Our cinder block church building originally was a grocery store. So we could wax eloquent about how the new occupant (namely, the church) was still in the business of serving up food, albeit a different kind.
This was a tiny church in New York's Hudson River Valley where I was pastor. We were glad we had a building, but those cinder blocks created a mammoth problem. In the hard winters of the Northern Tier, icy wind whistled in through cracks in those cinder blocks because there was nothing but a coat of paint to keep it out. That wind blew in, and our old furnace sent air out to heat the parking lot.
Enter Hubie. He and his wife Trish were a young couple who came north when Hubie's company reassigned him. He worked for a gypsum company whose retail products included wallboard. As he and the other deacons discussed the problem of heating the building, he said he probably could get the company to donate wallboard to provide some insulation against the cold.
Hubie got the wallboard, but none of the handful of men in the congregation felt competent to lead the task of putting it up. We were more helpers than leaders in building repair and upkeep. Of course, we stood ready to do our part if we found someone to point the way.
What to do?
Enter mission teams.
In my years of congregational and denominational work down South, I had been aware of mission groups from churches and colleges who ventured out of their home territory for various projects. So I had in mind that our little church ought to connect with some of those "mission-minded" groups. Nowadays, the buzzword is "missional."
Somehow in the providence of God, a Baptist Student team from a college in Tennessee were looking for a need such as ours. The campus minister's father was in construction work, and -- fortunately for us -- the son had learned much of the trade from childhood.
I honestly can't remember how our church in New York connected with that campus group in Tennessee. They didn't "just happen" to hear about us, and I don't recall any Tennessee connections I could call on. There probably was a reasonable explanation, but -- any way you look at it -- I felt God's hand matched us up.
We told the Tennesseans about our little building and how we had been given the gypsum board. We also discussed neighborhood ministries aimed at youth and children. So they piled into a van overflowing with suitcases, sleeping bags, and, of course, equipment for installing the drywall.
Our visiting helpers spent most of their days and nights in the church. In the morning, they crawled out of their sleeping bags on the floor or on the pews, then cooked breakfast in our semi-equipped kitchen and took showers in the parsonage just across the parking lot. Then they alternated between the physical work project and Vacation Bible School (VBS) type programs. In the evenings when our men got off their paying jobs, they did a second shift under the guidance of the campus minister from Tennessee.
The Vols were the first of a fairly steady stream of Southerns venturing into the Frozen North Country to aid our struggling congregation. In summers, we hosted a couple of youth choirs with 80 or 100 voices, more singers than we had in regular attendance in our services. We found locations around the area for the choir kids to lead VBS and give concerts in shopping malls, county fairs, and the church parking lot.
A little church history: Our congregation was one of many that started near World War Two military bases outside the territory of the historic Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In their heyday, the churches easily drew in Southerners who were "serving their sentences" far from home.
By the time my family and I arrived in the Hudson Valley, many of those bases had closed, and many military-oriented churches such as ours had to scratch to find replacements for those airmen and their families. In that environment, we welcomed help from larger, better-established churches in the South.
My wife and I no longer identify with the SBC whose structure now is dominated by the authoritarian religious and political right wing. This move from center to right, religiously and politically, began while I was pastor in New York. We relate to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a much smaller, more open group, formed after the takeover, still committed to Baptists' historic autonomy of the local congregation: no top-down decrees.
But denominational politics are beside the main point of my story. All that happened after we left New York. Our SBC-related church had various needs, and I found various connections with SBC groups back in my native territory who were willing to help us meet those needs. We always were buoyed by these visits, more determined, by God's grace, to "keep on keeping on."
Bottom line: I'm not sure who are more blessed by mission trips, the travelers or the hosts. I expect it's a draw.
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