PORTSMOUTH — Several churches gathered last weekend under one mission: serving the community outside the church walls.

Together, the churches collectively impacted two areas of town that LifePoint’s Ryan Hunt explained could always use more love — with projects ranging from entertainment, food, laundry services, free goods and more.

LifePoint Church was involved and leading the pack once again, which was instrumental in the formation of the event many years ago.

Hunt said that Serve Day was a worthwhile experience once again.

To Hunt, this is more than a LifePoint project, as it is about stepping out from the walls of the church and serving.

To him, it is about uniting to serve as many people as possible.

The church has, however, slowed down in rallying other churches to join them, as a way to focus on their own projects with greater importance.

More recently, the church has been working with a handful of churches in Portsmouth — and partnering on a few key projects.

“We’ve kind of gone with a different approach with it. Previously, it was a very large, church-focused event where we spent a lot of time on getting more churches on board and not as much time on projects that we needed to accomplish. Church unification is important, but I felt like our church was losing focus on being good news to our community and we would rather get out and give love to our community ourselves,” Hunt said. “In the past two years, we’ve done less networking and building partners for the event and spent more time serving the people of the community through service projects. So, we only worked with a couple churches this year.”

The partnership with the Nazarene Church on Brown Street led to the creation of a “free yard sale”, in which people could go through donated items and clothing and take what they needed.

They also included a small party for kids, which included inflatables, free food and games.

“There were tons and tons of things donated that were free and we had families down there doing their ‘shopping’ for goods they needed,” Hunt explained. “Some were even doing their back to school ‘shopping’ so to speak, but it was free. It was a great day with free food, a good time and just an opportunity to love on that community in the East End.”

Another project they had worked on was a party in Bannon Park, which featured inflatables, carnival games, food donated by Sonora Mexican Restaurant, and a free movie showing.

The church also took over a local laundromat to provide free use of the machines.

Finally, they partnered with JD Knittles — to provide free oil changes to members of the community, with an emphasis on single mothers and grandmothers.

“Our people did the work, but we partnered with JD Knittles to use their location, Hunt said. “We went over and provided 25 free oil changes to single moms and grandmothers.”

With several locations being treated with kindness, Hunt explained that their focus was still narrowed to a few demographics and areas within the community.

“While it seems spread out, we really focused on Bannon Park and the East End as a way to put all of our eggs in those two baskets,” Hunt said. “Our goal was to serve children and their families. It is great when we’ve had opportunities to paint curbs and things like that, but we live here, and a lot of hard things happen in Scioto County. I think the people who have it the worst are the children. We have grandmothers raising their children with little resources for kids and families. We wanted to do everything we could to focus our love on Bannon and the East End children.”

Hunt’s pivot to focus events on children and families is important to him, due to passages in the Bible.

“For the local church to be on mission is important. Serve Day is national, as a way to remind churches to focus on the community at large— not to be a holy huddle of sorts, but to be good news for their community. I think some churches forget that, but the purpose of Serve Day is to be good news for the community. Serve Day, as a national event, is important, but what we actually accomplish is important to me,” Hunt said. “If you read Matthew 25, there is a story where it says, ‘when you’ve fed the hungry and brought drinks to the thirsty and clothed the cold and visited the sick and those in prison; whatever you’ve done for the least of these, then you’ve done for me.’ He goes on to say, ‘when you’ve failed to do these things, you’ve failed to do it to me.’ In my heart, for a Christ-follower, Matthew 25 is where we should be putting our resources.”

Hunt also claimed he would like to expand these services.

“You know, I’ve also been wondering how we expand these showings of love, how to get churches more active with us, and how we continue to be good news to the community all year. I’m curious of what we can come up with, but that is where we are going to be steering things.”