New roof for Faith Church

A quest equaling the search for the Holy Grail has been going on in the grand halls of governmentdom in Frankfort recently, seeking a pithy little sentence that captures the essence of the whole commonwealth, Paducah to Ashland, Newport to Bowling Green. A friend of mine at the Lexington Herald-Leader came up with the best idea I've heard so far. He said we should letter the bottom of state license plates with the words: "Kentucky: come for the pollen, stay for the humidity."

I can relate to that. In fact, it's a really good description of the day I went downtown to watch a group of Christian teenagers from St. Louis join with local volunteers to put a new roof on an urban church at the corner of Seventh Street and Algonquin Parkway.

It was on one of those hot, sticky summer days when my hair goes boooing and the natural curls that produce my lovely "Texas Big Hair" look squeeze my head tight enough to pop my brains out my eye sockets.

But the kids I'd come to write about were scurrying around like gerbils high on No-Doz,, oblivious to the heat, the humidity, and the pollen soup in the air that had created a truly attractive swollen red nose beneath my frizzy hair in the middle of my sweat-drenched face..

These kids were on a mission. They'd come to help a minister who had been offering up the same prayer every Sunday morning for six months: “Please, Lord, don’t let the roof cave in.”

As more than 80 people packed the sanctuary and overflowed into folding chairs in the vestibule of Faith Community Church, the pastor begged God to keep the bulging ceiling from ripping open and dumping shingles on the congregation.

The roof had leaked like a spaghetti strainer for years. Efforts to plug the leaks by adding layer upon layer of shingles so overloaded the old roof that the walls of the building bulged outward from the strain—eight inches on one side and 11 inches on the other. The weight caused the roof to sag inward, and shingles slid down through cracks and piled up on the ceiling tiles of the sanctuary.

The church's insurance carrier cancelled the policy on the building, warning that its bulging ceiling and bowed-out walls were moving it daily closer toward a catastrophic collapse.

But that's not what happened. The church was rescued from that fate on July 31 when a caravan of vehicles, each identified by a different letter of the alphabet, set out from St. Louis into the rising sun on Interstate 64. The family minister of Riverside Community Church lead the way in the “A” car and the youth pastor from Dardenne Presbyterian Church held the train together in “Z.”

The collection of cars, vans, minivans and buses were carrying 140 short-term missionaries—teenagers and their adult sponsors—who had dedicated four days of their lives to a project serving Jesus on the mission field.

The mission field was Louisville; the project was a new roof for Faith Community Church.

The teenage missionaries came to be in Louisville courtesy of EDGE Outreach, a ministry that hooks up mission teams from churches around the country with mission experiences in Louisville.

The man who founded EDGE Outreach is Mark Hogg, whose relationships with local Christians formed during 15 years of ministry to churches in the Louisville area provides the momentum, expertise, manpower and encouragement to make mission trips to Louisville more than just, “Hey, ya’ll, come on down here and do some work for us.”

Hogg has found that all over Louisville “people are doing wonderful work for Jesus in the cracks and crevices.

“There are people doing incredible ministry that nobody ever sees, and we