Published: June 28, 2008 12:30 am      

The feet and hands of Jesus

Youth mission groups put the Bible to action

MANNINGTON — A beautiful summer day. A lovely town park. And a group of teenagers.

Not playing basketball or picnicking or even goofing off, but working, working hard in the summer sun, chipping off layer after layer of old paint from picnic tables, putting up basketball nets, painting a swingset, cutting and trimming grass.

If you drove past the George Bowers Memorial Park in Mannington any time this week, you probably saw these teens, some from Mannington’s First Baptist Church and others from the First Lutheran Church in Janesville, Wisc.

The two joined for this mission project, which also included work in the outdoor classroom at the library and at the home of a local woman.

“This is a local mission project for youth at First Baptist and an out-of-area mission for the youth at First Lutheran,” said the Rev. Gregory Roth, pastor at First Baptist.

Roth got to know Eric and Renee Engen, leaders for the Lutheran Church teens, when he lived in Wisconsin and worked for the Rock Valley Youth for Christ there.

“ Their youth group participated in lot of our activities with other local churches ... Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Independent churches ... you name it, we had all different kinds of churches.

“It was a way to get to know and understand a little bit more of what the Bible says without getting into all that denominational stuff.”

He’s also taken youth groups to post-Katrina New Orleans, Gulfport and Biloxi, he said, “to different places to help people in need.”

“Jesus said the greatest rule is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself.

“We start with the basics. We teach kids to love God and Jesus, and to love others and love yourself.

“I like to put it: Love God completely, love others compassionately and love yourself correctly.”

Eric and Renee Engen were the adult leaders for the Wisconsin teens, all high school students.

Students participating from the Mannington church are Brandon Shutler, Hannah and Rachel Roth, Jessica McNeill, Charlene Sirk, Logan Boone, Eric and Devin Dunigan, Derrick White and Mariah Sides. Adult leaders include Roth, Harold Efaw, Jack Rinehart and Harry Bertschy.

The Roths had lived in Wisconsin for eight years before moving here, and in Parkersburg before that.

Janesville, located on the North Red River, is feeling the effects of the disastrous Midwest flooding.

“Its downtown business district is closed because of high water,” Roth said. “It’s not flooded out but a lot of people are displaced. These kids left their families and friends who were having difficulties to come here and help. And when they get back, they’ll probably help there as well.”

The group arrived Monday and worked hard Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. They’ll head back today, splitting the 15-hour, 650-mile trip into two days.

“On Friday we’ll enjoy some of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia with whitewater rafting on the Cheat,” Roth said.

“This is putting the Bible to action,” Renee Engen said. “We teach to be the hands and feet of Jesus. We believe that this is a great way to do that.”

Each teen paid $250 to come on the mission trip.

“They came here to work,” Eric Engen said. “Some had done mission trips before and some had not.”

Mariah Nunn, a 17-year-old senior at Parker High School in Janesville, is here because she likes helping people, she said.

“I’d gone on mission trips before to Louisiana eight months after Katrina. There are gonna be problems down there forever.”

She does a lot of community service with her church and will probably study psychology in college.

“I want to focus on substance abuse. I want to make a difference.”

She likes the green and hills of West Virginia, she said.

“I was excited to see the mountains.”

Some people, when they go home from a trip, take magnets or postcards to remember their experiences. Not Mariah. She wants to take a little bit of Fairmont with her ... pepperoni rolls, to be exact.

“This is my new favorite thing,” she said. “And hot dog sauce. We don’t have those in Wisconsin. I want to sell pepperoni rolls at the food stand our church has at the state fair.”

Brett Larson, 17, just graduated from high school and plans to attend college next spring in Australia to study music.

“When we saw the park for the first time, it was overwhelming,” he said.

“The tables were completely chipped of paint. There were six to 10 layers of previous paint on them. Writing on the board. The posts were rusting and peeling. The swingset was horrible. There were little tiny chips of paint. If you ran your hand over it, you’d get little paint splinters.”

But with 13 teens from both churches sharing the work, by the end of the first day things looked better.

“At that point, we realized it would be easier than we thought.”

Larson also performs a lot of community and church service, he said.

“I’ve done it for a number of years, so it comes naturally for me. I technically have two churches: the one I go to regularly and the other I go to for youth group.”

He knows the inner satisfaction felt when doing something for someone else.

“That final look on their face when you’re done and it looks so much better ... . I saw a couple of kids here attempting to play in the park. I imagined them after we were done and saw their smile, like ‘This is so cool. I can’t believe they did this.’

“That’s better than any gift.”

The park is now one of bright purple, green, red, blue and orange swing seats, park tables and pavilions. The Wisconsin teens purchased the paint and supplies for the project themselves.

“They wanted to do a project and raised the money ($500) so it wouldn’t cost the community. That’s way cool,” Roth said.

“Like I said ... love God completely, love others compassionately and love yourself correctly.

“When you have those things in mind, you don’t think about yourself all the time. You think about others and about loving yourself. A lot of people forget it’s hard to love God completely and others compassionately if you don’t have the right view of yourself.

“If you think too highly of yourself, you’re not gonna help anybody. If you think too lowly of yourself, you think you’re of no importance, no worth and that you can’t do anything.

“I teach people that God loves us so much that He died for us. He died for us because we have a need.”

In turn, last year the Mannington group ventured out to Wisconsin to help the local Youth of Christ Chapter with its annual peach fair, raising $20,000 that week to be used to work with youth.

“They couldn’t do that if they didn’t have the help raising the money. We helped raise the money.

“Our denomination is giving us a $1,000 grant to do another project in the community and wants us to match that.”

He’s not too worried about matching the grant.

“We have some really good and really generous people,” he said.

“This is not about us,” he added about the teen project.

“We hope that maybe somebody hearing what we’ve been doing will reach out to others, whether it’s faith-based or just a personal project.”

E-mail Debra Minor Wilson at dwilson@timeswv.com.