midnight outreach

one of the healing place church vans parked in front of "kittens" (a strip club) while a team from the church wsa inside giving roses to the workers.


a picture of the roses being given to each one of the workers.


the rizzo family christmas card placed on each lady's mirror. (this is a picture they took on their phone and sent to pastor dino in the middle of the night to wake him up.)

check out these cool hpc outreach pictures. they're the ones pastor dino rizzo referred to in his message a couple weekends ago. about six weeks ago, right after christmas, a team from hpc went out in the church van to some of the strip clubs and gave out roses to the strippers in the changing room. the manager let them in and they put roses at each worker's mirror and they included a christmas card from the rizzo family (the ones we gave out at church). you talk about rocking the world of some people who are not used to being shown love by Christians.

here's the story as told by those who went (from the serve team blog):

Last Friday night HPC had a Christmas party. It wasn’t at the church, more of a ‘Midnight Outreach take-out party’. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Midnight, this is an outreach where we go to the streets, strip clubs and hangouts that are frequented by people who are currently losing the battle to darkness. Our goal is to bring hope to the hopeless and to demonstrate the love of God to the lost and hurting. At one of the strip clubs a dancer looked at a volunteer and said, “Thank y’all so much. This is the only present I’ll be getting for Christmas.” The volunteer smiled at her, told her she was welcome and reminded her that God knew where she was at.

Midnight Outreach is another effort at being a healing place for a hurting world. Between 7pm and 1am we handed out 96 roses, a few cases of chocolates and 87 HPC Chick bags. We took these items into forgotten places, scary places, into places where sin normally has full control. The love of Christ, His hope and forgiveness, at least momentarily, shone very bright in those dark places.

we've gotta do it because it's what our Savior did for us - he loved us before we got our lives cleaned up.