There was more practice and less preaching at Westminster Presbyterian Church Sunday.

About 100 church members and friends showed up Sunday for a brief service and a day’s worth of mission work, said the Rev. Andrew Lindahl.

It was the first time the church participated in the national “Faith in Action” program, a collaborative effort that brings volunteers of different faiths together to care for their neighbors.

The volunteers took on several projects Sunday, including “Operation Gratitude,” a letter-writing campaign to troops overseas. Westminster volunteers penned 88 letters before they broke into groups and headed out for more mission work, Lindahl said.

“We did more than I anticipated,” Lindahl said. “It went really well.”

The volunteers also put up eight walls, the entire framing of a Habitat for Humanity house in Albert Lea, he said.

Other groups put together 50 health and hygiene kits for the relief efforts in Haiti, cleaned up the grounds of three local schools, helped with home maintenance projects around Austin and collected food for the Salvation Army food bank.

The church hopes to plan another Faith in Action day next year, Lindahl said.

“It was a lot of work to organize, but Sunday everybody just came to church ready to work and it was a great experience,” he said.

For more information on Faith in Action, go to www.fianationalnetwork.org.