The exact date when your church is going to go out of business has recently been charted by mathematicians, according to CNN’s Belief blog. So add this item to your church’s bucket list of ministry things to do before it goes under:

• Acquire a Do-Good Bus to aid you in executing your responsibility to grow all the believers in your care to fullness in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As with many great discipleship ideas, this one didn’t come from the, um, church. In fact, as Alissa Walker at Good explains, The Do-Good Bus is a standalone nonprofit organization in its own right:

Co-founder Rebecca Pontius had always been involved with nonprofits, but in recent years she became flooded with questions from friends about how they could participate. “They’d say, “I want to volunteer, but I don’t know how,'” remembers Pontius, an event planner. For her birthday, Pontius organized a party bus and noticed the camaraderie created amongst her friends just by traveling to a new location together. Teaming up with two of her friends, Hannah Halliwell and Stephen Snedden, the trio decided to combine the fun of a party bus with a service trip as a way to make volunteering easy and accessible.

Part of the fun of a Do Good experience is that each destination is only revealed once volunteers board the bus, which Pontius thinks removes some of the anxiety from volunteering for the first time. “It takes away the preconceived notions or judgement about what you’re going to do,” she says. But participants don’t go into the experience blind: They’re briefed en route and also receive a training session from the organizations themselves.

In my new Whole Life Offering book, I lay out the ten ways–what the church has historically called the “Works of Mercy”–that the Bible calls us to mirror the love of Christ to our neighbors.

Why not a monthly “Works of Mercy Road Trip,” where church members board the bus (in lieu of Sunday services? Just askin’…) knowing only the name of the Work of Mercy they’ll be undertaking but not the specific destination for their service?

Of course, as the Whole Life Offering book recommends, we’ll want to train participants in that Work of Mercy in the month preceding their boarding of the bus.

Maybe if we undertake such an intentional plan for growing Christians in their love of neighbor and their love of God, then the mathematicians may be forced to revise their calculations predicting our imminent demise?