ASHLAND – Representatives of two Ashland churches, Come Alive Community Church and Trinity Lutheran Church, came together Friday to celebrate a new partnership they hope will empower and transform lives by healing broken family relationships and encouraging conflict resolution.
The well-established Trinity Lutheran Church gave a $6,000 donation to the newer Come Alive Community Church for cameras and office equipment to help fulfill a vision Come Alive Pastor Andrew Foster has for a new ministry.
Located at the corner of Fourth and Cottage streets, the approximately 3-year-old congregation at Come Alive is passionate about connecting with people of lower socioeconomic status, helping them not only to find and access appropriate social services but also to learn strategies to improve their own lives.
Foster is planning to launch a program this spring that will provide a safe space for children and help foster conflict resolution in broken families, modeling healthy relationships so that conflict patterns are less likely repeat in future generations.
“If you have a strong family, you have a strong society. But if you don’t have strong families, all your structures are going to fall,” Foster said. “It is from family life that we engage and interact with our society. For example, how you feel at home, you carry that into the workplace. Then how well you get along with your coworkers is directly reflective of how you get along with your family members.”
Foster’s plan is to receive referrals from local courts, social services agencies and schools and to provide services free of charge for families.
The program would provide a safe space for kids where parents can come to have supervised visits with video monitoring, if that is what is required by the courts. Parents who are separated and estranged can begin by dropping off their kids without having to see each other, but eventually, they can receive counseling and encouragement to build healthier co-parenting relationships for the benefit of their kids.
“One of our goals is to empower parents and families to be able to live in conflict so the conflict doesn’t fracture their relationships, but they can rise above the conflict and work amidst the differences of both parents,” Foster said. “The children then can see that dynamic played out, and as they live in society they are skilled, because they saw mom and dad do it, to engage with tensions they are faced with in society.”
Eventually, Foster hopes to be able to connect the families with resources for a range of needs, from help with budgeting to parenting lessons.
The money donated by Trinity Lutheran for the program comes from Trinity’s outreach fund, which goes to support programs outside Trinity’s walls, in Ashland as well as elsewhere in the world.
“We have a committee that evaluates applications and picks the ones we think are most deserving of funding, and then we put them on a ballot that we present to the congregation, and the congregation votes on these projects … The congregation picked Come Alive Ministries as something we want to support,” said Kenny Oberholtzer, a member of Trinity’s outreach committee. “God is about making people whole and bringing people together and building relationships, and that’s what Pastor Foster is trying to do here is trying to help make families whole again.”
Foster plans to continue fundraising for other costs associated with the program and then to launch the program in May and grow it over time.
“I don’t expect change in five years. Hopefully 20 to 25 years down the road, Ashland will be changed by this program,” Foster said.
