Stewardship 2024
Greetings from the Lakeside Giving Campaign Team!
The world needs more community, more compassion, more justice and love – and that’s exactly what Lakeside sets out to provide each and every day.
Community: Following Jesus, we’re called to thrive and to help our neighbors thrive, creating a beautiful, delightful, abundant life for all. For 60 years, Lakeside has been a beacon of community in northern Kentucky: a gathering place, a refuge, a house of joy and welcome, and a wellspring of service for neighbors down the street and around the world. Through programs like “Lakeside Cooks” or Illumination Youth Ministries, we build community by gathering and connecting. Through mission initiatives, we build community by serving. Our choirs and musicians build community through the arts. And our children’s ministries and adult education programs build community through learning. Moreover, the heart of Lakeside’s community is worship. Every time we gather, pray, listen to God’s good news, support, sing, and celebrate, we build up the Beloved Community with joy and beauty. And God knows the world needs more joy and beauty!
Compassion: The world needs more compassion! That’s part of what God’s “abundant life” looks like – not hostility, indifference, or patronizing pity, but genuine compassion, the kind of mutual care evoked by Jesus’ call to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” At Lakeside, this kind of compassion is at the heart of everything we seek to do. When the deacons show up with flowers or send a card – that’s compassion in action. When the youth group make blessing bags or members serve food in Covington – that’s compassion in action. When our contributions to Kentucky Refugee Ministries help provide furniture for new neighbors who have struggled through war and violence – that’s compassion in action. And when we gather, get to know each other, and take care of each other when we need it most – that’s compassion in action, too. The simple, beautiful work of empathy, reaching halfway around the world or halfway down the block.
Now more than ever, in an age awash in suspicion, supposed scarcity, and disconnection, the world needs more places like Lakeside, communities dedicated to bringing more compassion into the world, more beauty, more abundant life.
Justice and Love: Justice and love are at the heart of God’s vision for abundance. Justice means sharing the gifts of the community with the community as a whole – and accordingly, it means speaking up for those who are left out or left behind. As the philosopher and theologian Cornel West has put it, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Lakeside has a long history of working on behalf of God’s loving justice. After all, Jesus came that we might have abundant life – and that “we” includes all of God’s children, not just a few.
The world needs more community, more compassion, more justice and love – and with your help, Lakeside can continue to provide these vital treasures, these signs and sources of abundant life. As each one of us generously gives, we know and trust the God of abundance will make more out of our gifts than we can even imagine. More community. More compassion. More justice. More love.
Help us plan for 2024 by pledging. Fill out the form below or grab a physical pledge card in the church at any time.
See you Sunday!
The Lakeside Presbyterian Church Stewardship Committee
