Lighthouse Baptist Church, 11502 Colorado Highway 145, shared initiatives that are part of its 2025 theme ‘to make a difference,’ including student outreach and helping those in need.
In mid-October of 2024, Lighthouse youth Pastor Reece Alvarez was running errands at Walmart when he saw a “swarm” of high school students flooding into the building for their lunch break.
“I was like, ‘Man, this is a lot of people,’” Alvarez told The Journal. “I thought, ‘Hey, this is a pretty cool opportunity to catch them as they’re coming in to be a blessing to them.’”
The following Wednesday, Alvarez and others from the church set up a table on the sidewalk between Montezuma-Cortez High School and Walmart with free doughnuts for students.
“That first day, we ordered 12 dozen doughnuts from City Market, and we handed out doughnuts,” Alvarez said. “It was really just intended to be a one-and-done kind of thing, but it was so well-received we were like, ‘Hey, this is something we could do every week.’”
At first, Alvarez said the students didn’t seem to know what to think about their presence on the sidewalk.
After three weeks, students have gotten over their initial surprise.
“The second Wednesday we did it, it was still kind of a surprise, but by the third week, it was more of an anticipation thing,” Alvarez said. “I think every Wednesday, they expect us to be there.”
While students usually dash into Walmart for lunch, Alvarez shared they have conversations with some of the “stragglers.” They also invite the students to participate in a youth group.
“I found that those are some good times to start up conversations, and not necessarily to shove religion down their throat, but to kind of connect with them and see where they’re at in their walk with God and just in life,” Alvarez said.
Alvarez also is a consistent presence at Fellowship of Christian Athlete meetings at MCHS and the Dolores RE-4A school district. About 60 students attend in Dolores, and seven or eight at MCHS.
Last year, all clubs at MCHS were barred from hosting on-campus meetings at lunchtime. Now, Alvarez meets with students before or after school or during lunch on Wednesday. Cold weather has made meeting difficult or deterred some students.
Recently, when the group met in the Walmart parking lot at lunch, it was especially cold.
“We were just kind of shivering in the snow,” Alvarez said. “But next week, or the week after, we’re going to be getting an enclosed bus that’s been gutted, with tables and stuff put in so we can meet in the bus at the Walmart parking lot during lunchtime.”
Alvarez shared that the main leader of Cortez’s FCA is acquiring use of the bus.
Alvarez also spoke of the church’s new initiative, Compassion in Action, which will start the first week of March and will end on the National Day of Prayer in May.
Compassion in Action will take place through 12 groups of 10 to 15 people per group. On Sunday, Feb. 23, groups and their leaders will discuss what kind of projects they want to do to bless the community.
“It’s really up to the small groups what service project they want to do,” Alvarez said. “We have a list of people in our church that are elderly and widows, so they may come to us and say they want to clean a widow’s house, and we can connect them to those widows.”
Other projects include helping businesses clean their windows, mowing lawns for the elderly and widows, and writing letters to teacher and law enforcement.
Alvarez added that he hopes some of the projects will “organically pop up” through contact through their Facebook ads or as the groups begin to go out into the community.
“On Facebook, we’ll have ads, and that will typically have a point of contact that says, ‘Hey, if you know somebody who needs their gutters cleaned who can’t do it, call the church office at (970) 565-9302,’ and honestly, word-of-mouth spreads pretty quickly,” Alvarez said. “We’re ordering T-shirts for everyone involved, so on any given weekend, there could be a random group of people in these matching shirts doing something. Conversations will start, and hopefully service projects will organically pop up.”
The purpose of this initiative is to help out and build relationships in the community.
Alvarez said the scale of the project is new for the church, and will present many opportunities.
“But the theme this year for our church is making a difference, and we don’t want to just say make a difference without giving the people in our church and ourselves opportunities to make a difference,” Alvarez said.
