Youngstown, OH

Well, hello there! Summer has officially gotten underway now, and I've already been busy as could be. The Institute started about a week and a half ago and so far I'm loving it!

The first two days we worked with Pregnancy Support Services on cleaning up a house for a woman that's about to have her third child and with Habitat for Humanity on building a house in downtown Durham. Both were good experiences and provided a chance for the six of us that are in the Institute to start getting to know each other.

On Saturday, the 26th, we left for Youngstown, OH, in a 12-passenger van. We got there around 7pm ish and went to a graduation party for one of the members of the church we were visiting. Then we had kind of a relaxed day on Sunday, since they meet for church Sunday nights. The church is called Youngstown Metro Church and is pastored by Josh Shank. I fell in love with that church and would love the opportunity to go back anytime. It's a pretty small church - I think they have around 100 members - and it's growing. It's a kind of alternative church: lots of piercings and tattoos, rock music for worship, etc. As soon as that church service started and people started worshiping, you could feel God's presence there, and you knew that this was a church of people that are sincerely worshiping and loving God. Over the week we were there, we got to know some of the more involved church members, and there are some really neat people there. They're focused and driven, seeking to live their lives to serve God and their community, wanting to reach people with His love. Living in a world where complacency is so often a problem among Christians and the church, it was really refreshing to spend time with people that were so focused and driven. It was really inspiring.

While we were there, we were mostly helping them do some work for an organization they've started called Social Action Republica. SAR is a non-profit social organization that was started by and is affiliated with the Metro Church, but with which Metro wants to involve other churches and organizations in the community so that they're all working together. SAR's two main focuses right now are the issues of thirst and human trafficking. This August, a group of 7 or 8 people from Metro are going to Liberia to actually build a well to provide clean water to an entire village there. Since building a well like this costs $5-10 thousand, SAR is putting on a race called 10 Miles to Cure Thirst. The premise of the race is that a woman has to walk an average of 10 miles every day to get water, water that is usually contaminated and largely contributes to the spread of waterborne diseases, which affect the majority of their population. The race is in July, so we were doing a lot of promo for it, making signs for it, that sort of thing. A lot of it involved just walking around to Youngstown businesses and asking them if they'd like to be a sponsor in the race. It's a really cool thing they're doing, and they want to make it an annual thing, so that every summer they're going and building at least one well (more if they can get teams from other churches and organizations involved).

Social Action Republica also focuses on human trafficking (700,000 to 4 million women and children are trafficked around the world for forced prostitution, labor, and other forms of exploitation every year), an issue which is also very pertinent to the US, where it's the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the nation. Most of SAR's actions regarding human sex trafficking right now are spreading awareness. Less than 2% of law enforcement and medical personnel are trained to deal with sex trafficking and there are no major laws punishing it, so even when people are caught trafficking, they usually get away with just a slap on the wrist. SAR and Metro are focusing on spreading awareness so that we can hopefully put pressure to do something about this: train personnel to deal with it, make laws to punish it, find ways to rehabilitate and reassimilate the women and children into society. It's a really serious issue and one that I personally, even knowing as little as I know about it, already feel really passionate about.

What's really exciting about the whole thing is that the Summit Church may start a branch of Social Action Republica in Durham, participating in things like going to Liberia to build wells every summer and spreading awareness and finding ways to deal with human trafficking in the US. I've already talked to one of the pastors at the Summit about getting involved in the human trafficking issue, since it's something I feel strongly about, and I'm really excited about the possibility of working with that and hopefully being able to do something to help women and children get out of those hopeless situations and into places where we and others would be able to show them the love of Christ and hopefully turn their lives around and find them a decent way to live. The more I think about it, the more I want to do something about it. It breaks my heart to think about the hundreds of thousands of women and children that are forced into these situations all the time. We need to pray that God will raise up people to stop this, people that will take His love and His Word (and His justice) into these situations, that God will respond to our prayers and work through these situations to reveal Himself to people and to start to change it. This fall or spring, there's a movie coming out called "Trade" which deals with the issue of human trafficking, which both the Summit and the Metro are going to do a pre-screening of.

While in Youngstown, we were also looking around downtown for a new facility for the Metro, since the owners of the theater they're in now have started giving them a lot of trouble. We walked through downtown Y-town and looked for abandoned buildings that looked like they might be a good fit for the church and were hopefully for sale or lease so that the church could start going through them and looking for a building that would work. We found some good leads, so we're praying that at least one of them will work out, being of the right size and within the Metro's budget.

We met some really cool people while we were in Y-town. Josh and Aimee Shank are the couple that moved there to start the church; Josh is the pastor and Aimee runs most of the business side of it. They have a little girl, Ella, who's about a year and a half and the cutest little girl you ever met. We spent a lot of time with the three of them, and just being with them you could see the passion they had for God and the vision they had for His people in Youngstown. It was really cool. We also got to know a girl named Lauren, the college student that's planning and putting on the 10 Miles to Cure Thirst race. It's a lot of work and it was really neat to see how well she was doing everything, even though none of them had put on a race like this before and they really didn't know what they were doing. We also got to know a woman named Cece pretty well. She's also a main actor in the Metro and SAR, and she and I got to talk about human trafficking a bit, since it's something she's also passionate about. We're going to keep in touch with the whole thing, so I'm hoping I can learn a lot from her. She's a really neat person. There were several other people that we got to work with and got to know a little bit, and I miss them all already. The worship band that plays at Metro on Sunday nights just put out a CD, which features some original songs by their worship leader, Jesse David, and all of the proceeds of which go towards clean water in Africa. It's a really good CD, and you can buy it online (I'll give you the link at the end of the post).

Basically, I was in Youngstown for a week, visiting the Metro Church, and I fell in love with the church, the people, and the town. You could see God at work in those people and what they were doing, and I loved being a part of that. They offered for a few of us to maybe pray about coming up there next summer and interning with them, and it's something that I've been thinking about and praying about. I have very tentative plans for next summer already, so we'll what pans out, but I would love to be able to go there for a summer and be with them and learn from them. You could learn so much, not just about how to plant a church, but also about how to go into a city where God doesn't have a large presence or following and really reach people, go into their lives with the love of God and let Him change them, and through that start to change the entire city.

"We don't want to be relevent to culture - we want to lead it." ~Josh Shank, pastor, the Metro Church, Youngstown, OH.


Related links:
www.youngstownmetrochurch.com
www.socialactionrepublica.com
www.myspace.com/jessedavidworship
www.tradethemovie.com