From the Mission Year Website:
“Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor.”
My husband and I will be participating in the Mission Year Married program in Atlanta, GA. We will be living in community with another married couple in the neighborhood of Peoplestown. We will be doing fulltime community volunteer work during the day. I will be volunteering at a place called Emmaus House which is a community center serving their neighbors with ministries such as after-school programs, senior programs, poverty rights, computer labs as well as many other resources for those in need. My husband will be volunteering with an organization called the Georgia Justice Project which offers legal services for the indigent. My husband will be a Prison Support Advocate and will visit those in prison that Georgia Justice Project represents.
When we aren’t at our volunteer jobs we will be going out into our neighborhood and meeting our neighbors and building relationships with them. We will be taking the command of Jesus, “Love you neighbor,” literally.
We will also be living among the poor as one of them. We will live on $17 per person a week for food. (That comes to $68 per week for four people.) We will be doing our laundry at the laundromat and we won’t have television or internet access in our apartment.
We will also be pursuing our own relationship with God through taking advantage of scheduled quiet times, weekly Sabbath days, Citywides (all city worship and teaching gatherings), Weekly Reflections, and training sessions. We hope that God will grow us in ways that we have never imagined.