In one of the lowest income communities in North America, a Southern Baptist church planter learns a small gift can go a long way
Note: The North American Mission Board (NAMB) recently sent $100 checks to a handful of missionaries across North America with a parable-of-the-talents assignment: find a creative, kingdom-building way to spend that money. This is one church planter’s story about what God did with that gift.
FLINT, Michigan – As celebrations go, North American missionary Leo Robinson Jr. thinks “Pomp and Circumstance” is highly overrated.
“I graduated college, so I remember what it’s like,” he said. “You take all these classes, and you get all these degrees, but then once you’re done and ready to graduate, you don’t know what life in the real world is going to look like. It’s scary, man.”
Leo knows this better than most 40-somethings. That’s because not long after he and his wife Miosha planted Good Church in Flint, Michigan, they also started a Thursday night youth worship gathering that’s now become North Flint’s Gen-Z place to be.
“We have more than 75 young people coming every week,” said Robinson. “It’s crazy. We’ve seen so many of them get saved and baptized. And I think that’s partly because with all the broken families in our neighborhood, in a lot of ways, Good Church has become their family.”
Leo is a Send Network church planter who’s now unexpectedly, all the time, surrounded by young people. That’s why when a $100 check with a spend-it-for-the-sake-of-the-kingdom string attached showed up in his mailbox, his mind went back to decade’s dormant graduation memories: the exams, the teary good-byes, and the indigestion-inducing anxiety that came with having to finally, suddenly, act like a grownup.
“Our college-age kids had just been telling us how tough this season was,” Robinson said. “And so when that 100 dollars came, I called a friend of mine at the University of Michigan at Flint (UMF) and asked him, ‘How can we bless your students?’ And the idea we came up with — God showed up in it.”
Graduation Goodie Bags — that’s how Leo and Good Church decided to use their gift.
“We filled up bags with all kinds of items we thought might help keep these college students going during finals week,” Robinson said. “We bought fruit snacks, Slim Jims, pretzels, popcorn, Gatorade—then we also put a New Testament in each bag and a Good Church wristband that says, ‘Don’t give up.’”
“One hundred dollars is not a lot. But when you buy all that stuff in bulk, your money can go a long way,” said Robinson. “And the intentionality of “Hey, let’s see what we can do with this,’ forced us to be laser-focused and really think hard about every item.”
Once the bags were filled, Robinson and several other people from his congregation drove across town to UMF and handed out the bags at a campus event.
“The kids we met were graduating and super nervous about having to go out into the real world,” Robinson said. “And we could tell — our being there with these gift bags really communicated to them, ‘Hey, you are loved by people in the real world, and we’re cheering you on from the real world.'”
A small gift can be a big thing. That night, Robinson and his team from Good Church handed out 50 bags. They prayed for and with every student they met. And they shared Jesus over and over again.
For the low, low price of $100, 50 kids heard the gospel, and Robinson and his church plant received a higher education.
“I’ll be honest — sometimes we get fixated on the larger dollar amounts, and I really didn’t think $100 would be enough to open that many doors,” said Robinson. “But there were so many cool moments. We got to tell so many kids our stories, we got to share with them how we came to know the Lord, and some of them were really interested in finding out who this Jesus is.”
“And for some of our young adults at Good Church who’ve been asking, ‘How can we connect with other young adults?’ that small amount of money created the opportunity to do the very thing God’s been calling them to do.
“So it lit a fire. Yeah, that’s what it did,” Robinson said. “That small amount of money lit a fire.”
To learn how God’s using Annie Armstrong Easter Offering gifts of all sizes to make Jesus known in an unreached place like Flint, go to anniearmstrong.com/robinson.