AT THE LAKEWOOD CHURCH – JOEL OSTEEN MINISTRIES, EASTER SERVICE 2005, ASTROS BASEBALL STADIUM

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: You know what Mercy Ministries found out? It doesn’t matter what the problem is, Jesus Christ is the answer!

So I want to get results and I want to do it with my whole heart.  And that’s why I still do it because I see lives changing and the results are there.  And every time a girl graduates from Mercy Ministries I feel like we’ve won the SuperBowl.  It’s awesome.

Grammy Award Winning Artist CeCe Winans: We gotta do it together.

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: Yes, together.

CeCe Winans: We gotta do it together!

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: Together, girl.  That’s it.

AT THE MERCY MINISTRIES 25^TH ANNIVERSARY GALA – TITANS STADIUM

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: [Jesus] is the one that we’re here to honor tonight.  As much as I love the Mercy Ministries girls, I couldn’t change a single one of their lives.  I couldn’t help a single one of them with their issues.  Girls that have been diagnosed with severe eating disorders that the best doctors in the world look at them and say and look at their parents and say, “Your daughter is going to die.”  We’ve had girls walk through our doors at Mercy Ministries weighing only 65 pounds and they look like they are going to die.  But when you have the freedom to share Jesus Christ and you have the freedom to tell them about the One who can heal their broken heart and help straighten out what’s wrong on the inside of them.  The One who can actually help sort out the mess.  When you have the freedom to have a way to say you know what it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or who you’ve done it with, you can be set free.

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: When you have a young girl who’s drug addicted and she’s been to all the meetings and she’s been told that she has a disease.  But you know what?  The Bible doesn’t say that.  It says that He is able to seek and save that which is lost.  And that He is able to restore broken lives.  And so we’ve seen many Mercy Ministries girls that have been told that and they come through and they get set free because they ask for forgiveness and they ask Christ to come into their heart.  And they are changed on the inside.

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: I worked in a government system where for eight years I was told I could not share Jesus Christ because of separation of church and state.  And I saw month after month and year after year young girls who would leave us and go back to the same environment they came out of.  And we would begin to hear month after month and year after year of one that died from a drug overdose or one that got killed in a street gang fight or one that felt so hopeless about their life that they took their life.  And then later I was working on my Master’s degree and I did an internship at the women’s prison here in Nashville.  And I ran into so many of those girls who I had met in that juvenile facility when they were teenagers and now they are over 18 and now they are in the women’s prison because they never got the help they needed.  And for young girls who have made bad choices or for young girls who have been sexually abused or had things done to them whether it’s addictions whether it’s eating disorders whether it’s unplanned pregnancies whether it’s young girls who have issues with cutting.

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn: No matter what the problem is, Mercy Ministries has found out that when we offer the girls a way to have the shame and the guilt and the condemnation removed from them and when we tell them that you can have a new beginning.  2 Corinthians 5:17 “If any person be in Christ Jesus, they are a new creation.  The old things have passed away and all things are new.”

Mercy Ministries Founder/President Nancy Alcorn:  I would be so wrong to come up here tonight and not tell you about the One who changes the lives.  And that’s my heart, is for you to understand and know that when a young girl walks into Mercy Ministries and she weighs 65 pounds and the best doctors in the world have given up on her, that we have a great Physician.  He created us and He knows exactly what to do to restore us.  And I have prayed all these years and fought all these years for Mercy Ministries to remain free from government funding.  And I’m standing before you tonight to tell you that that is our commitment at Mercy Ministries.  And that is our heart.  And Mercy Ministries wants the girls that the world has labeled ‘reject’, ‘castaway’, ‘throw away’.  That’s the ones we want.  Because Mercy Ministries know that when they come in that we can introduce them to someone, not us.  We get to be God’s vessels. Mercy Ministries can introduce them to someone who can heal their heart, who can help them sort out their confusion, who can help them to be healed from the things that the world said they can’t be free from.

Mercy Ministries offers a free-of-charge Christian residential program for young women who want help for eating disorders, self-harming, abuse, addiction and unplanned pregnancies. For more information, go to www.mercyministries.com