Ridgecrest Calvary Assembly Church Bev Pippen– The Ridgecrest Calvary Assembly Church (RCA) will host an Angel Tree Event on December 22 at 6 PM.
What is Angel Tree?
Incarceration can strain family ties to the breaking point. By providing Christmas gifts on behalf of incarcerated parents, sending kids to summer camp, hosting sports camps, and other activities, Prison Fellowship Angel Tree allows local congregations to extend the hope of the Gospel to families with loved ones in prison.
In addition, Angel Tree invites and equips congregations to integrate Angel Tree families into church activities year-round, resulting in mutually beneficial relationships that foster growth, support, and encouragement.
What is Celebrate Recovery?
Celebrate Recovery is a beautiful community of strugglers that courageously enter this safe and beautiful space to get honest about our pain, and the negative ways we may see ourselves, God and others. In this process we come to accept that some of the habits we may have developed to escape our pain have caused destruction in our life and those close to us.
Celebrate Recovery is a biblically balanced approach to help bring sustainable recovery and healing to our hurts. It guides us toward new healthy truths and life-giving habits as we repair our broken relationships. Join more than 7 million hurting people across the globe who now walk in freedom through the power of Jesus Christ as we walk through the 8 principles of Celebrate Recovery based on the Beatitudes in Matt. 5.
What is Prison Fellowship?
Charles “Chuck” Colson, President Richard M. Nixon’s White House counsel and hatchet man, served time in a federal prison camp for a Watergate-related crime. After his incarceration, Chuck felt led by God to honor a promise he made to remember his fellow prisoners and their families. That promise grew into Prison Fellowship® and the world’s largest family of prison ministries.
Prison Fellowship® works to restore America’s criminal justice system and those it affects. We help men and women replace the cycle of brokenness that landed them in prison. We advocate for justice reform and activate grassroot networks to do the same. We equip wardens to bring restorative change to their facilities. We care for prisoners’ families and help strengthen the bond between children and their parents who are behind bars. We call the Church to lead the way in caring for those impacted by the criminal justice system. And we do it all from a biblical worldview.
This year Ridgecrest Calvary Assembly Church will serve 4 local families and 15 children
Several years ago Celebrate Recovery forged a partnership with Prison Fellowship. RCA began holding an Angel Tree Party with our local Celebrate Recovery group in 2019. We heard a message from James D’Amato (who worked on the national level with Celebrate Recovery Inside and who now works with Prison Fellowship) at the CR Summit and were compelled to see how we could bring some joy to local kids with incarcerated family members. After seeing the joy on their faces, our church decided that we would make it an annual event. This is our first time being back inside after the COVID restrictions of the past few years. We had to skip our event in 2020 due to Covid, but in 2021 we held our event in the church parking lot.
