A big smile stretched across Jay Murphy’s face as sweat beaded on his forehead, the Alabama sun baking him and the teenagers carrying lumber back and forth behind him.
“It’s hot, and I like my climate control,” he said with a laugh.
But despite appearances, the heat wasn’t the thing that “got him” that week as he worked on a World Changers crew in Birmingham in mid-July. Was it hot? Yes. Was it hard work? Absolutely.
But for Murphy, the thing that overwhelmed him was — Jesus.
‘Jesus immersion’
“This has been like Jesus immersion,” said Murphy, of Staunton, Virginia, who served as a World Changers crew chief. “You try to soak it all in. You hear about people taking a trip to South America to immerse themselves in the language, but for us, this is like immersion in Jesus, which is pretty cool.”
Christ was all around them, he said, as the group of about 20 students and adults from Virginia, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland and Washington State worked on a house in southwest Birmingham. They worked from sunup to sundown, then cleaned up and had worship at night, got up and had worship in the morning too and then did it all over again.
And so did teams on 85 other worksites in Alabama as students and adults from across the nation descended on Birmingham, Florence and Tuscaloosa, freshening up paint, working on roofs and building decks and wheelchair ramps.
“It’s Jesus all week,” said Logan Chappell, a student from Spartanburg, South Carolina, who worked on the site with Murphy.
Morgan Hope, also from Spartanburg, agreed. “As World Changers, we enjoy the work and get to minister to people all over,” she said. “For some people, offering to help them with something they need meets a physical need and can lead to meeting a spiritual need.”
It paves the way to share the love of Christ, Hope said.
And it’s such a great open door to the gospel that Birmingham Baptists keep it going year-round through the Metro Changers ministry, said Butch Henderson, executive director of Metro Changers.
“With Birmingham having nearly a 30 percent poverty level, there’s a lot of need that’s out there,” he said. “Christians need to be aware of how many homes are in disarray and how many people are living in unsafe environments.”
As the hands and feet of Christ, churches can help by painting or roofing a house or making it handicap accessible, “then go back and minister to that particular family or person as long as they want to,” Henderson said.
And they can focus on ministry and let Metro Changers do the behind-the-scenes legwork, he said.
Through a close relationship with Birmingham’s development office, Metro Changers chooses projects based on the homeowner applications given to the city.
Then they purchase the supplies for the project and the city reimburses them, Henderson said.
“This whole ministry comes at no cost to the church — only their time,” he said.
Metro Changers has been working alongside World Changers for eight years, preparing the plans and materials before the teams arrive on the ground.
It’s been a rewarding partnership, Henderson said.
But churches can do the same kind of project through Metro Changers at any other time of year too, Henderson said. Since 2007 the ministry has facilitated work on more than 1,300 homes, impacted more than 2,500 people and seen the gospel shared countless times.
“It’s really an astonishing thing to sit back and watch how homeowners react to volunteers,” he said. “It’s hard to put into words, but it’s really amazing to watch what God does.”
For more information, visit www.metrochangers.org.
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