c. 1999 Religion News Service

STUART, Fla. _ Three men sliced through the darkness in a white Ford pickup truck with their secret cargo. They carried flashlights and a slip of pink paper with their destination scrawled on the back. All over the age of 30, they approached their mission with the enthusiasm of boys playing G.I. Joe.

Arriving at the Orchid Bay community in Palm City, Fla., they approached the gate. Mark MacDonald, the team’s leader, clicked the gates open with a remote control. They were lucky this time.”The hard part is getting into these communities that are gated, unless you have someone on the inside,”said team member Chuck Stanley, a 40-year-old landscaper.”That’s why we have F.I.G. _ Flamingo Intelligence Gathering.” The men pulled up to a house on Coral Tree Lane and got to work. Standing in the truck’s bed, Stanley carefully handed over 50 plastic flamingos to MacDonald and teammate Mark Teed as they strategically placed the birds all over the lawn of MacDonald’s neighbors.”Watch your eyes,”Stanley cautioned as he handed over the birds with their 24-inch metal legs.

Frank and Monika Daly’s house had just been flamingoed.

The nighttime operation was part of a good-hearted prank to raise money for missions at First United Methodist Church of Stuart, Fla. For the past month and a half, three-member crews from the church have been planting the plastic birds on unsuspecting lawns all over the Treasure Coast area.

For $25, you can send a flock of 50 plastic birds to a friend or neighbor. Whoever gets”flamingoed”then pays $25 to have them removed or sent on to someone else’s house. If you don’t feel like paying, the birds will be picked up by a church crew free of charge _ after they’ve sat on your lawn for three days.”How could you not love them?”Teed joked after finishing the job at the Daly house.

Monika Daly, who was home at the time of the flock’s landing but didn’t hear the three men, got a good laugh.”I was home and never heard a thing,”Daly said later.”I have to admit, we had already done it to someone else and this was three or four weeks ago and it had completely left our minds. But then my husband came home and asked me for help carrying something in from the car and I saw two in my planter and knew they had been there.” But that’s not the end of the story, she said. Vengeance is hers.”I’m doing it to someone else but I’m not telling you who,”she said.

Jokes aside, this gag has a serious side. Money from the project is funneled toward missions outreach _ including local programs to feed and clothe local residents _ at the church, which is one of the state’s 10 largest United Methodist congregations.

So far, Operation Flamingo has been a huge success. More than $1,200 has been raised for outreach programs, and the current waiting list for flamingo”fly bys”is more than a month long.”It’s a way to glorify God through us using our time and talents in the project, and having fun, and also helping the community at the same time,”said church member Carey Jackson, who is coordinating the project.”It’s good for the church and good for the community.” Jackson is a member of the”Christians Under Construction”Sunday School class that is running the project. He said the targets of the tacky birds _ both within the church and without _ have been good sports about the project.

Which is not to say the project has not been”fowled”up by a few bumps along the way. At one delivery in Port St. Lucie, an entire flock of 50 birds was destroyed by some high school students who didn’t quite get the joke.”As with any top-flight military operation, you have to expect some casualties,”Stanley lamented.

And a few tactical issues have had to be worked out, like how to keep the metal legs from falling out of the birds.”I think we should epoxy these things in,”MacDonald said as he decorated the Dalys’ lawn.

And sometimes condos are difficult to accessorize with the birds, he added.”Yeah, it’s kind of hard to stick their legs in all that cement,”Stanley joked.

Not to mention the internal disagreements about just how tacky the always-tacky birds should be.”The girls are all upset because (the new birds) have yellow beaks instead of black ones,”Stanley added.

DEA END ECKSTROM