Blog
What we do …
Our Love Ottawa team does a lot of interesting and challenging things every week.
We pray. About Everything.
We meet with leaders. To hear their hearts and spur them on.
We build teams. To work on a myriad of impactful initiatives.
We neighbour our city. Exploring the 100 neighbourhoods that make up our great city. Looking for ways to create collaborative action to make them better communities for everyone.
So we put together a Prezi that describes some of what we do. Click here to view our Prezi
Introducing Our Team
Introducing our executive team: Richard Long, Sarah Jackson, Isaac Gimba, Gabe McReynolds, Gerry Organ, Joseph Kiirya and Ken Roth. We are grateful to be serving God together and bringing the love of Christ to Ottawa. We love to hear about the dreams to transform our city that God has put on the hearts of leaders. Give us a call!
Check out the bios for our team here.
Donate
Love Ottawa relies on funding and donations from committed individuals and congregations who believe in the vision of walking together for greater impact.
We are looking for financial support for our Love Ottawa Lead Richard Long, and also for our General operating fund. One time gifts are welcome. You can also donate to one of our Love Ottawa team efforts through the options given below.
In the long term Love Ottawa is looking for monthly partners and also for churches to make us part of their yearly budget.
There are several giving options:
1. Call the One Way Ministries office at 613-225-0210 to arrange an immediate donation via your credit card or to set up a monthly contribution by automatic withdrawal.
2.You can donate Online. Click here to the Love Ottawa General Fund and click here to donate to Richard Long. A donation you make here will be specific to the ministry of Richard Long. You can choose your preference of either credit card or bank account, and one time or recurring support. Thank you!
3. Cheques should be made out to “One Way Ministries.” Please make a separate note specifying that it is for Love Ottawa, and designating it for either the General Fund or the support of Richard Long or one of our Love Ottawa teams.
Mail to 89 Auriga Dr., Ottawa, Ontario, K2E 7Z2.
Tax receipts will be issued at the end of the year.
Thank you for your faithful support of this new ministry!
Book Lover’s Sale is Back!! June 24 – 26
We are excited that the Book Lover’s sale 2021 is on at a new location!
Please read carefully below about all the changes we have made to this event for 2021. It has been pushed back by 3 weeks to allow for collection to happen safely.
We are excited to bring back the Booklover’s Fundraiser after having to cancel due to COVID last May. There are many changes we have made (including location) and some very exciting developments going forward!
The funds from this event on June 24-26 (contingent on pandemic conditions) will again this year be toward theCode, the youth mentoring initiative that continues to do incredible work among vulnerable young men in our city. Check out their website – theCode
PRICING (during the event only):
Paperback – $1.00
Hardcover – $2.00
Specialty – Individually priced
Used Bibles – Free
NEW LOCATION:
816 Bank Street
Calvary Fellowship Church
(Door by Courtyard)
DATES:
Thursday, June 3: 9:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Friday, June 4: 9:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.
Saturday, June 5: 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
(REQUIRED: sign-in, social distance and mask protocol)
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DROP-OFF FOR DONATED BOOKS:
After the Emergency Orders are lifted
Book Drop-off
NEW LOCATION: 816 Bank Street.
ALL HOURS (after the Emergency Orders are lifted): Please place books in the Rubbermaid bin that will be there at the front of the church entrance in the courtyard. (The books in the bin will be retrieved regularly.)
DAYTIME (after the Emergency Orders are lifted):
Monday, Wednesday or Friday
9:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
WHAT DONATIONS ARE ACCEPTED?
All Christian Books, CDs or DVDs.
QUESTIONS?
Please email Sharon at admin@calvaryottawa.ca
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LAUNCH of THE UPPER ROOM
Located at Calvary Fellowship Church, The Upper Room is a safe place
for people to walk in and peruse used Christian books or purchase BRAND NEW BIBLES.
(All books not sold at the Book Lover’s Sale will be left at The Upper Room. All proceeds from their sale go towards offering a variety of Bible translations in a myriad of colors and kinds. Part of the vision of The Upper Room is that a person can walk in, touch and smell and feel a new Bible before making their purchase.)
Everything is Local
“Everything is Local”. That now familiar phrase informs the way that Love Ottawa thinks about our city. In other words, the only way we will be able to measure whether transformation is actually happening is if we look at local neighbourhoods, or local businesses, or local agencies. We will only transform the whole city when we see each and every neighbourhood transformed.
The good news is that this makes the task very concrete and do-able. Most pastoral leaders don’t think they are called to shepherd a city of a million people. But they sense that God has placed them in local parishes and communities for divine purposes. This is the way pastoral work used to be done almost exclusively. One city-reaching leader says to pastors, “Your local church is God’s excuse to get you to work together for the benefit of your whole community.” In other words, when we move to a new city, we need to find the others who make up the team of spiritual leaders who should be taking responsibility for their neighbourhoods and communities.
More good news. Most neighbourhoods are identifiable. Our municipality has already done some work to profile them.
We are fortunate that we simply need to turn to the Ottawa Neighbourhood Studies that were created in the last couple of years to find out that there are 97 neighbourhoods in Ottawa. That becomes our starting point to think about mobilizing congregations and believers to walk together to transform their communities.
After Two Years…
What I’m learning … |
It’s been two years now since we gathered at City Hall and officially launched Love Ottawa. I want to say what a privilege it has been to serve in this city-wide effort since then. Our team is keenly aware that we are only the current expression of what has been an ongoing work of the Lord under Mission Ottawa, and other movements before that. The Spirit of God is working powerfully in every corner of Ottawa and our team has had a front seat window to see at least some of it.
It is time also to say thank you to all the people and congregations and ministries who have stepped up to participate in new ways for the Kingdom with us at Love Ottawa. Every prayer, every word of encouragement and every dollar has been deeply appreciated.
I want to especially thank Kerry Kronberg who took the leap of faith with me for the first half of this journey, knowing that any remuneration would only arrive if she was willing to raise it. The strong work of networking all over the city and also overseeing our first neighbourhood study in Vanier, continues to be Kerry’s legacy.
In February this year our prayer was fulfilled, when God gave usSarah Jackson to begin heading up Pray Ottawa. Prayer has always
What’s the most important thing I have learned in two years? It will take me other installments to express it all. However I can say, that when we felt the Lord tell us that we needed to build multiple teams in order to multiply the impact, we can say now that He wasn’t kidding. By His grace many new initiatives have been birthed. Here’s a list of just 5 of the team efforts that have been working hard this Fall. Each have their own website. Rock the Capital, Friends for Dinner, Ottawa Civic Prayer Breakfast, Dig and Delve, and The Big Give.
It is amazing to me that we have well over a hundred pastors, ministry leaders and business people working on various team initiatives. New teams continue to form around significant outreach opportunities. I am continually amazed at the uniqueness of the leadership styles and different ways that teams effectively accomplish their task. I am learning from each group about how God uses diversity in the midst of unity to accomplish His work of loving our city through His people.
From time to time I will be trying to put these learnings down on paper. I look forward to sharing them with you through this format in the months to come.
Thank you for your partnership in the Gospel,
Richard Long
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been a huge part of the unity effort in our city – foundational to everything else. Our dream is to live in a prayer-saturated city. You will continue to see many prayer opportunities highlighted on our 
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Friends for Dinner
This Christmas season is a wonderful opportunity to reach out to the many international students in our city. “Friends for Dinner” is a new initiative to match interested families with foreign students. Check out all the details at the Friends for Dinner website.
Vanier Neighbourhood Study
Love Ottawa has a vision to come alongside the Church of Ottawa to bring transformation to the 100 neighborhoods of our city. As our starting point we chose the Vanier neighborhood as a place to do an in-depth study of its make-up and needs, and in conjunction with the churches there, develop a strategy to impact that area of the city. This initial study will help us to develop expertise, tested methodology and a format to be shared with other congregations and applied to other neighborhoods and regions of Ottawa in years to come.
If you would like your own copy of the report as a pdf file please contact us.
If you are interested in reading about the experience our summer researchers had in Vanier you can still read the blog which captured the progress of their work. Check it out at Neighbouring Ottawa.com
In the video below, Kerry Kronberg gives a brief overview of what you can learn in the larger report.
Love Ottawa Re-launched
Love Ottawa was officially re-launched at the Ottawa City Hall on Oct. 24th. A group of over 50 core supporters gathered at the invitation of Mark Peterkins(One Way Ministries) for a commissioning service of the new team.
All the active participants had been previous leaders on the Mission Ottawa team. David Crawley, a former chair began with a survey of the last 19 years of the history of unity in the city starting with the first March for Jesus in 1993.
Alain Caronbrought greetings and powerful prayers from the Church in our sister city of Gatineau. He shared the striking coincidence of how the city-reaching effort there recently renamed themselves “J’aime Gatineau.”
Our new executive team were introduced and each one shared about what they would be developing and what they were excited about as Love Ottawa began its new chapter. Dave Harder, Ken Roth, Gerry Organ, Kerry Kronberg and Richard Long then received a challenge from Doug Ward who called back David Crawley and Alain Caron to pray over the new team.
After an explanation of the need for financial support for the work, Richard and Kerry and their families were called up
for prayers of commissioning led by Ken and Lois Hall. This long-standing pastoral couple have mentored and encouraged leaders for over 40 years in our Ottawa. A number of others added their prayers as the whole crowd stood to bless the newly dedicated director and associate director.
Refreshments organized by the One Way team allowed all the attendees to stay and chat in the wonderful atmosphere in the Jean Pigott room. It was the perfect setting for the re-launch of this city-reaching ministry which hopes to gather up the combined efforts and talents of all the churches in Ottawa.
Prayer footing
Our director, Richard Long joined Pastor Scott Stiller from New Hope Community Church for a prayer walk in his community this past week. As you may know our PrayerWalk Ottawa effort registered 430 prayer routes in the last 12 months. We knew that many others were out there “praying onsite with insight”. Scott is certainly one of them, praying every Thursday afternoon in the streets around his target community.
What really piqued our interest was the integration of new technology that Pastor Stiller uses as he walks and prays. He takes pictures, writes notes to remind himself of what he has observed, and even tweets to his congregation some of the things he finds himself praying.
On the New Hope Community Church website there are simple instructions on how to “Go Prayer Foot.” Help that Scott hopes will have people from his church motivated to pray walk their own street.
The big impact in Pastor Stiller’s words is “the revelation of God’s heart of compassion for the people of Ottawa”. He highlighted how prayerwalking on a weekly basis has given him a whole new window on who are his neighbours, and a burden to find ways to reach out to them.
Are you prayerwalking your neighbourhood? Drop us a note about how it is going.
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