Silver Linings -- Wales Mission 2010

Silver Linings stand out because they emerge from the darkest clouds. Tuesday morning July 6th our team had a great time of Bible study and prayer focusing upon Acts chapters 1 and 2. Then we went to Seion Baptist Church in the nearby suburb of Waurnaurloydd (spelling approximate) where team two will be having programs for Children and Youth next week. The church was built the year Abraham Lincoln ran for president the first time – 1860. We surveyed the church in shock. We were supposed to do a little light cleaning and picking up trash. What we found was a room where mold was seeping through the paint permeating an entire wall. Jennifer could stand it for perhaps five minutes before darting outside with her asthsma inhaler. Shannon started to get sick. Deedee's throat closed up and Allen developed a sore throat within a half an hour. The Welsh didn't notice the problem much at all. It wasn't even on their suggested list of twenty items we might want to attend to. This is what it is like to live in one of the wettest countries in Europe.

We were initially dismayed at the decrepit state of the whole church. On the roof over the entrance door a swarm of bees buzzed angrily around. One or two of them stung Jennifer as she had run outside to catch her breath. The entryway foyer had minor mold problems and peeling, leprous paint. The roof has chunks of shingle long rotted away and other areas covered with moss. The cemetery in the back yard has weeds six feet high.

How did this church get in such a state of disrepair? The church members are a dozen or so elderly ladies who simply are not physically or fiscally able to maintain the church. But now comes the silver lining: for no apparent reason, except for the movement of the Holy Spirit, twenty or so children attend this church. Also, ten or so youth attend the church. The youth live in the nearby government run slum housing and they have somehow gotten interested in Christianity in a land where it is dead except for the seventy five or older crowd. The children come from different part of town and by and large don’t know the older ladies, other than they now happen to go to the same church together. So the only reason these children and youth seek the Lord is that the Lord has called them to Himself. And they sit every Sunday deeply inhaling the Gospel. And the mold.

I mentioned that when we saw the deep disrepair of the church building, we were dismayed. Well, not all of us. The silver lining is that the five person construction team sprang into action. The team was comprised of “Construction Commander” Lonnie Hamman, “Master of all Trades” Danny Tengram, “Electrician to the Stars” Tom King, “Interior Designer/Journeywoman/Account Manager” Donna King, and the young, broad-backed, Oompa Loompa dancing Welshman Euros Ap Howell. Ruth Matthews served as chauffer and long-suffering servant for the Construction Team. They were like hunting dogs unleashed. They stalked every inch of the building in a surveying frenzy. They had fire in their bellies, purpose in their hearts, and a glint in their eyes for the first time this week. They bared their fangs at the task ahead. And then they struck.

After ordering tools, which arrived the next day, and after a brief shopping trip for supplies, they were off and running. By Wednesday July 7th, they had torn out the mold-splattered Vestry wall, sprayed it down with hazard-killing bleaching solution, and re-concreted the wall. Meanwhile, they selected paint for the entryway foyer and applied gave a fresh yellow coat to every inch of the blistered cream color. Meanwhile Tom tracked down the rat’s nest of electrical wiring glitches and did some fast draw troubleshooting.

What’s next for the construction team? At Capel Gomer, they are to fix a roof leak, put in outside lighting, and ponder construction of worship area portable screens. At Seion Church they are to take out the deacon box, reconstruct the stage, and purchase heaters to keep worshippers warm in the long, bitter winters. Oh, and probably walk on water.

The Preparation Team was comprised of Allen and Deedee Rice, Shannon Richardson, Jennifer Nath, and local boys made good, Derek and Matthew Rees. On Tuesday, they scouted out locations for the next week’s children and youth programs, and did some prayerwalking. On Wednesday, Deedee, Shannon, and Jennifer bought craft supplies for the next week’s programs while Derek, Matthew, and Allen brainstormed over next summer’s mission plans. Then the whole team took a twenty minute train ride to Llanelli where they fellowshipped with the good people of Emmanuel Baptist Church. The team actually had a plausible excuse for such fellowship – we helped them paint the large entryway. Yes, even the Non-Construction Team got to do a little hard physical labor, though they pretended to be completely inept at their task (though for some it was not really much of a pretense). Allen left to go back to Seion Church where he met with a dear friend, Iestyn Ap Howell (Euros’s older brother), who has been such a strong pillar in the formation of Capel Gomer in its first year. Iestyn took Allen to supper (lamb steak with mint gravy!) where they caught up with each other’s lives and then had an incredible three and a half-hour long theological discussion. The two of them had been trying to carry on a long, complex dialogue back and forth by e-mail over the course of the last six months and it was such a relief for them to finally talk face to face again and heart to heart.

Wednesday evening concluded with almost everyone milling about at Capel Gomer. There was joking and laughter, the joy of unity after a hard day spent bonding. Encouraged by Deedee, local Welsh music sensation Hazel was coerced into positioning herself at the keyboard. Euros beamed a power point of some song lyrics upon a blank wall. Then an impromptu worship service broke out as a makeshift choir harmonized in a crescendo: “no power on Earth, no scheme of man can ever snatch me from His Hand.”

Dark clouds come. They bring hard rains. And mold. And bee stings. But they also bring silver linings. This team has brought their lunch buckets and their pick axes. They are swinging hard with happy hearts at the rich vein of ore directly in their path.