January 23, 2008
Sharon Watkins shares her experiences during the Habitat All-Women Blitz Build in Beaumont, Texas.
I'm on a plane on my way home from Beaumont, TX, nursing some pretty sore muscles. Beaumont is a hub city in Southeast Texas, where one of the first great oil wells in the world was discovered. It was target of Hurricane Rita in 2005. Driving into town, you can still see the telltale piles of brush and branches next to misshapen trees - a common sight after major storms. Memory and emotion about Rita's devastation are still near the surface of the citizens there.
But as Uliana Trylowsky, Executive Director of the Beaumont Habitat for Humanity told me, "Sometimes the most horrific happenings unexpectedly bring you into contact with people you would never want to miss knowing. Rita brought us into contact with the Disciples of Christ. We love the Disciples."
I was in Beaumont for the town's first-ever Habitat All-Women Blitz Build - a project of the Office of Disciples Women supported by Disciples Volunteering of Disciples Home Missions, Week of Compassion and Habitat for Humanity. The project for the first day was to frame the house. Uliana and I worked side-by-side taking turns hammering nails and holding 2x4's in place. We also chatted.
“Disciples have been wonderful... You've come again and again.”
"Disciples have been wonderful," she said - several times. "You've come again and again. Look at these houses." She gestured at the whole street stretching back from the cul-de-sac where we stood. "Disciples on mission trips have had a role in building many of these. And others besides."
It made me proud of us.
Uliana was also delighted that Disciples were involved in Beaumont's first ever all women's build. (Most of the 51 women of all ages who showed up to construct the shell of a house in four days had a considerable amount of trepidation mixed with our delight!) And yet at the end of the day, we had the walls framed, most of them raised, and you could see the outline of a house!
Actually, no one should be surprised that Disciples, Habitat and "first" would go together.
When Habitat for Humanity was just a budding idea in the mind of Millard Fuller, he and his wife, Linda were Disciples/United Church of Christ missionaries in Mbandaka, Congo (then Zaire). They had this idea about building houses with donated labor and sweat equity on the part of the owner, with interest-free loans based on donated funds that would become available for new home-owners as the first loans were paid off. They piloted the project right there in Mbandaka, home of the Disciples of Christ of Congo. Built on the former no-man's land between the colonial/white part of town and the African/black section, this first Habitat project became a symbol of unity - how appropriate for Disciples! This partnership among American and Congolese Disciples and United Church of Christ became the prototype of a movement to bring affordable housing to the world's low-income hard-working people.
No one should be surprised either to see Disciples women and hands-on mission linked. The Beaumont All Woman Blitz Build follows in a tradition dating back to the late 1800's, when a global missionary movement was budding worldwide. Disciples kept talking about becoming part of the growing world-wide missionary movement by sending a missionary somewhere overseas, but it was just too complicated - until the women decided to do it. And within months, they did.
We do our mission - hands-on and otherwise - together now. As one church committed to being and sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ from our doorsteps to the ends of the earth. And Habitat has long since grown from a great idea in the head of a Disciples missionary into a movement of its own.
But being on the Beaumont build, and talking to Uliana, reminded me yet again: I love our church! I love our pragmatic "get it done!" spirit that bonds with our passion for the oneness of God's whole created world - and leads us to work in partnership with whoever will bring healing and wholeness to the communities we touch.
At our best we are a movement for wholeness in a fragmented world. I felt that at Beaumont.
