New Hope University and Peace Academy

A growing number of recent immigrants from India, Burma, Mexico and elsewhere are choosing to begin their American journey by living and working with the Amish as construction laborers and in farm jobs all over rural Allen County, All churches have the responsibility to welcome and serve these new families who are strangers in a strange land.

Our Reform Church feels a strong calling to partner with the literally hundreds of other Allen County church communities and especially with the incredibly generous and supportive local Amish to demonstrate how sincerely we want to welcome, nurture and support these important new neighbors who are working so hard to find a place for themselves and their families by choosing to live near and among us.

I just received permission from our church fellowship to seek an abandoned or unused church or school building in Northeast Allen County.

Once we find an appropriate building, We will somehow find a way to beg, borrow, lease, purchase or restore this old building as a school and learning center.

We need a flexible multi-use room that will serve both as a classroom space and a 24 hour community resource center. We'll use the building ourselves for our occasional study groups but more importantly would like to open our doors to the growing rural immigrant communities to use for their English classes.

We believe this answer's Christ's call to nurture the strangers among us, and to welcome them into our communities.

We have decided to make this effort our guiding mission for the foreseeable future, and thus provide tangible evidence of our community wide support for immigrants and other new families who decide to begin their American journey by living and working with us here in Allen County, Indiana. All are welcome here. We worship at home - we don't build churches, we build schools.

Our first free school and community center will be a test bed for simple, low cost free community resources that help bridge the gap between rural communities and the incredible resource that is 24 hour access to the worldwide web with a bit of skilled help if you need it.

We will also install a nice big open wi-fi hotspot that will give high-speed internet access using the same technologies that are installed in all well equipped public libraries as a community resource. This technology has now dropped in price that a system that cost the Fort Wayne Public Library downtown $6000 five years ago now routinely sell used for under $100, or new for less than $500 including support and installation. We can afford that.

We envision a modest building equipped as a schoolroom but also serving as a year round climate controlled warming or cooling center open to the public at all times.

We plan to provide two or three good internet high speed computer workstations for free use by anyone with a even remotely legitimate purpose.

An emergency and non emergency phone system will be permanently installed and will be available for free use by all who need to use the phone. This may be of great value locally as the Amish are completely dependent on sometimes unreliable cellular phones - while ours will be hardwired in for 100% reliable emergency phone access.

So anyway - our plans are beginning to take shape. This isn't actually a very complicated thing to build - just a few clean comfortable rooms and some nice big doors that will always be open to anyone who would like to visit for any reason at all.