About Us

Project helps create unity among youth

The Daily Reflector
By: Kim Grizzard
Published August 6, 2009

Teens from area churches have brought brushes, buckets and ladders to a run-down house near downtown Greenville this week, but, the truth is, the paint is just a cover.

The new inner city mission project known as One Body is more about restoring relationships than renovating houses. The project has brought together more than 100 students to west Greenville not only to paint, but to provide food, pass out party invitations - and pray.

"It's about bringing a lot of kids who have never really come into west Greenville to west Greenville," said Ryan Hudson, an intern at Covenant United Methodist Church who helped organize the project.

Fourteen-year-old Thompson Brown is one of them. The Chestnut Street neighborhood is entirely new to the D.H. Conley High School student.

"I was a little bit nervous," he said Tuesday as he stood on a ladder, scraping paint on the porch of the More Hope House. "But I've met a lot of new people here. It's been fun getting to know people I don't get to go to church with."

East Carolina University student Candace O'Quinn said getting teens to cross racial and denominational lines was one of the goals that she and fellow Covenant interns had in mind when they started planning the project in May.

"That's the beauty of this project, that we're putting them in a new situation that they otherwise wouldn't have experienced," she said. "We're pushing them to branch out.

"We've got two African-American ministries and two white ministries (involved)," O'Quinn said. "Our main goal is to get them to get to know each other and to do this mission project together to unify the youth, and, in so doing, we just want them to love on the people they come in contact with."

For David Shackleford, 15, of J.H. Rose High School, that meant standing outside in 90-degree-plus temperatures, offering water or juice to neighbors of the work site at the intersection of Chestnut and Columbia streets.

It is not the first time Shackleford has taken on this role. He and fellow members of the local ministry Men of Standard have stood on this corner before, offering hospitality to anyone who passed by.

"We talked to prostitutes and told them how God loved them," he said. "We had, I think, five start going to church that next week."

Baylor University student Ashley Summers, a Greenville native, spent much of last summer in the same neighborhood, sitting on the porch of the More Hope House with a cooler full of water and Popsicles. Summers, who has spent time in Argentina as a missionary, felt called last summer to work a little closer to home.

"I came home and felt like the Lord was saying, 'Be a missionary right here in Greenville,' so I hung out at this house every other day last summer," she said. "When I heard that they were recruiting kids (for One Body), I got so excited. I just joined in with the kids and decided to help out."

This week, helping out includes working at JOY (Jesus, Others and You) Soup Kitchen, painting and cleaning at Building Hope Community Life Center, delivering groceries provided through Georgia-based Angel Food Ministries or simply performing random acts of kindness.

"They'll go around and they'll pray for some people," said Hudson, a Western Carolina University student. "They might pass out flowers at a nursing home, just wherever they feel like the Lord is telling them to go and to do to serve the people."

Mandi Nichols, middle school coordinator for Covenant Student Ministries, returned from a mission trip to the Dominican Republic on Sunday. On Monday, she was helping prepare for the One Body project.

"We've got things we've got to take care of here and ways for God to use us here," she said. "There are so many needs here."

Some people have as many misgivings about working in a run-down neighborhood in the city as traveling to a third-world country.

Covenant member Lexy Davis, 12, said her parents came along the first few times she volunteered at More Hope House with her church. This week, the Christ Covenant School student came only with members of her youth group.

"I wasn't nervous, but my parents were nervous for me," she said. "(They) just kind of had to trust God."

Hudson said the location of the work does not seem to have deterred teens. Forty-seven additional volunteers joined the project on Tuesday morning.

"As one girl was signing up (earlier), she said, 'It's going to be in the ghetto?'" Hudson recalled, "and we were like, 'Yeah, we're going to be in west Greenville.' That's the closest to hesitancy I've seen. Even after she said it, she still signed her name. I think people are more scared of meeting somebody new than being out here."

To help teens overcome those fears, One Body organizers have placed them in different groups from their friends. On any given day, teens from St. James United Methodist Church might be grouped to work with volunteers from Born to Win ministries.

Efforts to create unity continue after the teens leave the work sites for the day. Each afternoon, different participating ministries gather at Covenant for a worship service that includes different types of music, prayer and even dance.

"It's coming together instead of each group going out by themselves," Shackleford said. "We can come together and show people it don't matter if you're black or white."

Organizers are trying to get people to come together on Saturday for music, food and games at a Community-Unity Block Party at the More Hope House. The faith-based nonprofit group Certain Hope Ministries has hosted similar events in the past to provide wholesome fun for families in the neighborhood.

And what if the painting isn't finished by then? Covenant Director of Outreach Walter Strathy, who helped launch Certain Hope Ministries a year and a half ago, isn't worried how it will look. In his view, the painting is hardly the point.

"This project's an excuse to unify the students, the body," Strathy said. The external stuff, it's nice. We'll see tangible evidence of them working together, and the neighborhood will see tangible evidence, things are getting done.

"There's been a lot of spiritual renovation in the last year and a half in this community," he said. "We've seen drug addicts coming off the street, prostitutes coming to church, families being reunited. It's not tangible. It's more spiritual."