For nine years now, Jon Hodge has been in the neighborhood-changing business. While he’s changing neighborhoods, he’s also working, with God’s help, to change hearts, minds and souls.
Based out of Bartlett, Tenn., just northeast of Memphis, Jon and Linda Hodge are national missionaries for the North American Mission Board (NAMB), an assignment that takes Jon to middle Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, southern Illinois and Alaska.
Hodge manages a big chunk of NAMB’s nationwide World Changers ministry. Created in 1990, World Changers is a prepackaged missions experience that enables students — middle schoolers to collegians — and adults to donate a week out of their summers to rehabilitate substandard housing and share Christ.
Responsible for planning and coordinating different World Changers projects in the five states he represents, Hodge spends many months prior to the actual summer project months picking cities and meeting with city officials, school officials, city economic leaders and homeowners to choose the renovation projects. He also must ensure that his participants have a place to stay, get fed, serve and share.
He selects and trains about 25 college students, who serve as summer staff volunteers for World Changers projects, traveling from site to site. Each volunteer plays a different role — office manager, music leader, audiovisual (AV) coordinator and even a missions communications specialist responsible for alerting local media to World Changers activities in a given city. The students, in turn, work for World Changers’ experienced project coordinators and construction and ministry coordinators.
“The college students must be strong people to serve on these teams,” Hodge said. “We need leaders who’ll take a group and lead it. We have to have people strong in computers and AV. Mainly, we need kids who are willing to go, serve and work hard, because it’s long hours. You may go from 5 a.m. one morning to 1 a.m. the next morning. You have to be flexible, have a great personality and be willing to do whatever the Lord wants you to do that week.”
Regardless of the project venue, Hodge said, the first questions the World Changers always get from local residents are, “Why are you here?” and “Why are you doing this?”
“We’re able to share with them that we’re doing this because we love Jesus, and Jesus called us to go, serve and help people,” he added.
Hodge recounts the story of a man in Gulfport, Miss., a victim of Hurricane Katrina. About 350 World Changers were on the scene in Gulfport to help local residents rebuild. The man, naturally suspicious of anyone claiming to want to help him for free, had already run off others from another denomination who had volunteered to re-roof his wind-damaged home.
“Then he met 12 teenagers and adults who had come from different Baptist churches in different places to help hurricane victims,” Hodge said. “He said he could see in them a love that he had never seen before. He said he had to have what this group had. He accepted Christ because of the witness of the World Changers.”
Prior to his appointment as a NAMB national missionary, Hodge worked as a coach, truck driver and a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts route salesman. Before his call to full-time missions work, he also served as a youth and recreation minister for 11 years in Tennessee and Illinois churches.
“My call to missions came after I took a youth group to a World Changers project in Alabama. The more I became involved on the leadership side of World Changers as a project coordinator and speaker, the stronger the call I felt to be involved in missions I had taken the group to Alabama to rehab the homes of several low-income homeowners. I thought I was going to change their world by repairing their homes and sharing the love of Christ with them.
“But not only were their lives changed, my life was changed,” he said. (NAMB)
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