As World Changers closes an amazing 30-year run, here are some memories of one project that helps remind us of what matters....
Last night on Facebook, just before I went to bed, I found a post from Lifeway Christian Publishers announcing that they were cancelling the summer's scheduled projects for World Changers. Well, that's probably a given for many of the youth mission projects and camps this summer, the risk of spreading the Covid-19 virus is just too high. Yeah, I know a lot of people hold different opinions about it, but we're going to top 60,000 dead from it this week, after only two months of its spread. So the precaution is necessary.
But the announcement went on to say that the entire World Changers ministry, in operation for thirty years, was being shut down by Lifeway due to declining participation in recent years. That was when my heart broke.
In the early 90's, I want to say '92 or so, I saw a promotional video and some materials about World Changers. I was serving as an associate pastor of a small church in Kentucky at the time and was looking for something more than a "banana splits and balloons" camp experience for a youth group that needed to develop a vision for service. It would have been difficult for our church to put a mission trip together on our own and World Changers looked like an easy way to get involved in short term missions. The only openings at the time were in a project in Clarksdale, Mississippi, not too far away and location really didn't matter to us, so we signed up and went.
It was one of those weeks where, if something could go wrong, it did. The Mississippi Delta is a sweltering, mosquito infested place in mid-summer and it was in the middle of a heat wave. We headed out with a dozen youth and three adults, spent a little time enjoying some fun in Memphis and then headed south. Daytime temperatures were hitting the 105 degree mark. We stayed at a junior college in dorms that were undergoing a renovation of sorts, so the rooms were a mess. The first night, during the worship service, the AC went out. It was a major breakdown and the parts that were needed weren't scheduled to arrive before the end of the week. Did I mention the mosquitoes? Everything is usually bigger in Texas, but Mississippi has cornered the market on the size and number of mosquitoes. It rained hard the night before we went out to work and when we turned down the rural, dirt road where the house we were working on was located, the van slipped in the mud and slid off the road and into a ditch. So we unloaded and walked and had to call a tow truck to get us out. After that, we parked on the paved road and walked half a mile to the house.
Did I mention the mosquitoes?
The first day, the lumber yard didn't deliver the materials we needed to work on the house. They couldn't get down the road. So we did as much preparation as we could. When we finally got things going, we discovered that the floor of the house wasn't level, so the siding we were putting on wouldn't square up right. Turns out, that affects just about everything we're doing. We discovered that the reason the floor wasn't level was because one of the joists holding it up was broken and lying on the ground right under the kitchen, explaining why the refrigerator leaned away from the wall and into the room. So we cut the kitchen floor open and tried to lift the joist up so that we could repair it with a couple of 2x4's on each side of it. The ground underneath was mostly Mississippi mud, so we had to get a jack to put under the joist to raise it up to fix it. The jack sunk into the mud. I guess it's probably still down there somewhere. So we propped up the joist with cinder blocks and then build a lever out of boards that three of us could sit on long enough to get the 2x4's nailed onto the joist. It took three on each side to get the job done. That was a sign of what the rest of the week would look like.
Local churches were supposed to deliver lunches to the work site. On Monday, ours didn't come. We called the coordinator's number and he couldn't track it down, so he told us to find a local fast food joint and we'd get reimbursed. Mind you, we were working in a small, rural community in Quitman County, Mississippi and the county seat, ten miles away, didn't even have a Dairy Queen. This was before the internet, so I had to ask the homeowner if there was a hamburger or pizza take out place nearby. She directed me to a place about a mile down the road called "The Chicken Hut." It looked like one of those places you would pass up if you were just passing through, but it smelled wonderful inside. The guy who was at the counter apologized for being out of fried catfish but said the owner was at the lake getting more and would be back tomorrow. So I got a couple of buckets of their spicy batter fried chicken, a couple of large containers of fatback and collard greens, deep fried okra, cornbread muffins and a couple of jugs of sweet tea with a sugar film on top to feed 12 people, mostly high school and college students, on a 102 degree day in the Mississippi Delta. The chicken went pretty fast, and so did the cornbread and tea. Surprisingly, there were plenty of collard greens and okra left over. The next day as we headed to the worksite, I pointed out the Chicken Hut as the place where yesterday's lunch had come from. Several people got a sick look on their faces.
On Wednesday morning, a crop duster working on a cotton field across the road dumped some kind of red pesticide on us as he lifted up literally within a few feet of the top of the house. Whatever it was, it had no effect at all on the mosquitoes. We had to call one of the coordinators so that he could make some calls and find out what kind of pesticide it was and whether we could safely hose everyone off. It was a while before we got an answer back, but no one got sick or dropped dead and we were relieved, sort of, when we found out it was fertilizer, not pesticide.
Thursday morning, one of our participants started throwing up around 3:00 a.m. and after an early morning trip to the emergency room, which in Clarksdale, Mississippi is quite an adventure at that hour, she wound up in the hospital on an IV for dehydration. Within 45 minutes of our arrival, Two other kids from the project arrived wit the same symptoms. They were all diagnosed with dehydration. But I was amazed at how many other people were there at 3:00 a.m. Apparently, that is the most popular time to visit the hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Lots of people with bandages and bruises. It was a relief to the adult left in charge at the hospital when I came to pick them up that evening.
There were no porta-potties available but the construction coordinator had made arrangements with the pastor of a small, rural, Baptist church about a quarter mile down the road for the crews working in the area to use their facilities. The phrase "going to Mt. Zion" took on a whole new meaning. No air conditioning in there, either and the bathroom was a sauna. Did I mention the mosquitos? And the bathrooms were also home to some really large and particularly active wasps. There was a hole left between a couple of the floor boards in the girls' restroom through which one of the crew members observed some kind of black snake crawling on the ground below. We heard the screams a quarter of a mile away.
On Friday, at the end of the day, crews departed houses that had been visibly transformed. Our homeowner was in tears, in spite of the fact that the siding we put on her house wasn't exactly square, she also had a new, wider doorway into the bathroom, a ramp from the driveway and a storm door for her son's wheelchair access. Similar scenes were repeated all over the two-county area where we were working. But we also left behind lives that were transformed. We were blessed to know about some of those who became followers of Jesus because of the week we spent there, but there were others whose lives were changed that we won't know about until we reach eternity.
On Saturday morning, our very tired group loaded the van for the five hour drive back to Kentucky. I was thinking that none of them would ever want to do anything like this again. But I was also thinking that this was a real picture of missions and that in many parts of the world, people deal with so much more than that in order to find ways to preach the gospel and point people to Jesus. Apparently, the rest of our group was thinking along the same lines. The conversation all the way back was about what a great experience it had been and how they couldn't wait for next summer. Nothing that was negative ever made its way into the descriptions of the week given by the youth when telling the church about their experience. Well, except for the mosquitoes. The change that happened in the youth group filtered through the whole congregation. But that is what a World Changers project does.
Long-Term Impact of World Changers
For me, that week in Mississippi launched what has been one of the most meaningful spiritual growth experiences in my life. For the next twenty-six years, with one exception, a World Changers project was part of my summer, as a group leader bringing youth from my church to participate in a project and then later on as a member of the coordinating team at projects in seven different cities. It completely changed my perspective of missions and of being a servant of the Lord. I can also say that it was a life-changing experience for the participants who went on those projects as well, breaking down social, economic, racial and religious barriers and making kids--and adults--think about themselves as "missionaries" all the time, regardless of their career field.
In terms of operation and expectation, most World Changers projects were very similar, but they were never routine and the experience never got old. The experience described above, as it turns out, was very typical. It mirrors life in that things do not always go as planned. You learn how to discern the difference between a problem and a crisis and how to be quick on your feet to respond, making sure you say a quick prayer. But beyond that, every day of each project is another time during which the Holy Spirit is at work. There's a spiritual fire that gets ignited and kindled during the week and it spreads from there through youth groups and into their churches.
I don't think there's been anything among all of the missions "programs" that Southern Baptists have had over the years that has had anywhere close to the impact and influence on missions involvement and education that World Changers has had. In terms of the sheer number of youth who have been involved and what gets done spiritually in the course of one of those weeks, nothing else compares. A big hole has been opened up in Southern Baptist missions education by this loss.
Over 400,000 people have participated in a World Changers project. I'm sad that this virus provided the catalyst to have caused it to end but grateful for every minute of involvement.
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