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Awesome story--Great Kids!
Alex Ard scraped flakes of teal paint from the siding of an old house on Miller Street under the shade of a shaky porch that's about to be rebuilt, as soon as the house itself gets a fresh coat of paint.
"It's hot, but I'm glad we're here. Jesus woulda," the Sharon, S.C., native said.
Some 280 other teens who arrived in Augusta this week would agree.
High school students from churches across the Southeast have volunteered this week to repair 18 homes of low- and moderate-income families in the Laney-Walker Historic District.
From Saturday to Saturday, they're World Changers, members of a short-term mission offered in cities across the United States by the Southern Baptist Convention's missionary agency, the North American Mission Board.
They arrived Sunday morning in a caravan of church vans outside the Augusta-Richmond County Housing & Community Development Department.
"There are a lot of people who need what you're doing," said City Administrator Fred Russell. "I say none of us can rest when we've got people with holes in their roofs and rats in their basements."
World Changers began with a pilot mission in the summer of 1990 that brought more than 100 youth to Briceville, Tenn., to paint and reroof homes. Last year, 22,000 people participated in the missions.
Teams have worked in Augusta to repair 150 homes on earlier missions.
Each time, a handful of Augusta churches host the teens and their adult chaperones, offering their floors as sleeping quarters and meals throughout the week.
"They pay $260 plus transportation just to come here and sleep on the floor all week," said the Rev. Robert Austin of Bethesda Baptist Church in Harlem. He has organized local World Changers projects for the past five years.
Monday, he led the World Changers in prayer as they bowed their heads and asked for a cool breeze, an opportunity to share God's love, and safety as teams rebuild rooftops and raze porches this week.
They sang the song of World Changers everywhere across the country this summer:
"You can change the world if you really care. You gotta follow where Jesus leads. Lonely hearts are everywhere. You gotta see the way Jesus sees.
"You can be a world changer, shining the light for those in danger, sharing the love of the Lord and savior. You can change the world. Go out and change the world."
With that, teams set out for their job sites.
"It'll be a long week but we do it all for the love of Jesus," said the Rev. Bob Littleton, a pastor from Kings Baptist Church in Vero Beach, Fla., who was working on the house with the peeling teal paint.
There was still a roof to seal and a porch to rebuild.
"What we do to the home is temporal," he said, "but the opportunity to touch someone's life, that can change eternity."
Reach Kelly Jasper at (706) 823-3552 or kelly.jasper@augustachronicle.com.
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