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    Feb 07, 2016

    Why Do We Serve?

    Why Do We Serve?

    Passage: John 13:12-17

    Speaker: Pat Botelle, Lay Speaker

    Category: Discipleship

    Keywords: anniversary, missions, vim

    Today we are celebrating our volunteers in mission, SVOP, Group Work Camp, Camp Hope, Rebuilding Baltimore, Baltimore Work Camp teams as well as any individual who has been on any type of mission trip or helped with any type of mission project in our neighborhood or half way around the world.

    Welcome to Anniversary Sunday. Today we are celebrating our volunteers in mission, SVOP, Group Work Camp, Camp Hope, Rebuilding Baltimore, Baltimore Work Camp teams as well as any individual who has been on any type of mission trip or helped with any type of mission project in our neighborhood or half way around the world. I’ll use VIM but I’m really referring to all of these volunteer programs.

    So when and where did Volunteers in Mission start and why? To understand the why, Cathy and I checked out the United Methodist Church’s website and found a list of characteristics of our denomination. The list includes:

    • Connectional:Every United Methodist congregation is interconnected throughout the denomination via a unique, interlocking chain of conferences.
    • Concerned about social justice: For more than 200 years, The United Methodist Church and its predecessor bodies have expressed concern for God’s children everywhere — the poor, the orphaned, the aging, the sick, the oppressed and the imprisoned.
    • Ecumenical:United Methodists consider dialogue and missional cooperation between United Methodists and other Christians as a valid witness to the unity of the body of Christ.
    • Mission-oriented: Our mission is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. In uncomplicated terms, this means we strive to nurture followers of Christ who then reach out and teach others about the love of Jesus
    • Wesleyan:The United Methodist Church has a Wesleyan heritage, and as such, places an emphasis on mind and heart (knowledge and vital piety) and putting faith and love into practice (life).[1][emphasis added]

    Remember John Wesley’s Three Simple Rules? We talked about them last year on Anniversary Sunday. Do no harm, do good, stay in love with God. Doing mission work—that is, doing good--is at the heart of the Methodist tradition.

    Now let’s look at the start of Volunteers in Mission as a part of the United Methodist Church. On the UMVIM website, Cathy and I learned that the UMVIM movement began in 1976 and “is a grassroots movement designed to provide an official channel whereby Christians, both lay and clergy, may offer their skills and talents for Christian service at home and around the world on short term assignments at their own expense.”[2] The website goes on to say “The UMVIM network offers guidance, organization and training for more than 125,000 volunteers serving with the poor; building churches; and assisting in disaster response, community health, and leadership training each year.”[3]

    Now let’s look at Reisterstown United Methodist Church and our Volunteers in Mission program. VIM at RUMC started in January 1989 when the Council of Ministries requested the Administrative Board support a team of volunteers to go to Puerto Rico and/or somewhere in Maryland. Rev. Richard Randolph, associate pastor at the time, headed the effort and the project was approved provided funds were raised outside of the budget. In March 1989, the Ad Board minutes indicate that Rev Randolph reported that the Caribbean Volunteers in Missions project in Jamaica was selected due to recent hurricane destruction. (Hurricane Gilbert struck Jamaica as a category 5 hurricane on September 14, 1988.) The minutes go on to talk about the various fund raisers planned to support the project. In June 1989, the Ad Board minutes report that $20,000 was raised in just over 10 weeks. This was also Rev Randolph’s last Ad Board meeting since he was only with RUMC for one year. The team, consisting of 25 volunteers went to Sandy Bay, Jamaica from June 23 to July 3, 1989.

    In April 1991, it was reported that Tom Caltrider and Ed Gies were going to Kentucky to look over the project for VIM. The minutes also state that “Since so many have volunteered to serve, they [Tom and Ed] will see if there will be enough work for a second group to go a second week”. What a wonderful problem to have.

    I couldn’t find the exact date of the start of the youth programs, but it had to be in the early to mid-1990s.

    So from that point until today, teams have been going on trips to serve those in need.

    Cathy – let’s take a few minutes and reminisce about some of those trips.

    Before we continue, I want you hear from one of our newer members, Jess Thomas. Jess sings with the Praise Band and works with a Daisy Troop on Friday evenings. Jess is going to share her experience when she went to Costa Rico – check out the website (rumcweb.org) for pictures from Jess’s trip .

    So I asked myself, Why do they go?

    I sent out a survey to the congregation asking why they went on mission trips and some of their experiences from the trips they went on. Let me share with you what Bea and Ed Gies wrote:

    Bea went on mission trips because she enjoys helping people and she enjoyed being with other VIM members. We did more than build and paint and clean up; she also met people with different life styles than ours. Some were extremely poor and others, in some ways, had more than we did. All were thanking God for what they had even though, in our eyes, they had practically nothing. These were very humbling experiences.

    When Ed first went on the VIM trips, it was to see how much, we as a group, could help people to improve their life with repairs and building something new. When one gets there, you suddenly realize how much you can learn from them. You get so much more out of the experience than you thought you would, so that when you leave you say to yourself, I and we must do more to help other people.

    My two children went on the youth work trips – Lauren with SVOP and Chris with Group Work Camp. When I spoke to Lauren about her trips and why she went, her first response was “Community Service Hours” but after we talked a little longer, it was more than that because she went on four trips and her service hours were completed after two. She enjoyed spending time with friends, learning things and helping others. It turns out that helping others continues to be part of her.

    Chris went to West Virginia, Canada and Long Island, New York with Group Work Camps. When I asked him about why he went, his first response was the same as Lauren’s “community service hours.” But he, too, only needed two trips for the requisite 80 hours and continued to go because he felt good after the first trip and enjoyed the community and fellowship. During his first trip, the team built a set of steps for a family with an autistic child. Their trailer was at the top of a hill and they had to park their cars at the bottom of the hill. The steps made it much safer to get the boy to the car in case of emergencies. Chris may not admit is openly, but that trip really affected him and the trips helped form the person he is today.

    Jerry Mac wrote “’In as much as you do it for the least of these, you do it for me…’ One of the families we worked with told us that other church groups had come to tell them how to live their lives. Only the Methodists asked what they needed and how could we help them.”

    Another response I got from people on the survey about why they went on trips was you get to go to some places you may not otherwise have gone. Jamaica, Africa, Mexico, Alaska (I can relate to that one). But helping others is the response I got most often.

    Dan Schutte, a contemporary Christian composer, wrote “Here I Am, Lord” for the Catholic church’s liturgy and it has become popular in Protestant churches as well. “Here I Am, Lord” has become the hymn that just about every RUMC VIM team member heard the Sunday they were commissioned and is based on Isaiah 6:8 “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and I said, “Here am I; send me!”.

    When surfing the web to learn a little more about this song, I found a YouTube recording of “Here I Am, Lord” by Steve Silvia. Instead of having the words of the song over pictures, Steve wrote questions and quotes on the slides over some very powerful pictures. The first slide displays the question “What do I want to do with my life?” and the second one asks “What does God want me to be?”

    In preparing this sermon, I learned that I can’t answer the question “Why Do We Serve?” Each person has to answer that question for themselves. I know if you talk to most people that have been on a mission trip, youth or otherwise, local or far away, they will tell you they are glad they went. Sometime you just have to step out in faith.

    At the very end of the video I mentioned a few minutes ago it says:

    “The question is not ‘What do I want to do with my life?’ The real question is ‘What can I do with my life?’”

    So when RUMC asks “Whom shall we send. Who will go for us?” Can you answer “Here am I; send me!”?

     

     

     

    [1] http://www.umc.org/who-we-are. UMC.org is the official online ministry of the United Methodist Church

    [2] http://www.umcmission.org/Get-Involved/Volunteer-Opportunities/About-UMVIM

    [3] ibid