Willow South Lake Celebrates First Anniversary
On April 19th, Willow South Lake celebrated its first anniversary. The church, located at 625 Barclay Boulevard in Lincolnshire, Is the newest regional campus of Willow Creek Community Church of South Barrington.
It's not every day that you get to order birthday cake for seven hundred and fifty. On Sunday, April 24th, the church enjoyed cake after both the 9 AM and 11 AM services. One could argue that the cake was a bigger hit with those in the Promiseland Children's Ministry, however the adults enjoying their cake in the hallway outside the auditorium seemed equally pleased.
The first anniversary of the new church just happened to coincide with a major event, Celebration of Hope, which is held concurrently at all Willow Creek campuses in April each year. This is the eleventh year for the event.
Celebration of Hope is an annual program that allows the congregation of Willow Creek to share their many resources with others less fortunate around the world.
One of the major events of Celebration of Hope was the packing of seeds for the less fortunate in Africa and Latin America. A church the size of Willow Creek can dream big when it comes to major projects. In this case, the church designated a goal of packing one million family seed packets in a single weekend, April 15th-17th. They anticipated a need for 20,000 volunteers across all seven campuses. They ended up with 20,703 volunteers and packed 1,033,950 seed packets. For its part, Willow South Lake needed to come up with 500 volunteers to handle seed packing at their facility, and ended up with almost 600 volunteers.
Another event which was part of Celebration of Hope was a 5K Run at the South Barrington Campus. This event, held on Saturday, April 23rd was to benefit Syrian Refugees. Nearly 3,700 preregistered for the event, with a final count of 4,067 participants. Numerous members from Willow South Lake either volunteered, or ran in this event as well.
Another component of Celebration of Hope, specific to Willow South Lake, was to take up a special offering to raise funds to help partner congregations in the Dominican Republic and the Middle East. The funds will go towards bringing clean water and a community kitchen to a village in need in the Dominican Republic, and helping with trauma care for refugees displaced by the conflict in Syria.
Finally, one of the most graphic components of the Celebration of Hope program, was the displays that were set up at the South Barrington campus, addressing major social issues around the world. Issues such as poverty, clean water, hunger, etc. were presented with real life examples, and statistics, to show just how widespread these issues are around the world. The displays also addressed what Willow Creek and others are doing to address these issues.
Additional information is available on the internet at willowcreek.org/south-lake; and on Facebook at facebook.com/willowsouthlake.