Groups headed out to their serving sites after morning quiet time and got experience things like serving at a soup kitchen, running a day camp for kids at a boys and girls club, helping students at a learning center for low income families among other projects.
After lunch, all of our groups embarked on a prayer tour of Nashville. We visited historic sites and various neighborhood landmarks and prayed over schools, neighborhoods and ministry partner locations like “room at the inn” which uses rooms at a local boutique hotel as a day shelter for some of Nashville’s homeless population.
CSM staff led our groups in a neighborhood immersion project where students took on the identity of an average family from various different neighborhoods in town. Roles within the family were assigned to each students and collectively, they had to make decisions about how provide food for the family’s dinner while taking into account the limited resources they had and unexpected expenses like buying toilet paper and peanut butter for the home. We were then able to debrief the experience and discuss some of the causes and remedies of poverty in communities. One of the bigger takeaways for groups was realizing that poverty is not simply a lack of material resources but the result of broken relationships.
The night wrapped up with our first “Porch Time” of the trip where we gathered all of our groups and shared funny moments from the trip so far as well as moments where we saw Jesus move. We sang worship songs and had our first talk where we visited the Luke 10 passage where Jesus sent the 72 disciples and instructed them to “leave it all behind”. Small groups dove into the topic and discussed being fully present on the trip and putting aside things that would distract us and take away from our experience.
Nashville is off to a great start and we are excited for what tomorrow will hold for our students.
