Building a new window frame for a battered house in Birmingham is a familiar thrill for Gary Grooms of Tomball, Texas. “I’ve been a crew chief with World Changers for four years,” he said as he held up a wooden beam, measuring it visually against the deep crack around the window. “Every house is different — you don’t know what to expect. But it’s still the same — helping people.”
Grooms is among 24,000 volunteers working with World Changers this summer. He is also one who will be affected by the transition of the management of World Changers projects in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina.
The 2007 summer season completed the sixth and final year for these three states managing their own World Changers projects through the state conventions. The North American Mission Board (NAMB) will regain responsibility for management of the projects beginning with the 2008 season.
“We have concluded that the best way to manage all World Changers projects is through one system, not two,” Harry Lewis, interim executive vice president at NAMB, wrote in a letter to the three state convention coordinators of World Changers projects late last year.
Administrative changes
While all World Changers coordination and staffing leadership will now be run by NAMB, very little difference in the day-to-day activities will be noticed, said Tommy Puckett, who coordinated World Changers projects for Alabama Baptists until the transition. The main difference the student volunteers will notice will be with the worship style, he noted. A praise band has been used in the past, but NAMB uses a worship leader.
“We will not have a say so in any of the staffing of the World Changers projects, but we will assist wherever NAMB wants us,” said Puckett, director of men’s ministries at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. “We want them to succeed.”
During the past six years, Alabama Baptists — as well as Georgia and North Carolina Baptists — have hired Serve Management Group to run the World Changers projects. Serve, a Cumming, Ga.-based nonprofit project management organization, is run by former Alabama Baptist Andy Morris.
Cutbacks coming
The company has offices in Cummming; Murphy, N.C.; and Birmingham and employs 12 full-time people, two contract workers and one part-time person.
“We will be cutting our staff by more than half later this year,” said Morris, noting the impact the World Changers transition will have on his organization. Morris is also selling the main office building in Cumming as well as making adjustments in the other two cities.
“This has obviously hurt us,” he said. And the transition this summer “has been a little difficult,” but “I will continue to be a big supporter of World Changers.”
“I spent the first half of my adult life building the name World Changers. I don’t plan to spend the last half tearing it down,” Morris said, referring to his position with NAMB in the 1990s and until 2001 in the ministry area that developed World Changers.
Marketing the new name for his summer missions projects, Mission Serve, which is similar to World Changers, Morris said, “We are all in this together. It is about Kingdom business, not about competition.”
And, according to Morris, Serve’s relationship with Alabama Baptists “couldn’t be stronger.”
“It is probably stronger now than ever before,” he said, noting that Serve will manage its own projects in Talladega, Birmingham and Mobile in 2008. Serve is also currently managing an Alabama Baptist–Guatemala Baptist partnership project in Guatemala City.
About 80 Baptists from Alabama and North Carolina left July 21 for a weeklong effort to help six churches. Serve will manage another project in Guatemala in 2008 as well as an Alabama Baptist partnership project in Jackson, Mich.
Morris said Serve will manage 15 total projects for Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina in 2008, five of those connected to Alabama Baptists. In 2007, Serve managed 22 total projects in these three states — eight World Changers projects and three Mission Serve projects for Alabama. In 2006, Serve had 24 total projects in the three states, nine of which were in Alabama.
NAMB reported a total of 23 World Changers projects in the three states in 2006, eight of those in Alabama, and 22 total projects in 2007, eight in Alabama. In 2008, there will be 17 World Changers projects in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina, eight of those in Alabama.
The number of World Changers projects remains consistent in Alabama, but Serve’s role will diminish some in Alabama in 2008 because it will not be managing the projects coming out of NAMB.
Serve will also lose the student missions projects it has had with Birmingham Baptist Association (BBA) because BBA is reinstating its previous project management ministry MetroChangers.
However, Serve has gained management projects elsewhere.
Puckett, who takes the helm as Serve’s chairman of the board in August, said Alabama will continue to use Serve to manage projects.
“It is difficult to watch it have to cut the staff in half, but we are praying that we will be able to bring staff back on as opportunities for projects expand,” he said.
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