Dream Center destination for FCC youth

By Elroy King
of The Chronicle

     A group of nine teenagers and three adults from First Christian Church will head for a two week trip to Southern California Saturday, but what they will be doing is far from what most people would consider a dream vacation.
     They will work out of the Dream Center in downtown Los Angeles, in a building formerly known as the Hollywood hotel. It now houses a variety of programs that work with the homeless, the poor and others in need. Among the facilities in the building is a church, Angels Temple.
     Mark Hammer, the youth pastor at FCC, said the group will be working in and out of that building and will eat and sleep there as well. They will leave at 5 a.m. Saturday morning and will come back on Aug. 2 and will do their mission work from next Tuesday to Sunday afternoon.
     They will also work in some of the suburbs of L.A., mainly Compton and Crenshaw and will do a variety of things, including feeding the hungry and homeless, and working on a project called “adopt a block” where they will work to clean up neighborhoods, and helping people fix up their house. The team will get more details on what they will be doing once they arrive, Hammer said.
     They will also work with multiple vacation Bible schools from a van that goes out from the Dream Center and brings people to the church.
     There are other youth groups working at the Dream Center during the summer, but the group from FCC will have their own ministry, Hammer said. They will work with full-time staffers from Dream Center, who they have yet to meet.
     This is a time for the FCC youth “to put their faith into action,” Hammer said of the group, saying they “will be evangelizing and showing God’s love to people in our own country” rather than going to some other country. FCC has done mission trips to Mexico and elsewhere in the past.
     The youth group at FCC has been planning this trip since last October, Hammer said. He learned about the Dream Center from a former youth pastor at Covenant Christian in The Dalles, who did a one-day mission there a while back with a youth group.
     They will leave in FCC’s 15-passenger van early Saturday. On Monday they will visit Knott’s Berry Farm, their only “touristy thing” during their stay there. They will try to get to the beach at least once.
     The center is equipped to feed those in need at the center or to take the food where the people are, Hammer said.
     Jordon Hewitt, Jeremy Nisbet and Hannah Sandoz all graduated from TDWHS this past spring. All of the others in the youth group are high school students.
     This will be the first such adventure for Sandoz, who said she worked at a church camp last year but this is the first time for something of this scope. She sees it as a chance to be able to help people and grow spiritually as well.
     Jessica Nisbet and brother Jeremy Nisbet have been on previous FCC missions to Mexico where they built houses, acknowledged this is a little different from what they have done in the past.
     She says she has a passion for helping people and sums up the reason for many that are making the trip by observing that “if Jesus was here, these are the kind of people he would be helping.”
     Jeremy said he had always liked helping others, noting this is a lot better than just staying home. It will get him and the others in the group out of their comfort zones, he said.
     All three seem comfortable leaving that comfort zone and they all see it as a chance to grow spiritually.
     A dessert auction held in June to raise funds for the trip earned $6,200, but some of that money went for scholarships to summer youth camps.
     The youth group also did a couple of service projects, going out into the community and helping people with tasks around their homes. That raised more than $1,000.      They also have a day of team-building at Camp Jonah in Trout Lake.
     In the FCC church bulletin last week, Hammer called the Dream Center an intercity mission designed to meet the needs of the broken, needy and hurting. He said the students going have a huge heart for service.
     The young people going on the mission went forward for prayer at both the Saturday night and Sunday service and were quickly surrounded by members of the congregation.
     Hammer, his wife, Lindsey, and Elise Bailey, are the adults going with the group.
The others making the trip are Leah and Gabe Wilson, Duncan LoCicero, Faith Hodges, Jordan Hewitt and Robin Wilbern.

     To publish news events here or to suggest stories for the church page, contact Elroy King at The Dalles Chronicle. Churches are also encouraged to submit their bulletins that list special events for their church.
     He can be reached at (541) 506-4617, by fax at (541) 296-1365 or by Email at eking@thedalleschronicle.com
     The normal deadline is Wednesday noon, prior to Friday’s church news publication.

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