By Jeff Brumley
The Well at Springfield, a 4-year-old missional church plant, chose that name to underscore its role as a source of spiritual nourishment in its urban Florida neighborhood.
But its pastor, Susan Rogers, said the Jacksonville congregation can also be considered a bridge because it strives to connect schools, nonprofits and businesses to serve residents in the Springfield neighborhood.
“We want to be a connector between different people that otherwise wouldn’t meet,” Rogers said. “And we want to connect with what God is already doing 
through multiple agents.”
The form that takes is always surprising and powerful, she and others from The Well say.
Laundromat of love
An example she cited is Well’s Laundromat of Love ministry.
Held twice a year, it features members of the Cooperative Baptist congregation paying for the washing and drying of clothes for a two-hour period on a Sunday morning. The next outing will be March 1.
Volunteers give out the instructions, get the participants in order and provide quarters to 30 families. Each family gets two loads of washing and two loads of drying each, at a cost of around $300 to the church.
Game and coloring book tables are provided to children at the laundromat.
“We like to do things that are out-of-the-box to catch people by surprise and show generosity,” Rogers said.
But it also fits The Well’s standard as a ministry of connection.
“We thought it might help us connect with people in a way we otherwise wouldn’t,” she said.
And Rogers was right.
During the most recent Laundromat of Love outing, Rogers said she met a woman in the parking lot who was grieving the death of her younger brother who had been murdered and dumped on the side of a street. The woman also felt heartbroken and angry at how he had been treated by other family members.
They met over coffee a week later. In an hour-and-a-half conversation, the woman conceived a way to properly honor her brother.
“She went to the place where the body had been found and had a memorial service for him,” Rogers said. “That all came out of us just being there and being open to whatever encounters might happen.”
But the laundry side of the ministry on its own can be just as powerful, said Cori Wood, who has served as the congregation’s contact with the laundromats.
“The strongest feature of the ministry is that we meet people where they are at and offer them assistance with something that is a basic need but can be very financially draining on a family or individual,” Wood told Baptist News Global.
Laundromat of Love “is effective because we get to be with people and to offer them an opportunity to talk, pray or do nothing if that is what they want to do,” she said.
It’s also important to just let the participants speak, Rogers added.
“It’s just listening and being available to let people share whatever they need to share and not feeling like we need to fix people,” she said.
“Just being present was enough and God did the rest.”
‘Building bridges’
Forging partnerships is another way The Well seeks to connect unlikely dots in Jacksonville, Rogers said.
During the meeting of a school advisory council Rogers attended, it was announced that the Andrew Robinson Elementary School coat closet was out of coats.
Rogers mentioned it in church and soon had six donated coats for the school’s children in need.
But Greg Warner, a regular at The Well, was incensed.
“It just makes me mad that there is such a simple solution for such a silly tragedy,” said Warner, who also attends Jacksonville’s Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church. “It was just real obvious what needed to be done.”
And that was to get on Facebook and solicit residents of Warner’s neighborhood, which is some distance from Springfield and the elementary school.
“On my first trip to the school,” Warner said, “I had 46 coats and jackets and now I have 27 more to take over — all of that within one week.”
Many of the donations came from young families. One couple without children purchased coats for the cause, he said.
Warner said he hopes the coats keep a lot of children warm as well as strengthen The Well’s relationship with the school.
“This is a simple way for me to contribute something to that partnership and let the elementary school know we are serious about helping them out,” Warner said.
Rogers said the success of the coat campaign demonstrates The Well’s ability to draw unlikely allies together — in this case two different neighborhoods — to help those in need.
“To me, that is building bridges,” she said.
— Baptist News Global’s reporting on innovative congregational ministries is part of the Pacesetter Initiative, funded in part by the Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation.