A Volley of Volunteers!

In early July, we put out the call, inviting anyone and everyone to come help us kick off the cleaning and remodeling of our glorious, but neglected, 120-year-old church in downtown Steubenville, OH. A flyer was made and shared, a dumpster was ordered, and then a truck broke down, stranding the dumpster. So a SECOND dumpster was ordered. And on the morning of July 15th, with cold water and coffee at the ready, we sat and waited, hoping that a dumpster and some people would show up.

It started slowly. One of the first to arrive was our new friend Kelly, who walked in, introduced herself, pointed out her former cubicle from when she worked at the Urban Mission, our building's previous incarnation, and then went to work cleaning a bathroom. That may sound like a small thing, but we didn't have a clean, working bathroom, and then we did. We love Kelly.

Then people started trickling in, some we knew and some we didn't. Friends from down the street, local students, and a whole host of the hardest-working people on Earth from the local Melkite community all showed up and worked like crazy. It was amazing. Peeling paint and plaster were sucked into shop vacs, old, rotten furniture was hauled out, and bags upon bags of trash were marched out to the dumpster, along with a few near-miss treasures rescued before it was too late.

Slowly, the vision of what our place could become began to emerge. Maybe the most important thing was watching people see the space for the first time and hearing them say, "Wow, there is so much potential here!" followed by all the "What if you..." and "You know, you could..." suggestions that came from each of them. It was then that I realized how much I had needed to hear those things, to be told, in effect, "You're not crazy for thinking you could make something beautiful from the ashes of this abandoned building." We were overwhelmed with gratitude.

I felt kind of bad because, still recovering from open-heart surgery, I couldn't take part in much of the heavy lifting and cleaning. I mostly sat at my desk, talked to people while they filled out release forms, and answered the question, "What do you want to do with this?" in a million different forms, over and over again. But then people started coming in and introducing themselves. First a young person, then another who had youth groups that wanted to help, followed by a tradesman or artisan asking what we needed built or repaired. One person after another came in, introduced themselves, and asked how they could serve. It was overwhelming.

Finally, as I was sitting at my desk, an elderly Black woman came in and took a chair at the edge of my office. She asked me what we were doing here and seemed kind, but skeptical. I told her it was to be a house of study, work, and prayer—a place of community, worship, art, and ideas. She smiled, said, "Amen!" and introduced herself as Pastor Tony. She was part of the leadership of Urban Mission and had spent decades working in this building, serving the poor. She told me how God had dragged her, kicking and screaming, into that work and how deeply He had blessed her through it. We talked about vocation, discernment, and the ways in which the will of God can sometimes feel like being swallowed by a whale. She also took me into the sanctuary, showed me a window, and told me a story that I still tell a few times a week, but that deserves its own post. She blessed me and the work we were doing because she could see God's hand in it, even though it was very different from the work she had done in this space before.

As the afternoon progressed, the place began to emerge. For instance, the Yellow Classroom was an absolute mess, completely full of junk and heavy furniture that needed to be moved. We had decided to leave it for the next round of volunteers, since it seemed like an all-day job by itself. But by the end of the afternoon, it was completely empty and vacuumed clean.

One week later, the whole scene played out again—more faces, more stories, more connections, along with the realization: "Next time, we need to get a bigger dumpster."