Destiny Angels helpline, Destiny Church, Glasgow

Destiny Church's vision is to provide a bridge between the church and community and offer no-strings-attached ministry with food hampers, a helpline, furniture and a short-term befriending service - showing God's love and grace to one person at a time...

Destiny Church is keen to meet both the practical and spiritual needs of its community in Glasgow and their method is simple but effective. Three years ago they came up with the idea of a helpline called ‘Destiny Angels’ that anyone and everyone could call, whatever their need.

The church had previously run soup kitchens, 12 step programmes and had helped local asylum seekers but they wanted to do more to provide a bridge between the church and the community. During a six-month pilot of Destiny Angels they knocked on doors and visited community events to get face-to-face with people and ask how they could help.  In the first month they received around 20 calls – now that figure has grown to an average of 200 per month!

Food hampers

Around 40 per cent of the calls Destiny Angels receive are from people - usually those who are unemployed and/or homeless - in desperate need of food. To meet this need, church members bring non-perishable food items with them to church such as pasta, rice, cereal, tinned meat and vegetables, tea & coffee. These are then made into hampers to supply individuals and families with enough food to live on for four or five days.

Furniture

Another big need in the community is for furniture as people are often moved into empty flats they can't afford to furnish, leaving them with nowhere to sleep or even sit. Sometimes the situation is just temporary while they wait for a grant to come through and they just need furniture to see them through. Destiny Angels Project Co-ordinator Susan Coupland says, “We ask people to let us know if they have an item of furniture to donate and it’s amazing how many times someone will call to say they have something to give, then a few hours later someone else will call looking for the exact item that has just been donated!”

Helping people make friends

Like many cities, Glasgow has a large number of lonely people and not many initiatives which help. “Befriending projects are great,” says Susan, “But often organisations find they can’t sustain the programme over the long term because the volunteers get drained or move on. We’ve decided to offer short term help where someone will visit for up to three months. Over that time the idea is they take the person out, find out about groups they could join in their local area and get them meeting new people with similar interests. Lots of people are just shy and really value having someone to go to events with, so that they can meet more new people. This helps alleviate the serious problem of loneliness without putting too much pressure on one volunteer.”

The church link is key

Destiny Angels are upfront about faith being the motivator for their work and they are keen to look after people’s spiritual needs as well as their practical ones. “Everything we do is given with absolutely no strings attached,” says Susan, “But we also take every opportunity we can to explain why we’re doing what we’re doing. We put leaflets in the food hampers inviting people to church and give away teaching DVDs when we can. We believe it’s really important to gauge what each client is open to and be led by God. We never ‘Bible bash’ but we have an open door to the church and we’ve seen a number of people come on a Sunday after we’ve helped them. We want to fulfil our mandate to stand up for the oppressed, feed the poor and to invite people into a relationship with Christ too. We’re working with other churches to spread the work of Destiny Angels and we’d love to see similar projects spring up around the country reaching as many people as possible. ”

Inspired? Thinking about doing something similar? Susan shares some of the things Destiny Angels have learned along the way:

• Identify what the needs are in your local area and what organisations are already working there so you don’t reinvent the wheel.
• Look at what resources you’ve got that can meet the needs and start from there. Then be ready to start a walk of faith. Look for more need and ask God to give you the resources to meet it.
• Think about how to handle calls when you’re not there. We have a system that allows missed calls to be translated into emails so that we can pick them up from wherever we are.
• Respect your volunteers and look after them. We have about 40 volunteers and we aim to meet with them every six months to see if they are happy in their role and whether there’s anything else we can do to support them.
• Look after the needs within your church family needs first. The Bible teaches that we should look after our brothers and sisters as well as those outside of the church so we mustn’t neglect the needs in our own congregations.
• Unfortunately you will sometimes get people in the community who try to take advantage of you so you have to put in boundaries. You also don’t want people to use you like a crutch and come to depend on you in an unhealthy way. For both these reasons we will only give up to three crisis hampers in any six month period. Though you can’t always keep rigidly to that, it does help make sure that your resources are distributed fairly.
• We’ve asked local businesses to get involved in our work to take some of the pressure off the church. We put food bins in a number of offices where employees can leave non-perishable food items that we distribute through our hampers. We’re also looking at ways to get supermarkets involved in the future.
• Always stay connected to God and recognise that he is the one resourcing the project. We invite God into every call we receive and ask him to give us wisdom to understand what the real needs are of the person who’s calling so that we can get right to the heart of the issue.
• Don’t look at situations from the perspective of what you can do but of what God can do. We always says, “Pray before you start your day” and the days we don’t are often chaos!

Want to get involved?

Destiny Angels are looking at ways they can support and resource churches around the country who would like to run similar projects. If you’d like to get involved you can email Susan for more information at susan.coupland@destiny-church.com

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