Honduras. Ethiopia. These are the types of places Josh Parker said people think of when they think of doing missions.
But when he thinks of doing missions, Parker thinks of the people sleeping under bridges in Dothan, people who don’t have anything.
“Those people get forgotten about,” said Parker, youth minister at Bethlehem Baptist Church, Headland, in Columbia Baptist Association.
But they’re not forgotten anymore, at least not in the Dothan area, thanks to WIRED, a weeklong associational missions effort with all the fixings of a summer camp most churches normally would travel to get to.
“We are trying to ‘wire’ churches together with one common purpose,” said Mark Anderson, camp director of WIRED and student minister at Malvern Baptist Church.
The purpose? To expose needs in the Wiregrass area.
“There are thousands of dollars spent traveling to other parts of (the) country and world when there are a lot of overlooked needs in our own area,” Anderson said.
It took three years of prayer and planning to come up with a solid program, but in 2008, a group of youth ministers’ goal of a missions project in its own “Jerusalem” was realized with the first WIRED.
This year, there were 340 more participants than last year. The 575 students and adults from 33 churches were organized into 36 teams that focused on three ministry tracks: social ministry, children’s ministry and painting/construction/yard work ministry.
Dothan’s Mount Gilead Baptist and Ridgecrest Baptist churches acted as their home base July 5–10 with each church providing housing and meals and Ridgecrest Baptist hosting nightly worship services and Bible study.
Ministry track leader Dustin Lee, who attends Mount Gilead Baptist, saw the hearts of the 12 guys in his group soften while remodeling a home for abused and neglected girls.
The guys came to understand that a lack of family, love and material belongings is not just a Third World country issue — these things happen in Dothan and to people they go to school with, Lee said.
“It’s helped them be leaders and to know they need to love these girls,” he said of the experience.
While the guys didn’t have a chance to interact with the girls while they were working, three girls attended WIRED’s closing celebration, which was open to the community, and were saved.
Through the course of the week, more than 100 people made salvation decisions at ministry sites, 50 made decisions during evening worship and between 25 and 50 made decisions during Bible study. The missions project also led 44 students to commit their lives to the ministry, and since it ended, even more have made this decision.
Why has God blessed WIRED?
“I think it’s because we are fulfilling Scripture. We are starting in our hometown and ministering to our people,” Anderson said. “We are not looking at each other as individual churches but as one body uniting together in faith to serve Christ and the community through nursing homes, food kitchens, rescue missions, construction sites and VBS sites. Seeing the fruits of our labor as we minister to the community has helped us think outside the walls of the organized church.”
Share with others: