By J.A. Dunn

MIAMI —It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved with SOUL Team, a program that provides Vacation Bible School to inner city churches that can’t afford to start their own.

Developed by Miami Urban Ministries, the Summer Outreach Leadership (SOUL) Team will get a boost this year when the Florida Conference Council of Bishops’ Initiative on Children and Poverty (BICAP) task force kicks in a $7,200 grant to help SOUL Team hold Vacation Bible School programs at nine churches this summer.

SOUL Team began leading Vacation Bible School last year at five Miami United Methodist churches, with the churches funding the cost.

“One church was thrilled to have the program,” said Donna Jean Forster, Miami Urban Ministries program coordinator. “They told me one person drove by the church and asked what was going on because nothing ever happens at that church.”

That type of response is possible because of BICAP funds collected through offerings taken at Florida Annual Conference events.

Conference congregations may apply for a BICAP grant to undertake specific actions to make their churches more responsive to the needs of children and their families in the church and community.

Since the inception of the conference’s BICAP task force in 1996 more than $550,000 has been collected and distributed to more than 150 churches.

Aware the community surrounding her church was becoming less and less Anglo and more and more Hispanic, the Rev. Cathy Williams, pastor of Palm Springs United Methodist Church, allowed SOUL Team to hold Vacation Bible School there last year. She said it was an opportunity to minister to the Hispanic community, which she says goes largely unchurched.

Williams said SOUL Team immediately made an impact, both in the church and the community. She said the church only has three children, but eight attended the first day of Vacation Bible School, and by the last day 40 were participating. A large number of those children were Hispanic, and when Vacation Bible School ended there was no Hispanic Ministry in place to retain them and their families.

This year the church started a Hispanic Sunday School with hopes of retaining children, as well as their families, from Vacation Bible School.

Williams said the SOUL Team program has given the church a way to minister to its community. “We can see God work,” Williams said. “We want to reach out to the Hispanic neighborhood.”

Attracting new members and allowing churches to get involved in their communities is one goal of SOUL Team, Forster added. One church started its Vacation Bible School on Monday with five children and ended with 25 on Friday, Forster said.

To start a program, the SOUL team attends a pre-selected church on Sunday and explains the program to the congregation during worship service so their children or children they know can attend Vacation Bible School that week. The program begins that Monday and ends on Friday with a celebration parents are encouraged to attend.

A lasting difference is what 17-year-old Ruth Saintilien, a member of Grace Haitian United Methodist Church and member of SOUL team for two years, hopes she’s made in the lives of the 200 children she worked with last year.