Tag Archives: Mountain T.O.P.

Jan 02

Which one’s the real world?

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This is the last (I think) in a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. Look at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments. In another day or two, I’ll make one last post with links to all of the installments in order, or perhaps I’ll set it up as a standing page on my web site. By the way, I did not do a separate post for Quest, the newest ministry within the AIM program, because I’ve not had the chance to experience it yet and thus really didn’t have much to say about it beyond the summary in my original post. If anyone who’s been to Quest would like to write a guest post about it, I’d gladly put it up and link to it as part of the series.

I sometimes say that my participation in short-term missions trips is a selfish hobby because I get out of my trips far more than I put into them. There’s something about being in intense Christian community — whether on a short-term mission trip, an Emmaus walk, or certain types of retreats — that’s difficult to explain or describe if you’ve not experienced it. In an earlier post, I quoted Mountain T.O.P. founder George Bass as saying that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone was like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never had one.

In many ways, a Mountain T.O.P. community is a safe place for me, a place where I know I’m among friends, where I could ask someone for a neck rub without being thought creepy, where I can write and receive notes of encouragement, where I’m free to try things outside my comfort zone and know that it will all work out somehow — and if it doesn’t, that will be OK too.

A day at AIM begins with a group morning devotion, led by one of the campers. I am almost always privileged to be asked to lead one of these when I’m at AIM. Last summer, I went to two different AIM weeks; I led a devotion at one but not the other. That made perfect sense — why call on someone a second time when there are plenty of others willing to share? — but I tried to think back to the last time I had been at AIM without doing a morning devotion. I’m sure there must have been at least one other time, but I couldn’t think of it. Even at my first AIM event I led a devotion — which I’ll mention again in a little bit.
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Dec 31

The blind leading the unwilling

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Part of a series of posts about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. For links to previous installments, see the bottom of this one.

In the spring of 1993, I was an unofficial member of the Singles Council of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methdodist Church, working on a newsletter which was published at that time.

We had a meeting at Brentwood United Methodist Church, and there to speak to us were George Bass and Gail Drake (now Gail Castle). George was the founder and executive director of Mountain T.O.P., and Gail was director of adult ministries. At the time, Mountain T.O.P. was trying to promote one week of the Adults In Ministry program as “singles week,” an idea that was later scrapped. In any case, they wanted our help in letting our constituents know about the AIM program. I had little if any idea what Mountain T.O.P. was all about; my only connection to it was Mary Jane Tucker,  whom I knew through the conference singles retreats who served on the Mountain T.O.P. board at the time.

At the time, AIM weeks offered only Major Home Repair or Summer Plus. Kaleidoscope wouldn’t be offered until a couple of years later, and the Quest program didn’t start until recently. As Gail described the Summer Plus program – enrichment workshops for teens from mountain communities – she listed some possible workshop topics. One of them was “creative writing.”

I had no experience teaching or working with teenagers, but I am a writer, and I started thinking that it might be fun to teach creative writing. And I thought that Mountain T.O.P. might offer the same kind of Christian community that I had come to enjoy at the time through the conference singles retreats. So I signed up for the third AIM week of the summer, in early August.

At the time, Mountain T.O.P. had a much larger geographic footprint by renting various camp facilities across the Cumberland Plateau, from Jamestown in the north to Jasper in the south. My first AIM event was at Camp Overton, in the little town of Campaign, Tenn., between McMinnville and Sparta and close to Rock Island State Park.

It turned out to be a quite atypical AIM week, for reasons I’ll get into, and yet it was quite sufficient to get me completely hooked on the Mountain T.O.P. program.

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Dec 18

Special needs

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This is the latest in a series of posts in which I talk about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program. Starting with this one, I’ll include the links to the previous posts at the bottom instead of trying to put them all here.

Kaleidoscope is an arts program for special needs children from Grundy County. Grundy County has six primary schools sharing one art teacher and one music teacher. “Special needs” covers a lot of ground; it can mean anything from severe disabilities to ADD, ADHD or just a bad home situation. Most of the Kaleidoscope kids are referred by the school system, although (as with Day Camp, Summer Plus and Quest) it’s not uncommon for Mountain T.O.P. to be lining up a home repair project, notice that there are kids at the house, and ask if they’re interested in participating. I think the age range for the program is 6-11, although that’s off the top of my head and may be off. I remember 12 being the dividing line between Kaleidoscope and Summer Plus but I’m not 100 percent sure whether it’s the top age for one or the bottom age for the other.

Volunteers lead arts workshops for the kids, or simply help out as caregivers in workshops being led by someone else. Workshops can be things like drawing, arts and crafts, music, drama, and so on. As with the other AIM ministries, the volunteer base for any given camp event tends to be a mix of age and experience levels. We’ve had professional teachers and child care workers, as well as clueless amateurs like, well, Yours Truly.

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Dec 09

If I had a hammer

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A few weeks back, I had a post encouraging you to think about attending Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program next summer.

I followed that up with a post about why going out of town (or out of the country) for a short-term missions experience complements, rather than competes with, the ministry you and your church do in your hometown.

I didn’t really have any master plan for this when I started, and you may be sick of it already, but I think I’m going to continue on with some posts exploring some more specifics. I’m going to start with individual posts exploring the various ministries in which you can participate at AIM.

Mountain T.O.P. was started in 1975 as a youth ministry, with church youth groups as volunteers, and the youth summer ministry (YSM) remains the largest and best-known part of Mountain T.O.P. But as years went on, the Mountain T.O.P. staff saw needs in the ministry’s service area that were beyond the ability of youth volunteers to meet. YSM volunteers perform minor home repairs such as building a wheelchair ramp, but there are people in the service area, which includes some of the poorest communities in Tennessee, who have much more severe housing needs.

Adults In Ministry was started in 1989 as a way of extending Mountain T.O.P.’s impact. Major Home Repair has been, and continues to be, the biggest part of the AIM program.

Like the other AIM programs, MHR is open to anyone, regardless of gender, age (well, you have to be an adult, but beyond that it’s pretty broad) or experience level. MHR, by its very design, has professional contractors or other highly-skilled volunteers working side-by-side with 70-year-old grandmothers. Everybody learns something. The newcomer may learn some practical skill like how to use a circular saw. The professional contractors, I suspect, sometimes have to learn how to bite their tongues.

But no one – no one – should count themselves out of MHR based on lack of experience. The program loves to get highly-skilled volunteers, don’t get me wrong, but it is designed to be a good experience for anyone.

The heart of that experience, and one of the reasons it’s so compelling, is in the concept of team-building. While Mountain T.O.P. exists to be in ministry to the people of the Cumberland Plateau, it has a secondary goal of meeting the needs of its volunteers. That secondary goal is the reason for some of the ministry’s policies and practices, developed over the past 36 years of ministry.

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Nov 29

Hit the road

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A couple of weeks ago, I had a lengthy post about Mountain T.O.P.’s Adults In Ministry program and why you – yes, you – should join me there next summer. If you missed it, I’d consider it a personal favor for you to read it now. I’ll wait here until you get back.

Anyway, I was walking at the rec center today, thinking about that post, and realized there was one issue I meant to cover and didn’t cover in great detail, although I sort of got got close to it a couple of times. It’s a pretty big issue, one I’ve encountered whenever I talk about Mountain T.O.P. or whenever I talk about my foreign mission trips. It’s more relevant than ever right now, because of the tough economy.

People from all over the eastern U.S. come to Mountain T.O.P. camps, but sometimes when I talk to my own friends and neighbors here in Tennessee about it, I get a response – sometimes implied, sometimes stated outright – that it makes no sense to go to Grundy County (or Kenya!) to be in ministry when there are needs right here in our home county.

It’s exactly right that we have needs, serious needs, right here at home. We see that more clearly at the holidays than at any other time of the year, although the needs themselves are year-round.

But the first point I want to make is that it’s not an either-or situation.  Listen to the very last words Jesus spoke to his disciples before his ascension:

Acts 1:8 (NIV) “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Jesus calls the disciples to be in ministry in their home city, in their region, and beyond.

It needs to be said, immediately, that what you do on a mission trip, domestic or foreign, is not a substitute for, or an alternative to, being in ministry in your home community the other 50 or 51 weeks out of the year. And, in fact, many of the people I know who are most passionate about short-term missions are also heavily-involved in various ministries, non-profits or community outreach in their hometowns. One of my good friends from both Mountain T.O.P. and LEAMIS trips, Jan Schilling, is a great example of this. One week, she’s in Kenya making charcoal; the next week, she’s back home in Smyrna working for Habitat For Humanity or an animal shelter or doing some other type of volunteer work.

The “Mountain T.O.P. song,” which the ministry has adopted as its theme song, makes allusions to this; we can’t live on a mountain top, but we can take our mountain top experiences home with us and share them “in the valley below.”

It’s also important to note that there are different types of needs in different places. I would never make light of poverty here at home, but then again there’s no comparison between being poor in Bedford County and being poor in the Kibera slums outside Nairobi. The poorest person in Bedford County has access to clean water, free school for the kids, emergency room care, and various types of public assistance. People in Kibera live in tiny huts, crammed together like sardines, with filthy water running between them, in constant danger of being attacked or robbed.

Grundy County is much closer to Bedford County than to the Kibera slums, but even in that case the needs are different. Poverty in Grundy County goes back decades, and there are conditions which are short-term hardships for us but a way of life for them. There are cultural differences, geographic differences and vicious cycles that apply in the mountains that make it different from life here at home.

In some ways, it’s not a matter of one person being needier than another. You’d go crazy if you tried to rank or prioritize the needs of every cultural subgroup in Tennessee, much less Planet Earth. But when we recognize that there are different types and levels of need, we recognize the value in exposing ourselves to different cultures and different types of ministry.

Short-term mission work takes nothing away from local ministry. But I’m going to go further than that: I think short-term mission work enhances local ministry.

The primary purpose of a short-term mission trip is the ministry being conducted, the people being served. But an important secondary benefit of a short-term mission trip is that it often serves as a time of spiritual development and refreshment for the volunteers themselves. I know it has served that purpose in my life; I sometimes feel selfish for going on such trips, because it seems as if I get more out of them than I put into them. There is something about the process of separating yourself from your regular routine, immersing yourself in intense Christian community, making obedience to God your primary focus, that can be powerfully inspiring and uplifting. As a former Mountain T.O.P. board member, I’d like to think that Mountain T.O.P. is organized and operated in ways that maximize this effect, but it’s by no means unique to Mountain T.O.P. or any other specific organization.

I think that process requires getting away from your regular surroundings. If you lived in Grundy County, I’m not sure Mountain T.O.P. would have the same impact on you as a volunteer. Frankly,  I think you have to get out of town to get the full impact of being in short-term mission.

If that sounds interesting to you, get in touch with me or go to the Mountain T.O.P. website for more information.

Nov 16

Why AIM? Why you?

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I’ve posted or Facebooked several times lately about Mountain T.O.P. Adults in Ministry. Last summer, I went to two separate weeks of AIM (just to be clear, I’m only suggesting you do one). It was the first time in several years I’d been to the summer AIM ministry. I’d been a couple of times to fall AIM weekends, and those are great as well, but to me there’s something special about the kind of community that forms during a week-long event. Plus I have a passion for two programs that are only offered during summer AIM events. I had forgotten just how much I missed the program, and it meant a lot to me to be there.

I’d really like to take some more folks with me in the summer of 2012. I’m already trying to lay some groundwork at church. I already go to church with two Mountain T.O.P. regulars, Andy and Edna Lee Borders; Andy is currently on the Mountain T.O.P. board, just as I used to be. But we’ve never been able to make that connection to convince others to take the plunge. I’d like to change that this year.

But if the reader will indulge me, I’d like to widen my net a little bit, and invite you – yes, you – to join me next summer.

George Bass, the founder of Mountain T.O.P., used to say that trying to describe Mountain T.O.P. to someone who’s never been is like trying to explain what a banana tastes like to someone who’s never eaten one.

But I’m a writer, and I like explaining things. So I’m going to endeavor to explain what this program does for me and why I think you would enjoy it as well. But first, here’s the brand new AIM video, which will take  you about four minutes and change to watch:

 

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Nov 07

I’d love to live on a mountain top

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It’s been a stressful week or two, for reasons I can’t really go into here, and I have to admit that one of my coping mechanisms when I start to feel anxiety and I’m not in a position to do anything productive at that moment has been to daydream about being someplace else.

The past few days, that someplace else has been Camp Cumberland Pines, near Altamont, Tenn.

My Sunday School teacher was out of town this past weekend. The previous week, he announced he’d be gone, but the question of who exactly would fill in for him was left up in the air. When I agreed late in the week to take the job, I asked if it would be OK for me to show some of my video from Mountain T.O.P. Adults In Ministry last summer. I think – I hope – the class enjoyed it. I showed this Summer Plus video:

I did not show my Kaleidoscope video. Instead, I showed the official camp slide show from the Kaleidoscope week, because it also included shots of the home repair projects. My video, of course, pretty much includes only places or programs where I was present to take video (or hand the camera to someone else). I wanted the class to see the home repair projects, because I’m still hoping to take a few more from church with me when I go back to Mountain T.O.P., God willing, next summer.

Anyway, completely unrelated to my Sunday School class, a member of our outreach committee asked me to send him some information about the program; he knows I’m looking to take a group next summer and would like to go.

I thought I’d share with you what I wrote him, in case maybe anyone who reads this blog is looking to spend a week next summer in intense Christian community doing good things for people who need them. I guarantee you’ll get more out than you put in.

Here’s the Mountain T.O.P. Adults In Ministry information you wanted.

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Jul 31

I’d love to live on a Mountain T.O.P.

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I have been thinking a lot about Mountain T.O.P. in the past few days. I laid awake in bed last night thinking about it.

I’m not sure why.

I e-mailed the chair of my church’s outreach committee earlier today to tell her that I want to get serious about taking a group from First UMC to a Mountain T.O.P. Adults In Ministry (AIM) week next summer. I’ve been back from AIM less than a month, and I’m already looking forward to next summer.

The cynic in me might think that it’s escapism; I’m frustrated with my current situation, facing some challenges, and waiting patiently to hear about an opportunity for me to improve things. The cynic in me might think that I’m just trying to escape from everyday life by thinking back to an environment where I’m happy, well-socialized, relaxed, with relatively little to worry about. I get neck rubs and affirmations from people who love me. I get to play UNO and tie-dye T-shirts. The cynic in me might accuse myself of not being interested in ministry so much as in self-esteem.

This was the second of two weeks I attended this summer, in late June lapping over into the first couple days of July.

 

There may be some extent to which that cynical interpretation is true. But I don’t think it’s all that is going on. I really think this idea of putting together a team for next summer is something serious, something I’m being called to do.

Mountain T.O.P. does have AIM weekends in the fall, and I might end up going to one of those. I enjoy them, and they’re a great opportunity to catch up with some of my Mountain T.O.P. friends. But they’re home repair-only; I don’t get to do Kaleidoscope or Summer Plus, the two programs I enjoy so much during the summer AIM weeks. And the community that forms during a long weekend isn’t quite the same as the one that forms during a week-long summer AIM event. I’m looking forward to going back and doing next June what I did this June.

Does that mean I’m not going on a foreign trip next year either? I don’t know yet. I don’t even know what LEAMIS’s schedule is going to be yet, or Mountain T.O.P.’s for that matter, and if I end up making a career change I don’t know what my own vacation situation will be. I don’t think I’m done with foreign mission trips, by any stretch of the imagination. But right now, Mountain T.O.P. is stuck in my imagination.

Jul 02

More about the week

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In my last post, I kind of glossed over the camp week itself, especially for those of you who can’t watch the video for one reason or another. It was a tremendous week.

At Summer Plus, I taught Creative Writing in the afternoons. You never know, with a workshop like creative writing, whether you’re going to get students who are interested, or students who got their first choice of workshop in the morning and who got stuck in creative writing because they were assigned to it. This week, I had the former – and I also had two helpful and enthusiastic assistants, one of whom (Diana Woodlock, daughter of Mountain T.O.P. executive director Ed Simmons) is a teacher and coach. We basically ended up with only three students – fewer than originally planned – but that allowed us to have a ratio of one adult to one child.

Family members were sort of a running theme to the week. Several long-time AIM participants brought family members for the first time. Gwynda (Eversole) Patterson brought her husband Greg, Doug  Warner brought his wife Peggy, Robert Matthews brought his son Bobby. I think Diana’s husband Barry was also a first-time participant, although I might be wrong about that one.

In the morning, I found myself assisting in Jan Lloyd-Gohl’s newspaper workshop. Seriously. Jan had the idea of a workshop that would produce a camp newspaper. I grumbled playfully about not being able to get away from the newspaper business, even on vacation, but in truth it was fun helping out. The kids really got into it, interviewing workshop leaders, fellow campers and friends of Mountain T.O.P. One boy drew cartoons. We solicited questions from all of the Summer Plus campers for a “Dear Abby”-style advice column, and the questions were farmed out to various adults to answer. (All of the answers were published under the pseudonym “Aunt Blabby.”)

Several of the kids touched me particularly. One of our creative writing kids was a sweet young girl who has already, at her young age, had to be treated twice for cancer.

One of our Kaleidoscope kids, to whom I’d given one of my spare Reed Bradford crosses, was right on the borderline age between Kaleidoscope and Summer Plus, and got to return for Summer Plus, and so I was delighted to see her again.

After our afternoon workshop each day, we would break the teens into small groups and lead them in a little discussion about our theme word of the day, a character trait like “courage” or “patience.” On the first day, I was reading the prepared questions which had been given us by the staff, and one precocious young woman asked me if I was a therapist. I finally had to show her my business card to prove I was a newspaper reporter, and she playfully referred to me as her therapist for the rest of the week. On a more serious note, she revealed a day or two later that her father was recovering from a stroke, and I told her I’d pray for him.

Do you remember how I fell, badly scraping my knee and elbow, on the first day of Kaleidoscope? Well, on Thursday of Summer Plus, we were playing tag and … I fell, tearing off the small scab that remained on my knee and adding some new scratches.

I got to play several fun games this week. I’d been jonesing for UNO during the Kaleidoscope week but forgot to bring my deck. I brought it this time. I also got to play “Apples To Apples,” about which my co-worker Mary Reeves is always gushing. I loved it too. I may have to buy it some time. And we played “Fact or Crap” one night, which was a real hoot as well.

I also played “Taboo” with the creative writing kids, partly as a way of teaching them about finding new ways to describe things.

I enjoyed tie-dyeing so much during the Kaleidoscope week that I made sure to participate this week. This time, I made another shirt for myself and I also made several to give as gifts.

As I posted to Facebook, I had the same room and the same roommate this week as I’d had during Kaleidoscope – “Smitty” Smith from Smyrna. I didn’t even realize Smitty was coming back for the second week. (He always does home repair.) Smitty and I were the only repeat AIM campers, although Doug Warner had a similar schedule; he was an adult camper in our Youth Summer Ministry at the same time Smitty and I were doing our first AIM week, and then he returned to do AIM with us this week.

Jul 02

Fantastic week, strange ending

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I’m going to vent a little bit. This may be a bit more tediously personal than normal. I won’t be offended if you skip it (or if you watch the video without reading the blog post).

It has been the case repeatedly over the years that I will be at a summer AIM event, feeling the best and most relaxed I feel all year, and all of a sudden I’ll experience negative emotions for no reason, a stupid reason, or something that’s obviously not the real reason.

I have never been able to explain this completely. Part of it may be that I feel safer and more relaxed at an AIM camp than I do anywhere else, and stuff bubbles to the surface. I just don’t know.

I had a minor such moment during my Kaleidoscope week, at the end of the day when I felt kind of like a fifth wheel in the Kaleidoscope program. But I had a major one this week – on Friday night, of all times, after what had been otherwise a fantastic week – a successful creative writing workshop, a fun camp experience, and what have you.

My video of the week

At our Friday evening worship, Betsy Galbraith, this year’s AIM director, had a tremendous message challenging us to take the qualities of service and evangelism we’d displayed during the week back with us “to the valley below,” as the Mountain T.O.P. song phrases it. It was a fine message, and I sat there agreeing with it.

And yet, as the worship ended, and Betsy challenged us to seek out someone in the community who’d brought light to our experience over the course of the week, I suddenly felt … depressed. I wanted to be alone. I suddenly didn’t feel like I was capable of taking my Mountain T.O.P. experience to the valley below – exactly the opposite. I’m great at being Mister Christian Community when Christian community is laid out for me on brightly-colored copy paper schedules and when I’m surrounded by well-wishers. In the outside world? Not so much. Many of my problems with finances, weight, career, and socialization have been caused by and/or contributed to my self-centeredness. I sit here in my little cocoon, typing on the keyboard, with the TV cranked up loud enough to drown out my thoughts.

I suddenly felt a sense of guilt – and, in a sort of vicious cycle, that guilt drove me further into myself. I didn’t seek anyone out. One person hugged me (as much as she could, since I remained seated) and then I bolted from the AIM pavilion into the darkness. I eventually found myself sitting alone in the dark on the Friends cabin porch, crying for no reason but my own stupid self pity. Eventually, I went to bed – and even then, instead of using the door that leads from the porch into the lobby, where my friends were happily reminiscing about the week, I snuck around to a side entrance where I wouldn’t be noticed.

To make matters worse, some allergies (I think) which had bothered me a little on Wednesday night and Thursday hit full-force on Friday, and my throat was scratchy and my eyes were burning.

When I woke up Saturday morning, I was still in the feedback loop, still in a foul mood. We’d been asked to load up our cars prior to breakfast, and when I got mine loaded at 6:15 a.m. I got into it, put the keys into the ignition, and drove out of camp. I made it all the way to Altamont, several miles away, before thinking better of it and turning around. Once I was in company again, at breakfast, morning devotion, evaluations and our cleaning of camp, I was a little less moody, but still somewhat subdued – and, after closing circle, I slipped quickly away rather than make the rounds of hugging people goodbye.

At sharing Friday night, maybe an hour before my breakdown, I told the assembled crowd how delighted I was at having rediscovered the summer AIM experience, and how it had been a bright spot in what’s been a difficult and depressing 12 months. I still think so – and maybe that was what I was really emotional about. Maybe I just didn’t want to return home to the career I hate, the resources I’ve squandered, the drab little cocoon I’ve fashioned for myself.

I need a radical change, and I’ve known it for some time. I just don’t know exactly what it is or how to accomplish it.