Source: NeighborNewspapers.com
First Baptist Church Douglasville teens spent part of their summer vacation in a slum.“We went to Philadelphia, to Chester, Pa., known as one of the worst cities in America — a crime-ridden, drug-laden area,” said Kevin Williams, First Baptist associate pastor for students.
“We worked the streets, knocking on doors, handing out fliers. We sang at a local school and took the kids to a park near the school,” he said. “The very next week after we went up there, a kid was killed in that park. We had so many people tell us, ‘You’re crazy — don’t go in that park at night.’ The park director told us not to go there; the mayor told us not to go there. They were scared that something would happen to us. They sent two unmarked units to watch us.”
The 79 Georgia teens held a “backyard Bible club” in the park, with games, Bible stories and crafts for 160 Pennsylvania children.
“We shared the gospel with all the people,” Williams said. “That night 72 people came forward professing Christ to be their Lord and savior. There were a total of 122 people making decisions that week.”
As he looked out over the park filled with his students, all wearing their white “souled out” T-shirts and witnessing to their little “Bible buddies,” he said, “It reminded me of the Bible verse, ‘The field is white, all ready to harvest.’
??West Ridge Church of Dallas is big into helping the local community – building ramps and repairing flooded homes as in the recent Community Makeover — and the international community, too.
“We just got back from Burkina Faso,” said James Griffin. He is the church’s student pastor, but the Africa trip was for adults, who returned to the United States on June 28.
In Burkina Faso’s capital city, the team of 13 gave candy and played games with children at the site of the Compassion International ministry.
“We showed the World Cup one night in the middle of a soccer field and shared some testimonies,” he said.
Then they drove eight hours into “the bush” and stayed two nights in one village and two nights in another. “We slept outside, ate the food they cooked us — no electricity, no running water; we lived the way they do,” he said.
In those four days they framed two new churches.
“We set the steel, did all the truss, all the roofing; we built the shell, then they’re going to come back in and add their pieces to it,” Griffin said. “We want them to do the parts they can so they’re taking ownership.”
The country’s poverty is the most extreme he has ever seen, he said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, never heard stories like I heard in Burkina Faso; it’ll break your heart,” he said. “But the joy these people have is unexplainable. They treat you like kings and queens while you’re there. They make you feel very loved. Here, we complain about a lot that we don’t really need to complain about. I think they might have something figured out that we don’t. They’re great people.”
??In April, 45 West Ridge youth used their spring break to entertain more than 300 South American children in a Vacation Bible School.
“We went to a little town, Iranduba, in the middle of the Amazon rainforest,” Griffin said. “We did music, teaching, face painting, balloon animals.”
Five people from another Dallas church, Bethany Christian, went along, and 17 West Ridge adults.
“A cool thing about Brazil,” Griffin said, “we actually slept on a boat on the Amazon every night — we ate there, we showered there, the whole nine yards.”
Again, they helped with construction, this time clearing land where a Brazilian ministry wants to build a school to train pastors to work with indigenous tribes.
Each student raised $1,675 and spent four weeks preparing to work this hard, he said. It was “a lot of sun, a lot of sweat. It is the hottest place I think I’ve ever been in my life.”