Las Vegas, Nevada
“52 million people travel to Las Vegas each year. During our short time living in Vegas, our hearts began to long for those people more than we ever could have imagined.” - Julie and Matt Harrison
Why Las Vegas? This national Pioneer Place of Engagement offers The Heights family the chance to provide financial, prayer, relational, and team support with Lifesong Church, a new church plant in one of the fastest-growing and most unchurched cities in America. Efforts will be coordinated through Surgance, a Las Vegas-based non-profit ministry coordination organization, and Hope Baptist Church, a thriving church in the Las Vegas area.
What are the objectives?
- Be a key “start-up” partner with a new church plant called Lifesong Church to engage, minister, and reach out to the community.
- Work with Lifesong Church leadership, along with Hope Baptist Church in Las Vegas, in a mentoring partnership.
- Provide financial, prayer, relational, and team support as this church establishes a ministry presence in the community.
- See God reach individuals and families through the ministry resulting in both spiritual and numerical growth.
- Transform the Southern Highlands community through ministry and relationships with families and individuals.
What is the strategy?
- Realizing that one of the fastest growing segments of the population in Las Vegas is elementary-aged children, the primary tool to reach these children and their families is Upward Unlimited, an evangelistic sports ministry.
- Upward will provide opportunities to witness life change and “do life together” in the community for children, families, and volunteers who participate.
- Send Heights’ teams to the Las Vegas area for short-term missions. These teams will have participants who have expertise in implementing and running Upwards programs, students with sports-ministry backgrounds, and participants who will canvas neighborhoods, communities, and points-of-interest to promote and share the news of Lifesong Church, Upward programs, and ministry-related events and programs.
- Partner with Southern Highlands Preparatory School to give back to the community through service projects that impact children and families.
- Adopt community initiatives through the new church and a non-profit organization called Surgance to partner in community initiatives to help the homeless, battered women/children, single-parent families, and more as needs are explored and discovered.
- Start a church to provide a place for people to hear of the love/sacrifice/and grace of Christ—then see members who embody and live out the gospel.
Occupations, skills projected for this Place of Engagement: Relationship builders, parents familiar with the Upward Basketball Program, persons with athletic ability, sports organizers, persons with the gift of hospitality, persons burdened for families, children’s workers, life skills trainers, social workers, persons with compassion, good organizers.
