Church Work
Laborers for the glory of God
Goals
This section will describe the manual work done by the CMU Philly team during our week at UWC. Our main goal was to work together as a team to accomplish the tasks UWC gave us when we arrived in Kensington.
UWC is gracious in giving us physical labor to do during our week in Philly. Truth be told, it must be hard directing untrained college students. We rarely have people skilled in woodworking, office work, or welding.
What the team lacks in manual labor skills, it makes up for in the desire to physically serve. We took on tasks that any large number of bodies can do. This included organizing closets, clearing garbage, cleaning every single Windex-able surface imaginable, and painting.
In this section, I’ll be writing about “Who Did What”, organized by task accomplished, and “How We Felt”.
Who Did What
Labor projects from past years included ripping up and disposing of floorboards as well as completely clearing the Children’s Ministry rooms of clutter. My first year there, we spent days digging UWC out of a sudden snow storm (Carmen likes to warn us not to bring the snow once in a while). We always took time at the end of the week to clean and mop the main Fellowship Hall, where a majority of the team’s activities — VBS, devotionals, and meals — happened.
The team (and I) went to Kensington with goals to clean the area around UWC of garbage, quickly paint a room for the Children’s Ministry of UWC, and do miscellany to help those in need. The latter included a widow who needed people to clear her yard and other small reconstruction projects for UWC and the children around Kensington. Although we expected to do labor around the church, I expected our team to go out into the Kensington community a lot more than in previous years.
Our plans to help local folks were dashed when our point of contact, a lady from Kensington, ran into trouble with her son and was not available for the week anymore. We spent Monday morning waiting for her call but instead found time to relax. This was disappointing because the team was ready to spend a few hours toiling under the March sun.
Instead, Pastor Jose Carrera of UWC was the one to give us manual labor tasks. The issue was, a lot of the things he planned were for later in the week. Someone needed to buy paint from Home Depot so we could, well, paint. This made me as a leader worry about how the trip was starting out. I didn’t want the team to think I was wasting their time.
We asked for work, and work did come. The painting project doubled from one room to two, and the second room was massive. We helped Carmen peel enough potatoes to feed our 28 person team. We emptied several closets filled with parts of vacuums, broken bins, and dusty clothes, and organized the material inside. We swept the streets outside of UWC all the way down the block. We hauled garbage. So much garbage. We wiped all of the pews inside the 300 person capacity sanctuary, disassembled the sanctuary’s organ, and then wiped the pews again.
It’s valuable to have “point people”. These people are the ones to ask first about a particular topic. Andrew and I didn’t consider how much instruction the team would need in order to accomplish the manual labor UWC set for us. These tasks are simple, but time consuming and labor intensive. Problems like not knowing where we should store our cleaning supplies were enough to bring our labor to a standstill. Someone would then run and grab me or Andrew and we would have to stop our time to plan to answer that question and then a few more.
The lack of delegation was clear to the team by the end of the week and team members brought up suggestions to delegate. Therefore, one of the ways in which I’d improve this aspect of the trip would be to appoint people to lead labor like painting or mopping the sanctuary. Having a point person for each task would make it so the future missions leaders wouldn’t have to answer smaller questions like where the bottles of Fabuloso are. More importantly, the team wouldn’t have to wait for our answers. This improvement is contingent on whether those people in charge are aware of the small questions to answer, so I expect the people who will take charge will be returning members or people who are interesting in exploring UWC and its many storage closets.
Painting
This was the job that took the longest. Andrew and I were under the impression that a small nursery would take a few hours to paint and overnight to dry, after which the six boys who were staying on the bottom floor of the girls’ house would move their beds into the nursery. This job ended up taking until Thursday, by which it wasn’t worth it to move the guys’ mattresses. Here are a few pictures of the team, hard at work in the nursery.
We used different groups of people to paint during VBS and morning labor time but realized the kids looked forward to seeing the people they had previously talked to. We opted to have a few members teach the aspects of VBS they had planned to lead but directed them to paint the rest of the time.
The reason painting took an entire week is because of a larger room called the Children’s Chapel. This room was filled with clutter and had windows the size of a female college junior.
I was so thankful for the team members who took initiative and directed the Children’s Chapel painting. This job was far removed from the Fellowship Hall so I didn’t stop in to check as often on the painters. They never gave me reason to worry, either.
Five or six team members stuck to painting the entire week, which means they never spent time with the kids in VBS like we had planned. Although painting was exhausting and labor intensive, the people who painted together were proud of their efforts. I was reassured they had a good time talking to each other. They even shared their testimonies of how they came to faith and where they are spiritually.
Organizing and Mopping
Many well-meaning people donate what they have to UWC. Unfortunately, a lot of those things end up wearing out and/or being saved for future use. The items begin to pile up in empty pockets of UWC — random storage closets, spare rooms, etc. — and so our team was tasked with getting rid of a lot of those things. This occurred towards the end of the week, so one of our team members with a special love of organizing took initiative and directed our team to declutter.
Cooking, Bathrooms, and Around UWC
There was a range of team members in terms of experience with household chores. Some people learned to mop starting from the innermost corner of the room while others were seasoned moppers. Team members learned to clean toilets, wipe mirrors, and sweep. Each group bonded through learning from each other and taking on these tasks together.
Many college students don’t cook for themselves, much less for 28 people. Nonetheless, cooking was one of the ways the team was able to bond. Carmen would sometimes spend hours in the kitchen so having someone help her was a great way to get to know her.
We did get to go into the community for a bit. Some of the team swept and gathered the leaves and garbage that had compacted onto the curbs. They even met a woman who was sweeping out her house and her territorial dog.
How We Felt
Tired. Imagine waking up after less than six hours of sleep, breakfast, meditating on the Word for an hour, doing manual labor for hours, lunch, planning and running VBS, going into the streets at night to talk about God, and then having a 1.5–3 hour debrief about the day. It was hard to even find time to shower, but the team still woke up to the best of their abilities and served with joyful hearts. 0/28 people on the team lost their tempers with each other. Everyone was so patient with Andrew and with me.
Conclusion
Our team was unified in body and in spirit. We could see that through our willingness to work. We faced frustrations while working (and living) together, but there was no sense of pettiness because we were all willing to submit to one another. The team gave the labor its all. We came out of the other side of Philly Missions having accomplished a lot and having worked together to make those accomplishments happen.
