Church Aims To 'Put Others First'

Realizing New Year's Day, which this year fell on Sunday, may not be the best time to hold a normal worship service, a local church opted for something different.

"We decided to not have our normal worship and turn our worship center into a mission experience," The Well Lead Pastor Andy Postell said. "We called it 'Put Others First.'

"As people came into the worship center, we had stations set up where people could do different things. We also disbanded our normal children's activities and created mission opportunities for all ages."

Postell said Cartersville's , a self-proclaimed "Church Done Differently," in about an hour succeeded in helping people throughout the world in a lot of ways.

At the end of its New Year's mission session, the church had: 

• Packed 3 tons of food that has been shipped to an orphanage in Liberia;
• Put together 100 hygiene kits for the kids living in the orphanage;
• Put together 100 hygiene kits for the homeless community in Cartersville;
• Donated, sorted and packaged eight boxes of blankets, jackets, gloves, etc. for the homeless in Cartersville;
• Donated, sorted and packaged 25 boxes of clothes that will be given to charities across Georgia and West Virginia;
• Donated, sorted and packaged 50 boxes of clothes that will be sent to eight different orphanages across Liberia;
• Packaged gifts for the children of Andros, an island in the Bahamas; and performed other services, including:

• Children wrote letters and sent photographs of themselves to 50 kids in Liberia to develop pen-pal relationships in preparation for a church mission team's trip to Liberia in June, who will deliver the letters and encourage Liberia children to write a letter in return;
• Both children and adults decorated 200 goody bags for soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan; and
• The Well donated Christmas cards for cancer research.

The Well meets at 9:30 and 11 a.m. on Sundays at .

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