportunities for community fellowship, working to affirm the ways we are all connected as siblings in Christ’s family.

At University Baptist Church of Hattiesburg, Miss., GRF helped the church put on a Trunk-or-Treat event. The celebration reached out to local families, especially those with children in the closest elementary schools and another community church called “Ekklesia” for an intergenerational fellowship opportunity.

At University Baptist Church of Starkville at Mississippi State, a special offering helped the church partner with other local organizations for an event titled “Rainbow Bazaar Marketplace,” which served as a safe space of fellowship for LGBTQ community members, especially students. The event also gave participants practical opportunities, such as learning about inclusive business or support group opportunities in the area.

This opportunity for connection, the church says, was a showcase of “God’s wildly inclusive love” in North Mississippi, challenging sentiments that hate has won.

Hardship, repair and a little music

Beyond fellowship and food, two more grants helped churches learn about and be prepared for disasters and have the tools to repair broken community supports.

At Broadmoor Baptist Church in Shreveport, La., GRF helped fund two projects during the month of June 2024: A disaster preparedness workshop and a community music camp. The disaster preparedness workshop educated community members on what to do in times of crisis and provided lunch during their 3-hour time slot.

GRF’s funding also helped the church provide scholarships to elementary schoolers, whose families were in financial hardship but wanted to attend their “Go, Go Jonah” community music camp.

At University Baptist Church of Baton Rouge, La., a GRF grant funded the repairs and renovation of the Together for Hope Mission House in Lake Providence, La.

Church members who attended the trip to help make the repairs said they “experienced the power of community engagement in a very tangible way” when a local farmer, sheriff and even local inmate volunteers formed a team to finish the project quickly. Although the community is one of the fiscally poorest in the country, one volunteer told GRF it was “rich in community” and the renovation experience “really gave me hope.”

Practical life skills

Finally, two community engagement projects conducted by Second Baptist Church Downtown in Little Rock, Ark., focused on educating participants in practical life skills and knowledge relevant to the context in which they live, worship and fellowship.

In one grant, GRF helped the church invite BJC leader Amanda Tyler to speak to church and community members about the relationship between church and state. Church leaders hoped to encourage congregation and community members to think critically about this intersection during an election year.

In another grant, GRF helped provide lunch and informational sessions educating community members on practical life skills, including health education, community resources and hands-on skills.

Looking forward with C3I

And looking forward to future projects, GRF is excited about their partnership with C3I to help equip congregations as they continue doing this work.

C3I works with their clients to strengthen the work that already is being done. The team uses both social work and ministry perspectives to create individualized action plans with every institution they work with, including congregational communities across the country. The four main areas of their work are wellness, care and hospitality, difficult conversation and children and individuals and families in vulnerable situations.

Their goal is to show how congregations can collaborate with one another and with their surrounding communities — in all their differences — to affect positive social change that meets their context’s needs.

Gaynor Yancey

“We don’t see congregations divorced from communities,” said C3I director Gaynor Yancey. “We do believe that working together has a positive impact on communities.”

Especially in today’s social, economic and political climate, Yancey said. “Since January, we may find ourselves with more people turning to congregations for help than ever before.” That is why, she says, congregations must understand “the importance of how we share” things like resources, space and love with one another in thoughtful, accessible and sustainable ways.

C3I Program Manager Erin Albin Hill agreed. “We deeply believe in the local church … being a safe place and resource for people.”

And although many people today associate the church with traumatic or hurtful experiences, or consider certain denominations as exclusionary or unwelcoming, which Hill acknowledges as a reality throughout church life, she also posited a challenge for the church: “The church should be the truest sense of goodness because it has the power to.”

To achieve this vision, Hill explained, “A lot of our work goes back to building empathy for people.”