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We just finished up our 5th team of the summer and they were fantastic. Bill Winton, who came to Windermere years and years ago on a team, has now successfully led his 3rd trip to the island since my time at Windermere. Each year the team from CFC has made it their goal to reach into the southernmost part of Eleuthera and share the love of Jesus to the children in those settlements. This is most meaningful since, to my knowledge, they are the only team throughout the whole summer to reach that far south.
Bill’s emphasis for a missions trip always has a combination of mobilization for new team members and leadership development on the field. Their team is matches only a handful of other that focus their trip around “family teams.” Here the parents and children work side by side and hand in hand throughout the week. It is an extremely effective form of mission trip leadership because it solves the issue of supervision for a youth team from the get-go.
On this week’s trip I had them planned to do quite a bit of painting and cleaning from what has been accomplished thus far in the summer. At the end of it all, and after having cleaned up all the brushes, we discovered that their group of 32 had painted 45 gallons of paint all over the campus. From scrubbing the mildew to reaching those hard to reach places, they put a fresh coat of “beautiful” from the exterior sidewalk wall to the insides of Ms. Gibson’s office. The school has been truly blessed by their cooperative efforts this week.
Bill’s team was also on campus with Emily’s church team from Ohio. The whole week went wonderful and everyone cooperated beautifully. We did however get a scare from tropical storm Chantel and the team leaders had to make the difficult decision as to their responsibility to the team with a potential hurricane forming storm barreling down through the Bahamas. In the end the storm dissipated, but the team leaders elected to play it safe anyways. Despite it all they still served a full week and nearly fit in everything they had planned to do.
I told Bill as he left that they are the kind of team that I will refer to by saying “I wish they could have stayed longer.” It was a great week with everyone and we look forward to our continued relationship with them, partnering to build the Kingdom of God throughout the world and lift high the name of Jesus Christ.