Clarksville, consider yourself officially “Invaded.”

This weekend wrapped up the final outreaches of our first-ever Invade The City outreach week. At the beginning of 2013, I told Awaken that our goal for the year was to be further invested in our city than ever before…and we’ve now fulfilled that far more than we had envisioned!

We’ve been planning and prepping for Invade since December of last year. Partnering with 7 organizations over a period of 8 days with so many people involved and so many moving pieces was quite the administrative feat. I’m so thankful for such an incredible team to make it happen.

Since this was our first Invade, I didn’t know what to expect from the week. We thought about setting a goal of 300 hours that we would give back to our city during Invade. 300?! That was it? We highly underestimated what would happen this week. As a church, over the course of 8 days, 180 people (adults and kids) partnered with 7 organizations, pulled off 14 separate events, and gave 704 hours of service back to our city…and those are only the hours we could keep track of!

In addition to the amazing amount of time we gave to our city, I was blown away at the many people who gave so much time, effort, and energy, took time off of work, and gave themselves to serving the city. It is an honor to be the pastor to a bunch of people who love serving Jesus in such practical ways.

Here are a couple highlights from Invade The City week…

– We met all the school supply needs for the Youth Villages kids in Clarksville on Saturday night alone! The extras that came in went to kids in Nashville, Cookeville, and other surrounding cities!

– The Red Cross was hoping to collect 25 units of blood, but we gave 27 unites instead. With that blood, we are a part of saving up to 81 lives!

– On Thursday alone, a team of 26 people gave 118 hours toward painting the parking lot in our shopping center. We wanted to bless our landlord, and that parking lot looks great now!

– We partnered with the city of Clarksville’s Housing division and worked on 3 separate housing projects throughout the week. In one of our final projects, “The Jenkins House,” our team gave about $5,000 worth of labor and materials!

Just for fun (and to put things into perspective), think about 704 hours like this:

– In order to work 704 hours, it would take 17 40-hour work weeks. If you go to work on Monday, and work till mid-November, that would be the same amount of work that we did in just 8 days!

– If you got in a car, and traveled at 70mph for 704 hours, you’d travel 49,280 miles, which would be 2 whole laps around the circumference of the earth!

God did great things this week in and through us. Those are the stats, here are some pics…