In today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches his disciples that his mission involves great suffering, rejection, death and that he will rise again. After a confrontation with Peter, Jesus expands his teaching to the “crowd” and proclaims “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.” This weekend at all three of our worship services and on Sunday at 9:30 a.m., youth and adults who went on the Appalachia Service Project Mission Trip shared their experiences of living and serving “for the sake of the gospel.”
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In July, 14 of our young people along with 7 of our adults traveled 9 hours to Ashland Kentucky where we spent a week with Appalachia Service Project (ASP) in Boyd County Kentucky.
Appalachia Service Project is a Christian ministry, open to all people, to inspire hope and service to families through volunteer home repair and replacement in Central Appalachia. With the help of thousands of volunteers each year, Appalachia Service Project repairs homes free of charge for needy families in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Much of the work is done in summer and the areas they serve change from year to year. Over the last 50 years, 18,000+ families have been helped by more than 400,000 volunteers including our youth. Some of the repairs ASP provides include emergency roofing, building access ramps, floor and wall repair, bathroom and kitchen repair and more. Repair work is performed by teams of 7 volunteers, usually made up of 5 high school youth and 2 adults. Volunteers work for one week at a time, with many of the projects taking multiple weeks to complete.
In Ashland, our St John’s group was joined by two other groups of volunteers, a group of 46 volunteers from St Luke’s Lutheran in Devon and a smaller sized group made of from several churches in Martinsburg WV. For the St Luke’s group this was the sixth straight year of them taking their young people on an ASP Mission trip.
Our group of 21 was divided up into three crews. In order to protect the privacy of the families being served the work locations were named after soups. Why soups we never really figured out. Humorously, a poster on the wall in the Methodist church where we stayed claimed Ashland invented soup. Let’s just say SOUP is a whole lot older than Ashland and the American colonies. We did find out that Appalachia is famous however for soup beans and cornbread, a Native American dish, which is said to fill the belly and enrich the soul.
Our three crews were Tomato Basil, Chili, and French Onion. The members of the Tomato Basil Crew were Savanna Muller, Mo O’Neill, Morgan Beatty, Dylan New, Max Strunk, Mark Gerner and Rick Kramer. The Chili crew were Gabrielle van der Veer, Rosa Gerner, Cole O’Neill, Maddie Muller, Jack Kramer, Jeff van der Veer, and Shelly Saeger. Those on French Onion were Evan Coughlin, Katie Kramer, Anna Gerner, Karisa Saeger, Jodie & Justin O’Neill, and Claudia Borst.
Thanks to your generosity in buying hoagie tickets, donating while having your car washed, or making direct gifts, all the transportation and living costs for our mission trip were paid for by our congregation. Your giving enabled our young people to serve God and others on a life changing mission trip they will never forget.