Youth mission turns attention toward home
It’s one thing to go on a mission trip to a foreign country, or even to another state, but the mission of helping people in need in your own community is something altogether different.
Next summer, for the first time, Mariner’s Bethel United Methodist Church’s CRASH Youth Ministries will be hosting a youth mission trip in this area, but they need help. To be a host site, they need to raise $40,000. So, they are starting on fundraising this September, with a golf tournament.
“The good news is we know there’s the need, and we know there’s the help,” said Associate Pastor Woodrow S. “Woody” Wilson. “The reality is it takes money to be able to do what we need to do.”
CRASH Youth Ministries will be hosting upwards of 400 student and adult volunteers from all over the U.S. next summer and will need to find lodging, buy food, hire caterers and buy the materials for the actual labor involved in the mission – all of which will be done locally.
The fundraising is specifically for the “Week of Hope Work Camp,” which will consist of fixing 82 homes in the Dagsboro, Selbyville and Frankford areas that have elderly, disabled or disadvantaged residents who are at or below the poverty level and that have been identified as needing to be brought up to code. Wilson said they want to involve as many people as they can to help out the local people in need.
The youth group went on two different mission trips this year – the first with high-school students to China Grove, N.C., and the second with middle-schoolers to a town outside of Pittsburgh: Johnstown, Pa. – the site of the Flight 93 crash on Sept. 11, 2011.
The middle-school group, which was organized through the Pen-Del Methodist Conference, went to Pennsylvania and ran a vacation Bible school for the community. The high-school group went to North Carolina as part of Group Work Camps, which does the home-repair mission trips. The group of about 300 high-schoolers was split into smaller groups and worked on 48 different home sites in China Grove. They did everything from painting to roof repair to building decks.
“It’s for people who are unable to do it for themselves,” explained Wilson. “Whether it be because of finances or health, we fix safety issues and bring the places up to code.”
In addition to the manual labor, the teams stop every day for lunch and place as much of an emphasis as they do on fixing the houses on getting to know their residents.
“The overall focus is to spend time with the residents,” Wilson noted, “to enter in their story, to share their lives and to pray and have devotions together.”
Christina Wilson, Mariner’s Youth Ministries coordinator and Woody Wilson’s wife, said it was obvious to them that God had put the groups together with perfect design. Because the work groups are put together by skill set, the youth from Mariner’s are linked with other people on the trip, and not necessarily with those from with their own church.
Christina Wilson explained that Jeremy, a young man with autism, was on a team that did work at a site where the resident family also had an autistic son. She explained that this gave the mother hope for her own son’s future, that it could be bright and high-achieving.
“That didn’t happen by chance,” concluded Christina. “That was all orchestrated by God.”
The 300 or so participants all spent their week sleeping in a local high school. They met every morning for breakfast, had their morning program, got their assignments and went their separate ways. Each day, they also had some free time to devote to hobbies or interests, as well. The mission for summer 2011, which will be hosted locally, will be very similar in nature to the North Carolina mission.
Jordan Carey, who is going into 10th grade this fall, went on the North Carolina mission because he wanted to get closer to God and wanted to see about straightening out his life and “using that good for the good of his kingdom.”
Carey said he expected an amazing, personal experience, but found instead that he was the one with something to share.
“I thought something amazing would happen to me and my eyes would be opened, but what happened was that I ministered to other people. God wanted to use me. I learned that it’s not always about what God can do for me, but what I can do for other people through God.”
Christina Trager, who will be going to college in the fall, said the mission trip helped her to solidify her goals of being a youth minister.
“It answered a lot of last-minute questions I had,” she explained, adding that God’s plans for her were clearer than ever.
Woody Wilson explained that they have traveled many times doing mission trips, and he understands that God sometimes “calls us to other places.”
“But sometimes the need is right on your back doorstep,” he continued. “There’s folks right here that we need to be loving and serving.”
In addition to the fundraising golf tournament on Friday, Sept. 10, at the Salt Pond golf course, the church’s annual Trail Run in November will also raise funds specifically for the mission week next summer.
For more information on the golf tournament, which will tee off with a shotgun start at 9 a.m. and will conclude with lunch, door prizes, a silent auction and a 50/50 raffle, call Marilyn Adams at (302) 541-4773, Bobbi Brown at (302) 539-2602 or Judy Phillips at (302) 537-1303.
