Lynwood adjusts City2City outreach event to help community throughout pandemic

Lynwood Baptist Church has looked for new ways to “bless the community” throughout the coronavirus pandemic, which members hope to continue at the second annual City2City event Saturday.

Executive pastor Hayes Howell said they have organized a variety of projects for the City2City event, as well as a picnic afterwards to celebrate the church’s accomplishments.

There are two main projects, Howell said. One project involves landscaping around Burfordville Baptist Church and Fruitland Community Church in Cape Girardeau County. The other includes sending gift cards and handwritten notes to public schools in Cape Girardeau, Jackson and Scott City, where the schools can distribute them to families in need.

“This year, we are doing the gift cards a little bit differently,” Howell said. “We’re actually going to handwrite a card that each one of those gift cards will go into — an encouraging note, so that when that family gets that card, they know it’s been prayed for.”

Howell said about 50 students from Lynwood Baptist’s youth ministry will also be volunteering at the Shining Light Food Distribution Center on Saturday in Charleston, Missouri. Howell said church members realized they needed to “scale back” on this year’s City2City event due to the pandemic, which would allow them to engage in other partnerships within the community.

“As we encountered COVID back in March, we knew that the [City2City] event was going to look drastically different, so we did some other things throughout the year,” Howell said. “We’ve had a couple opportunities to partner with different organizations.”

Some of these partnerships are with local coffee shop Red Banner in Cape Girardeau and coffee trailer Molan Latte in Jackson, Howell said.

“This week, first-responders can go to these locations and get a free cup of coffee on us, just to say ‘thank you’ for all that they’re doing,” Howell said. “That actually began Tuesday and it goes through Friday.”

Howell said the church will be hosting a picnic outside Lynwood Baptist Church at 5:30 p.m. Saturday, with pizza and music, where they will announce some of their other partnerships.

“[The City2City event] is not really about magnifying Lynwood, it’s about blessing the community, and helping people experience the love of Christ in a real way,” Howell said.

For more information, visit www.lynwood.church/city2city.

A previous version of this story listed the wrong county location for Burfordville Baptist Church