Everyone’s heard there is no such thing as a free lunch.

So when Mark Jones and his team went door to door in northeast Lincoln asking what they could do to help residents, their offer was met with skepticism.

But those suspicions evaporated when Jones returned with volunteer crews to fix roofs, build patios, landscape yards and re-gutter homes — for free, “no strings attached.”

Jones, along with his team of Jeremy Goodding, Jason Arensdorf and their families, are “planting” a church in northeast Lincoln.

The church, Community Harvest, will reflect the mission and teachings of the Southern Baptist churches all three families have belonged to.

The new church is not connected to Lincoln’s Harvest Community Church, which was planted in 1983. Harvest Community Church is affiliated with the Great Commission of Churches and meets at 10:30 a.m. Sundays at Park Middle School.

Church planting is designed to rapidly start new churches and compound the numbers as they sprout up.

“We want to be a church that plants other churches across Nebraska and gets them growing,” Jones said.

His goal: a planted church in each of Nebraska’s 93 county seats by 2017.

Like many church plants, the move begins with a leader. Jones is the leader for Community Harvest. Goodding will direct the church’s programs and oversee adult and family ministries. Arensdorf, a native of North Platte, hopes to use his experience with Community Harvest to become a pastor and lead planter of churches in western Nebraska.

Lincoln is the starting point.

All this summer Jones and his team members have gone on a door-to-door mission throughout northeast Lincoln. They ask people if they have any needs. If the need is physical — such as a home improvement project — mission workers from other Southern Baptist churches come to do the physical labor.

Often people just want someone to pray for them or with them. Other times Jones invites them to a Community Harvest preview service.

Door-to-door mission work is key, according to Jones.

“It is a way to reach the community and show them God’s love by doing practical things for them,” he said.

“We believe taking care of physical needs is as important as spiritual needs. By taking care of the physical we earn their trust and their support,” Jones said.

He credits God with bringing him to these people in need. An open ear, a helping hand and a comforting soul makes it easier for people to check out his church services, attend one of his block parties or take part in a backyard Bible study that uses the gospel to teach people how to handle life’s challenges.

“We want to be a church that serves the community,” Jones said of Community Harvest. He envisions a church that recaptures that traditional neighbor-helping-neighbor value.

Standing in the front lawn of a weathered Havelock home, Jones and mission workers from Golden Avenue Baptist Church in Springfield, Mo., and Bois D’Arc Baptist Church in Bois D’Arc, Mo., are fixing the water-rotted roof of the front porch and installing new gutters.

Pastors Boone Middleton of Golden Avenue and Phil St. Laurent of Bois D’Arc have traveled the country repairing homes this summer.

They are not the first to help plant Community Harvest Church. Earlier, mission crews from Southern Baptist churches in Texas, Georgia, Florida, California and Arkansas helped Jones with various neighborhood home improvement projects as well as vacation Bible school and hosting block parties.

Jones, who serves as bivocational youth pastor at Southview Baptist Church, 3434 S. 13th St., in Lincoln, said that two years ago, “I sensed God calling me to plant churches to reap the harvest.”

“This felt right,” he wrote in his strategic prospectus for the church, which is posted on the church’s Web site. “Since I was saved, I have been burdened for lost people, and for a long time I was drawn to the idea of church planting, thinking that a new church would naturally be on fire for lost souls and would be able to reach them just as the church did in the Book of Acts.”

Planted churches often are generated from within — meaning they are created by the people who will attend them, as opposed to expanding an existing church. And while people may subscribe to the basic tenets of a single faith their church represents, its work, mission and operations are unique.

Planted churches are not so much about an actual church as they are about creating a close-knit community that shares its beliefs, values and purpose of  helping others to find God.

Existing churches can be intimidating to the unchurched, Jones said. And large, established churches often focus on the needs of their members instead of reaching out to an uncertain community, he added.

“We don’t want to take from other churches, we want to reach people who aren’t churched,” he said.

Southview Baptist Church is one of 10 baptist churches and organizations partnering with the planting of Community Harvest.

For Jones, the idea of planting a church percolated in 2005 during weekly drives to Hastings, where he worked with a small church.

“As I went door to door visiting residents along quiet neighborhood streets, I was shocked to find people who had never heard the gospel and some who had never set foot in any church,” Jones wrote of his calling.

During these long drives between Lincoln and Hastings, he began to think about the people in all the small towns in between.

“My heart ached as I wondered how many people in these towns had never heard the gospel,” he wrote.

So he started researching church habits of Nebraskans. By his estimate, in the nine square mile area he has targeted for his Community Harvest Church, only 4,800 people attend an evangelical church. He figures as many as 25,000 people “do not know Jesus”  and “around 9,000 of them are completely unchurched.”

It is Jones’ contention that many of these “lost” people do not find existing churches meet their spiritual, emotional and physical needs.

They know prayer is important, but unless they feel a connection to God, feel they know Jesus, they will struggle to find the connections they need, he said.

“We’re not about religion,” Jones said. “We are all about personal relationships with God.”

Reach Erin Andersen at 473-7217 or eandersen@journalstar.com.