rp29nct’s BodyBlog

Since 2005, my church (www.fbcmct.org) has sent volunteers on mission with Baptist Builders for Christ. The organization was founded as part of a ministry to help meet the needs of congregations that are growing or have outgrown their present church facilities, and are seeking to or are in the process of building new facilities. My church benefited from the organization in 2004, and has been part of it ever since.

This year, the team from my church went to Logan, Ohio, to work on the new worship center for Ebenezer Baptist Church. Teams are organized and sent each week during the summer, and are scheduled to coincide with the specialty work required each week. For us, our work focused on putting the roofs on. Since pictures speak louder than words, I’ll include some images of the progress we made in one week.

For most of the week, this was the roofing crew. In the photo, we’re standing in front of what will be the new sanctuary. The whole roof, also consisted of the preschool and class wing extending from the other side of the sanctuary. The team is smiling and still appears “fresh,” which is probably due to the fact we had not started, yet (I’m the tall one wearing the black tanktop in the background).

When we first got started on Monday, the roof of the preschool and classrooms was the only one that had the decking and felt paper on. We started putting the shingles on, and actually finished the entire roof in a day and a half. By Wednesday, we were ready to start on the larger roof over the sanctuary, which was a bit more challenging because the pitch of the roof was 1 inch more than on the preschool wing. Since I’m actually afraid of heights, I was lashing myself to as much of the safety equipment we had in place as I possibly could. God kept us marvelously safe throughout the whole week!

By the end of the week, the team had laid 10,000 sq ft of shingles out of a 15,000 sq ft job. No small miracles that week! We had great weather and plenty of time to get the work done. Thanks and praise to God for the labor we completed, and for allowing us to keep the project on schedule. Once the roof was in place, the rest of the teams could begin drying in the building and hanging the sheetrock and installing the electrical systems.

After the hard work, we got to enjoy ourselves for a few hours before the flight home. We went to the Washboard Music Festival in downtown Logan, OH. If you enjoy bluegrass, eating smoked turkey legs, and general fun, then that’s definitely a place to be!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 9:35 am and is filed under Christianity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.