We call our parish summer youth program Gospel Road. It is a week-long service retreat that has been building momentum here at the Church of the Resurrection for at least ten years. Begun as an offshoot of a larger program operated by the Diocese of Columbus, Gospel Road alternates between providing our students with an urban service experience one summer and a rural service experience the next.

During Urban Gospel Road, our students spend the week volunteering at various service agencies and organizations around Columbus. From soup kitchens, to homeless shelters, to home building organizations, to working with special needs children and the elderly, our students are exposed to many of the different needs of our community. Urban Gospel Road enables young people to see and serve Christ in all types of people. It is a powerful, eye-opening opportunity for our teenagers.

Equally powerful, but completely different in scope, is Rural Gospel Road. This summer experience takes teens and adult volunteers to Harlan County, Kentucky where they spend the week building, repairing, painting, re-roofing, shoring up, and sometimes even tearing down the homes of Harlan County residents. Coming from a privileged area, our kids are amazed at the living conditions of some of the residents of this rural Appalachian community.

Both the urban and the rural experiences help students recognize how blessed and privileged they are. They also recognize that Christ takes many forms and works through many types of people. Youth go into the week expecting to serve, and come out of the week feeling blessed and amazed by the people who touched their hearts and fed them spiritually. They experience Jesus in places they never expected.

Our parish is extremely supportive of our Gospel Road efforts. This is partly because they are just very generous people. However, it is also because in the past ten years, parishioners have participated in one of these Gospel Road projects, either as students or as adult volunteers. Our parishioners’ children have gone on Gospel Road and returned changed people! These parishioners know first-hand the impact the experience has had on their families and they want others to have the same opportunities.

The trip takes place in June, so every February we being our campaign. We ask for volunteers, financial contributions, and lots of prayers. We bill the project not as a youth project, but as a parish-wide project. It is amazing how willing people are to be involved when there are many options and levels of involvement.

This year, for our rural experience we built a house! That is right: we started from the ground up, in our church parking lot. We asked parishioners of all ages to come for an afternoon and work. Some parishioners provided refreshments. Our workshop was a huge tent (donated by a parishioner) set up in the parking lot so the project was highly visible to everyone. We made frequent pulpit announcements and published weekly bulletin updates about our progress.

When it was time to leave for the trip, we loaded all of the floor joists, roof trusses, and walls that the parish had constructed onto a flat bed truck. The day we left, the entire assembly processed to the parking lot after Mass where our pastor and deacon blessed the house and sent us on our way. We transported the house all the way to Kentucky where we completed phase one of the project. (Phase two will take place next summer!)

This was a project about which our entire parish could feel proud. In fact, as an offshoot of this project, another group in our parish organized a shoe drive. Even though they had already given time, money, and prayer to the house project, our parishioners purchased a new pair of shoes for each and every student in the local Harlan County elementary school.

The last minute approach does not work with something like this. A project of this scope and magnitude must be planned to the very last detail. Yes, the Spirit must be invited into the process, but attention to detail is the key. A timeline must be created, competent and committed people must be in place. Several people need to review the plan to catch any details that might have been left out.

Follow up is also important. Parishioners want to see where their money and time went. A DVD of the trip was created and the parish was invited to the viewing. We displayed pictures in the gathering space of our church and ran descriptions of completed projects in the bulletin.

Gospel Road has mobilized our parish community for service. It has opened our eyes to the needs of people in other regions, as well as in our own backyard. The opportunity to serve and give unites and inspires us to give more. It reminds us of what it means to be Christian. Our summer experiences have blessed our parish tremendously. It’s almost as if God designed it that way.