EXCELSIOR SPRINGS – Church of Liberty Pastor Doug Perry said his church is taking on a new project to aid those who need help making ends meet.

Area residents might know the church for work since 2015 to shelter the poor about 1.5 miles north of Walmart.

“At a mobile home park here in Excelsior, we own like 10 of the mobile homes and house people there,” Perry said.

The church asks the mobile home residents to cover the cost of basic expenses for the trailers.

“Typically, we ask that they contribute to cover their own costs for rent, utilities,” Perry said. “If it’s single people, … we try to have three, four bedrooms in the mobile home. It may not be very big, but it’s monastic, sort of – a bed, a desk and room for your little TV, but if they can each contribute a couple hundred dollars a month, then we can pay all the utilities and the lot rent and stuff like that, because we own the trailers.”

Various types of people need the service, he said.

“Some folks have disabilities … and some of them are here to help with the the ministry and offset (rent) by working at the (church) farm or the other stuff that we do,” Perry said. “We try to be flexible.”

THE NEW WAREHOUSE

The church has rented about 14,000 square feet of warehouse space at No. 7, 115 Crown Hill Road, next to Orscheln, to store and sell items for community use.

“It is meant to be a thrift store and a community storehouse … for anybody in the community that has extra stuff. We’ll house it and get it to people that need it,” Perry said.

The church used to have a free store, but the public seemed leery about getting anything good free, he said.

“If you give it away free, they don’t get it,” Perry said, so the thrift store will charge modest prices. “If you want to pay $100 for a dinette set, fine, but if their house just got hit by a tornado and they need it, then we’ll just give it to them. We just want to be here and be available for folks.”

For now, the store is taking in a donation of hundreds of pallets filled with paper products.

“We’re going to flip some of the supplies that we get and turn it into green beans and other stuff,” Perry said. “We don’t need 16 million masks or whatever. If we end up with all of the stuff on this manifest, it’s just a humungous amount.”

What the store offers to the public will increase as more donations are accepted, he said.

In addition to the warehouse, the church has about a 300,000-square-foot cave off Old Quarry Road. The cave is known to area law enforcers as a place where they once conducted indoor training exercises. Community members might recall the cave serving as a haunted house.

NEW MEDIA

Perry said the church is developing a social media outreach plan to bring together the body of Christ and the communities of Excelsior Springs at citysaver.org. The site is in the testing stage, he said.

“The whole point was to provide a portal for every city everywhere, and we’ll get to Richmond sooner or later,” he said. “You can promote local businesses, local causes, sports, news, everything people would want to know about what’s going on in town. You can see who’s online. The people want Mayberry, and instead, they’re gaming with people in Ukraine that they’re never going to meet.”

When times get rough, having ties within a community is more important than having online acquaintances who might live out of state or outside the country, Perry said.

“You better know the people that live around you and the internet is sort of counter to that,” he said.

The church is not affiliated with any denomination, Perry said, instead focusing only on the surrounding community. He compared doing so to the individual communities, such as Ephesus, within the early church that had a separate social structure in each city.

“That’s set back to the defaults the way it ought to be,” he said. “In the New Testament, (the church) was just all the believers in that city and they weren’t supposed to split up into teams.”

To donate, call 816-929-4466. To seek assistance, go to libertydisasterrelief. com. The church classifies a disaster as a physical crisis that disrupts basic needs.

NOT AFFILIATED