Bright reminder

A stoplight runs its cycle in the foyer of Spokane Valley United Methodist Church, flashing at members as they come to and go from worship.

It reminds them to stop, think of hungry people and donate to Church World Service for global and local hunger relief.

Madelyn Bafus, the church’s former coordinator of children’s ministries, education and mission and service outreach, read in Church World Service resource materials for CROP Hunger Walks about a church that set up a stoplight to draw donations.

For a while, she used a nonfunctioning stoplight in the Christian education area.

One day she learned from John Reynen, a church member who worked for the city of Spokane, that the city was replacing its traffic lights and the church could buy one.

Carl Jenkens, another member, put the stoplight on a post with a clear plastic collection container and rewired the light so it operated when plugged into an outlet.

“It’s a constant reminder of CROP,” Bafus says.

While the church previously recruited walkers every year for the local CROP Hunger Walk fundraiser, the last four years it has primarily given donations from the container. In 2007, it raised $600 for CROP hunger projects.

The church’s and Bafus’ outreach does not stop there.

More than a year ago, she left her job with the church and became a caseworker with Interfaith Hospitality of Spokane, one of four local agencies that share the CROP Walk funds raised in Spokane.

It organizes churches to host homeless children and their families for a week in their buildings, and helps families find housing, employment and services.

Bafus, who has a teaching degree, began in children’s ministry, but soon picked up on mission and service, she said, because “it’s where my heart is.”

When she was coordinator of mission and service, she offered different outlets to people and backed them up with Christian education.

“I hoped people would gravitate to where their hearts are,” she said. “We have many opportunities to be Jesus’ hands and feet.”

Bafus listed some of the ways Spokane Valley United Methodist Church’s more than 400 members serve people in the community and around the globe:

•Members assist with various hunger efforts, preparing or serving meals at Crosswalk or St. Ann’s Catholic Church, as well as helping at the food bank.

“At Crosswalk, we are the ‘roast church,’ and at St. Ann’s, we are the tuna noodle casserole group, because that’s what we always take,” says Bafus, who still serves on the mission and service team.

•The church helped start a food bank that operates out of Valley Partners, formerly Spokane Valley Center, which the church also helped start.

•Spokane Valley UMC helped start and initially housed Valley Meals on Wheels about 30 years ago. That program, which also receives CROP Walk funds, delivers meals to homebound elderly and disabled people from its office at 321 S. Dishman-Mica Road.

Church members still volunteer to drive.

“When my children were young and I drove to deliver Meals on Wheels, I took them with me. Now my son, Chris, who is in his 30s, wants me to take his daughter, Chloe,” Bafus says.

•It is a support church when St. Mary’s Catholic Church hosts homeless families through Interfaith Hospitality.

•Two years ago, through World Relief, the church sponsored a refugee family from Liberia.

The church’s commitment to outreach is visible in the foyer by the office.

A basket holds clothing gifts for CASA – Court Appointed Special Advocates, which assists abused and neglected children in the court system – a ministry of one group in the church.

Photos of Appoline and Helen, two orphan children in the Congo, sit on a table. The church has adopted them, writing letters and sending money so they can go to school. Church children, who have heard the story of their parents being killed, often write letters, too.

Reports on mission programs are often shared at the seniors’ monthly soup-and-salad lunches, the 55-Plus Luncheon. About 72 people come regularly from Good Samaritan retirement center, the neighborhood and the church.

“We started the lunch, aware that the end of the month is a hard time financially for seniors,” says Bafus. “It also gives them a social outlet.”

Bafus, who grew up Lutheran in Walla Walla, earned a teaching degree at Washington State University in 1970. She and her husband, Jerry, became United Methodist soon after they married. She taught fourth grade for three years in Walla Walla before they moved to Spokane Valley in 1979.

Seven years working at a pawn shop and meeting marginalized people heightened her commitment to mission.

Her motivation is Jesus’ words in Matthew 25: “When I was hungry, you fed me; homeless, you sheltered me,” and, finally, “when you do something to the least, you do it to me.”

The words of John Wesley, founder of Methodism, also inspire her: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”