Hillcrest Baptist Church, Enterprise, is a missions-focused congregation that sends several members on international trips each year. They go to places like Costa Rica, Belize and Ethiopia to minister, share God’s love, offer medical assistance and more.
Those who participate in these trips come back invigorated to do missions work and are more aware of how much Americans have in comparison to people in other countries, church leaders explained.
A group that recently traveled to Ethiopia started brainstorming some unconventional ways to share their trip with the younger members of their church family.
Understanding Ethiopian life
Annette Whitton, director of children’s ministries at Hillcrest Baptist, has been to Ethiopia several times and always comes home changed.
“We’ve done talks and slide presentations and it’s all been good, but we started wondering if there was something else we could do to make them understand what life is like there and how blessed we are in America,” Whitton said. “We started thinking that maybe we could build a village right there at our church.”
A Royal Ambassador (RA) teacher who went on the Ethiopia trip also is an accomplished craftsman, and he offered to build the actual village structure. The idea was that the team would keep this endeavor a secret and only reveal it to the kids when they arrived to the church for a special event. The church always hosts a campout event for their Girls in Action (GAs) and RAs, and so this melded nicely into that annual tradition.
Though initially the event was going to take place in September or October, there were some conflicts that pushed it back to November and the event actually occurred Nov. 14–15.
Despite it being extremely cold that night, requiring the group to sleep indoors because temperatures were below freezing, GA director Jennifer Amlong said the timing worked out really well.
“It’s kind of better because it was just before Thanksgiving so we were able to remind the kids how blessed we are,” she said. “We could remind them that there are people in the world who don’t have the things we take for granted.”
The children showed up to the church — overnight bags in hand — not knowing what to expect. They were led into a side courtyard area of the church where the village had been set up.
The church’s “village” consisted of four huts, a campfire, a trash area and an outhouse. For those who had actually traveled to Ethiopia, everything felt very familiar and authentic.
They separated the kids into four “families” and each family had a hut. Because about 23 first- to sixth-graders were at the event the huts became cozy quickly and the leaders explained that in Ethiopia families had to share these small spaces.
When it came time for dinner the children were served a meal much like one people in Ethiopia would eat including a version of “injera” (a bread-like food Ethiopians use in place of flatware while eating) and meat flavored with an Ethiopian spice called “berbere.”
Digging through trash
Whitton said, “Some kids complained about not having enough at dinner, so we told those kids that in Ethiopia when people want extra food, they go through the trash to find some. We’d hidden hot dogs in plastic bags in our ‘dump’ area of the village, and so the children had to dig through the trash to find hot dogs to grill if they wanted extra food.”
After dinner the leaders took some time to talk to the children about Ethiopia and about missions work in general.
Amlong said, “It really made them think. In GAs we talk about missions every Wednesday night, but this way they got to experience it. You can talk about a child having to go to a dump to find food but when they experience that on their own it really sticks.”
Hillcrest has left its Ethiopian village intact and plans to offer it as a resource to other churches that want to come by and see it and learn more about the lives of people in that country.
Share with others: