On Nov. 18, Donnie Sisk, student minister at First Baptist Church, Pelham, will drive a used, low-mileage blue van to a church in Lake Orion, Mich. He will give the van to the church and then catch a plane home.
The van, the gas up there, his hotel expenses and his ticket back to Alabama will all be paid for with money — more than $4,000 — raised by the Shelby Baptist Association church’s youth group. All it took was a little faith and some scriptural ingenuity.
After partnering with a group of Michigan Baptist pastors and going on a missions trip to the Great Lake State, Sisk and the students at First, Pelham, (where Mike Shaw is pastor) decided to take on the needs of one particular church — New Beginnings Baptist, Lake Orion — as a special project.
The church needed a van.
“We just really wanted to find a way to help them,” Sisk said.
The only question was how.
“A member of our student ministry team owns a car lot, and he said, ‘I found this really great van that’s an older model, but it doesn’t have a lot of miles on it,’” Sisk said.
The van cost $1,500 but Sisk estimated that a safe trip from Pelham to Lake Orion would require another $1,000 in parts.
Still it seemed right. So he thought on it. He even took the members of the youth group down to the lot to pray over the van to see whether God was moving them to buy it. He was.
“So, in trying to think of the best way to do that, I decided to try something I’d done before at a church in Tennessee,” Sisk said.
And it worked.
Taking a lesson straight from the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, Sisk gave $5 of “seed money” to 86 people, mostly members of the youth group, and told them to double it, triple it, quadruple it — do anything with it they wanted as long as it multiplied.
The results were more than anyone expected. In just four weeks, $430 turned into $4,200, enough not only for the van and the repairs but also for the trip up and — just barely — the trip back. Sisk said only two students returned just the $5.
Fifteen-year-old Steffan Swindle was not one of them.
Swindle and a friend pooled their money to buy one of six boxes of leftover youth conference T-shirts that had been sitting around the church for months. They sold all the shirts, bought the remaining boxes of shirts and then sold them. When it came time to turn in the money, they handed Sisk $1,000.
“I thought the project was never going to work, that no one was going to participate,” Swindle said. “I really didn’t understand but then it worked out and it was great.”
Seventeen-year-old Matt Weaver quadrupled his money by buying two bulk bags of Reese’s peanut butter cups and selling the candy individually to his friends at school.
“It was pretty cool,” he said. “I didn’t really know how it would work, and I didn’t think someone would want to buy something. But when people came up asked me what I was doing, I just told them and they thought it was cool.”
Both of Sisk’s daughters also participated. Maegan Sisk, 16, made and sold papier-mâché cross decorations, and Mallory Sisk, 14, made and sold cookies.
“It was just a really cool thing for our students,” he said. “It was great to see how creative they can be and to see God turn something small into something big.”
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