Church 180 in Seaman held its fifth annual Christmas Bazaar on Saturday, Nov. 21, on Moore’s Road in Seaman.
This year’s festival featured 30 vendors offering a wide variety of products for Christmas shoppers including, Christmas and primitive décor, health, bath and body products, jewelry, crafts, and much more.
The bazaar is held each year to raise funds for the Midwest Dream Center, a year long, faith based, life recovery program for people recovering from addiction.
“We’re adding more vendors every year,” event organizer Rhonda Burton, told the Defender, “The Dream Center is a way of giving back to the community.
Church 180 members are dedicated to providing help to those in need by actualizing their vision of a recovery center that has the capacity to reach those who are struggling with serious addictions.
“This facility will allow those struggling with addiction to escape their negative environment for 12 months while they go through recovery,” Michael Parks, pastor of Church 180 explained. “In February of this year we had $8,000 in the bank for the project, since then we’ve auctioned off a car, a vacation, and several quilts, and we now have $40,000 in the bank.”
According to their web site, “The Dream Center will exist for the purpose of helping adult men and women of all ages become free from addictions and other life-controlling issues. We will do this by offering a comprehensive faith-based recovery program as an alternative to mainstream drug and alcohol treatment centers. It will strive to help solve moral decay, crime, drugs, and poverty epidemics that exist in Adams and the surrounding counties. The vision of the Dream Center is to see hundreds of hurting people come to know a new life through the efforts of our staff, volunteers, and rehabilitated individuals whose lives have been dramatically changed.”
The Dream Center will offer an intense one-year program to enable graduates to become a successful, productive, and functional part of society. The program accomplishes this by enabling residents to become: spiritually alive, emotionally stable, physically healthy, and socially active in all aspects of society. This is done through a rigorous schedule that runs from 5:30 a.m. in the morning until 10 p.m. at night, in which residents participate in various group activities, classes, and work projects.
The Life Recovery curriculum used in the residence program helps individuals achieve success based on their behavior and attitudes. This method provides the person with skills to understand that the choices they make directly affect the benefits and rewards they receive in life. This unique program also creates opportunities for graduates to be in a leadership role as a second-year resident with additional responsibilities of overseeing various areas of housing, as residential advisors.
The Dream Center will be housed in a new 60- bed residential facility that will be located and constructed in West Union. The program will be operated by a combination of volunteers and administrative staff employed by the Midwest Dream Center. Upon entering the program, residents will be offered counseling, group settings, diversion programs, GED training, life skills equipping, job training, and other important key programs.
In addition to the life recovery home offered by the Dream Center, staff and volunteers offer other programs and services to the surrounding community. One such program to reach at risk neighborhoods is Adopt-a-Block. Individuals will visit selected neighborhoods to create relationships by addressing needs while going door to door. Sometimes, families are found that do not have transportation to crucial basic life functions, they may have no food in the kitchen cabinets or even furniture in their homes. These needs are identified and addressed by local congregations of churches and other local organizations. Over time, these new found relationships with the parents of at risk youth will allow access to their children to help them with proper relationships to help ensure successful endeavors in their lives.
Other outreach programs of The Dream Center will include the following: busing over 100 children and adults to local non-profit organizations, training students and recovering addicts to ready them to earn their GED, providing child care for young mothers who are trying to earn their college degree and conducting a victims support group for women. The center will also network with corporations, non-profit organizations, foundations, and individuals from Adams and surrounding counties to reach people and help meet their most basic needs. Although addictions and other life-controlling issues are a threat throughout our nation, the Dream Center’s direct focus will be on Adams and surrounding counties. The effort is to assure that the war on drugs and poverty is not lost by providing help for today and hope for tomorrow.
See more at: http://midwestdreamcenter.com/live/about-us/#sthash.JFHBHwoY.dpuf.
