Crew from the Hood

By Kariss Lynch, FBC Lubbock College Student

“From now on, we will no longer call you the ‘Crew from Texas Tech.’ You will now be known as the ‘Crew from the Hood,’” Ted Napp, the Director of Missions in the Crescent Bay Baptist Convention shouted out to a rousing round of applause to conclude the testimony service on the final night of our mission trip in Los Angeles, California. The room buzzed with one hundred and five people from Texas, members of six congregations in the LA area, fresh paint, and new wood standing proudly as a new stage at the front of the sanctuary.

On March 13, 2009, ninety-three college students from Texas Tech University, Lubbock Christian University, Wayland Baptist University, and South Plains College loaded onto two buses with thirteen adult leaders to begin the twenty-two hour trek from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles, California to spend the week fixing up churches in underprivileged areas of LA. The trip first started in the spring of 1985 with Sam Douglas, the then University Minister at First Baptist Church of Lubbock, Texas. Douglas had a vision to encourage college students to experience mission work through service and helping others. The first year, four cars full of students made the trip to Richville, Utah to work on a church there. The next year the trip grew to a couple van loads of students with the final destination being Sheridan, Wyoming.

Douglas’ dream caught on and the trip continued to grow every year. Since 1985, the First Baptist University Ministry has traveled to Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, Idaho, California, and Mexico to help build, repair, and encourage churches that are unable to afford necessary repairs. The goal every year is to help fellow Christians further their work by meeting the needs of the church in regards to their building facilities.

Eventually, Douglas left and Keith Brister took over, taking eighty to ninety students to Utah where they built a church in a week. He also was the first one to bring in adults from the church with construction experience to aid the mission trip goers in attaining their goals more effectively and efficiently as they served. Bill and Diane Davis, the current trip coordinators, began their spring break mission trip experiences in 1988. In 1991, Bill began to lead the trips, coordinating with directors of missions in California to see which churches had the greatest need. After Brister, John Strappazon took over the ministry, continuing to expand it, followed by Bruce Venable, the current University minister of four years.

From the outside looking in, the trip may seem simple enough: a handful of students go spend a work doing a Christian service project in another state; however, those of us that go on the mission trip know differently. The students and adult that go on the trip give up their spring breaks, taking off of work and setting aside homework and projects to pay two hundred and eighty five dollars to spend a week working every day for roughly ten hours a day. Tyler Ferguson, a sophomore in the ministry, described it as “an incredible picture of the body of Christ at work. Every one of us has different abilities and passions, but God is here teaching us to serve, humbling us. If everyone in America would learn how to serve like this, we would be able to fix our nation.”

This was my third mission trip with the First Baptist University Ministry to California, and it never ceases to amaze me how God moves. God does something special and powerful when His people commit to serve. There is nothing easy about the trip and there is nothing special about the students that go. We simply acknowledge that God has called us to serve and we do what is required.

Before leaving, every student is asked to fill out an evaluation of skills that they are capable of doing from roofing, painting, electric work, sheet rocking, and working with power tools. Many students embark on the trip with no experience, simply a willingness to serve. With our group of ninety students this year, we were able to work on six churches in southern LA including: First Southern Baptist Church of Anaheim, Faith in Christ Baptist Church, New Rock of Ages in Hawthorn, First Baptist Church of Southern LA, Greater Good Shepherd Baptist Church, and Southside Bethel Baptist Church.

The group discovered as a whole this trip that we came to be a blessing and encouragement to the congregations and pastors, but over and over again we were blessed through them as well. At services every night, Bruce would continually remind us that one day both our group from Texas and the congregations from California would praise Jesus in Heaven together, without thought about race, economic status, occupation, background, or political opinions. God truly does a work in His body, and it was a blessing every night to worship our God with believers in a different state that we had never met before and may never see again.

Throughout the trip, Bruce and Bill continued to ask us, “What is God teaching you this week? What is He showing you through this experience?” Ryan Wilkinson, a first time goer, said about the week, “I feel like God opened my eyes in the sense that I don't need to drink and go out to have fun. I also feel like he let me see the joy in helping people in need, and that prayer should not consist of my wants but I should focus on his will.”

We were able to complete our tasks at five of the six churches, leaving information and necessary resources for the members to finish at the sixth. As Bruce has continually stated since our return back to Lubbock, “God has blown a fresh wind into our ministry through this experience. How will you apply what you have learned to your daily life now that we are back?” We experienced God in a big way on mission trip in Los Angeles, California. But He continues to be the same God who calls us to do the same things in Lubbock and in our various hometowns.

As a University Ministry we have claimed Acts 20:24 as a prayer for ourselves in our city: “However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me – the task of testifying to the gospel of God’s grace.” We pray that God will continue to use us in the days ahead on our campuses, because in the end, it is all for His glory. As we sang one night in service after a long day of hard work and sunburns, with our new friends and fellow believers in LA, I realized that nothing that was built, painted, or repaired would have happened without the Lord. We will one day sing again with them in Heaven, “How Great is Our God.”

Kariss Lynch is a creative writing major at Texas Tech University. She loves swimming, reading, and going for walks with her golden retriever, Wise Guy.

FBC Lubbock Student's Beach Reach Mission Experience

Lubbock students travel to Florida for unconventional spring break

It seemed normal.

A group of 50 college kids in a charter bus, dubbed “The Party Bus” by a few of its riders, who were antsy and excited to get to Panama City Beach, Florida, one of the world’s most popular spring break destinations.

However, the group’s purpose for going to Panama City was anything but normal compared to the majority of students in the city.

“The general response is ‘What is this?’ ‘Why are y’all doing this?’” said Clint Wren, one of the 50 students from First Baptist Church of Lubbock who participated in Beach Reach. Beach Reach is an evangelism-oriented mission trip put on by Lifeway.

Wren said the students gave up their entire spring break in order to serve and share the love of Jesus with spring breakers, most of whom are desperately seeking something.
“It just blew my mind to see how many people, even though they were there partying, they just had a turnaround,” said Elise Peak, a freshman at Texas Tech who went on the trip.
To reach the spring breakers, the students would begin their mission work at around 9 p.m., and finish for the night anywhere between 3 and 6 a.m. The night was divided into two shifts, and there were three roles the students served in.

One of the roles seems simple, riding a van, but that was not the only aspect of the role. Students had canvassed the area known as the strip, where most hotels and clubs in the city are located, with promotional cards advertising free van rides and a free pancake breakfast in the morning. Spring breakers were able to call a phone number and get a safe van ride to and from anywhere on the strip for free. When they took advantage of this service, they were greeted on the vans by beach reachers, as they became known, who were prepared to have conversations and establish relationships with the spring breakers and to intentionally steer the conversation towards Christ, in hopes of being able to share the Gospel.

“We’ll just talk with them while we take them to wherever they want to go and just pray that God will lead it into a spiritual conversation,” said Ricky Bolander, a sophomore on the trip who also went on the trip last year. “It usually happens, so it’s pretty cool.”
Another role was called street team, where students would get dropped off at an area of the strip and talk with people walking down the streets of the city.

“It was more casual so that people would talk with us, but then once we struck up a spiritual conversation it was just amazing where it took us, “ Peak said.

Tim Puckett, a graduate student who went on the trip said people are often very open to having lengthy conversations, even if they are heading to a specific destination. Puckett greeted a student who was on a way to a party to meet with a girl.

“He stopped and we ended up talking for probably 45 minutes, maybe an hour. He ended up rededicating his life to Christ,” Puckett said. “It was one of those things where like, he had his own plan and his own intentions, but clearly God had a different plan for him. Just the fact that he stopped, cause he was like on his way to go to this party and meet this girl, the fact that he stopped and we talked for so long and he made a decision that hopefully will change the rest of his life I think that was pretty cool.”

Wren, Peak, Bolander and Puckett all said prayer was the most important aspect of the trip, and much of that prayer originated from the prayer room, the third role the students served in. The prayer room was set up at the hotel the students stayed at, and had two screens at the front of the room displaying updated prayer requests. The requests came via text message from students in the vans and on the streets, so students in the prayer room were able to lift up spring breakers by name

“Our prayers were completely answered,” Peak said. The power of prayer was completely proven night after night.”

Puckeet said while the prayer room was important, prayer was a major aspect no matter where the team was.

“I think the coolest thing about the trip is seeing prayers answered right before your eyes,” he said. “I think the biggest summation of the trip would be prayer and seeing God work through that.”

After serving in these roles the students slept for a few hours and then woke up to go to the free pancake breakfast, to which they invited many of the spring breakers they ministered to the night before. The pancakes were prepared by a team of senior-adults from Georgia and given away free to anyone who came. Beach reachers then started conversations with spring breakers while they ate in an effort to continue to grow the seeds they planted in previous nights.

“Whenever we sat there in line and saw people we had seen the night before come to the pancake breakfast it was so refreshing because you know, there are people out there that are hungry for the Word,” Peak said. “People want to know the word.”

All four of the students said they were amazed by how God worked through them during the trip, and said their personal spiritual walk grew as the week progressed.

“For that one week there’s that intimacy and closeness with God that is almost indescribable,” Wren said. “It’s almost exactly what was intended for us as Christians to have with God. You can’t beat that.”

“Of course, you see God show up in miraculous and crazy ways,” he said. “(There were) just a lot of events that only God could ordain.”

The week of Beach Reach FBC Lubbock’s students attended resulted in more than 20 first-time decisions for Christ and numerous rededications.