Greetings friends and partners! Happy Friday!
Praise God, the momentum is continuing here at The Joy Project. This week, we took steps towards more strategic partnerships, all of which look like they could be very fruitful.
The first was with a local ministry called “One Christ, Won City” led by my friend Jim Foubister.
One Christ Won City In Venice FL, Sarasota, Nort Port, and Englewood.
OCWC is focused on unifying the Body of Christ via different events and initiatives. I first got connected with Jim in 2023, when he asked me to be part of “Baptism in the Gulf”, an area wide unified baptism event. I got invited back in 2024, and 2025 and recorded this clip in 2025.
In 2026, they took a hiatus, but they are still doing various unity events throughout the year. While talking with Jim, he showed me something that really intrigued me. It was a service that he is an area coordinator for called “Meet the Need”.
MTN has an online software platform that allows people all over the community to input practical needs they have into a database and then have those needs be shown to all the volunteers that have registered in their system.
The categories of needs are broad, and include everything from household repairs, to rides, to physical items and everything in between. There are dozens of needs being put in on a regular basis in our area and there are over 1000 volunteers in the system who can sign up to meet these needs. Talk about a practical way to be the hands and feet of Jesus in our community.
Jim connected me with one of the lead people at MTN and we will be discussing with them the possibility of synchronizing these needs into our app so that our users will not only see an abundance of outreach events they can participate in, but also practical opportunities to serve individuals in Jesus’ Name.
We expect this to greatly multiply the Kingdom fruit from the app, so please be praying for the Lords will to be done in regard to this partnership.
I’m also excited that we now have a strategic partnership with Frontline Rescue Evangelism, led by a brother who is part of Calvary Chapel Sarasota.
Daniel Hilts, the leader of the ministry, is willing to offer a free evangelism training once a month to be listed on our platform. This will be a great asset to our network because many people who want to be involved in outreaches feel a lack of confidence because of having never gone through any training. Brother Daniel has actually taught up to 13-week courses before, so he is a great person to help people take this intermediary step.
I’m also excited to be meeting with the outreach coordinator at Bayside Community Church soon. I was given his contact info by a mutual friend, and he is very excited about what we are doing here at Joy Project. I love his response to learning about it, it pretty much embodies what every ministry leader says about the app:
I also had a great meeting with Pastor Ron of Hope International, and he is excited to have us come and share the app with his congregation so they can download it and get plugged in. And now that our development team has made some important updates to the app which have streamlined our event listings, we are ready to present this to congregations across the area.
On that note, please let your Pastor know about this, and please put him in touch with us. We believe this will be one of the major things that will unite the body of Christ in the days to come and ultimately lead to many more souls being saved.
More updates to come soon!
Blessings and love
Chris, Chris and John- The Joy Project Team