Creekside Christian Reformed Church in Boulder, Colo., recently sent 13 people on a mission trip to Haiti. But it wasn’t the destination or the mission that made the trip unique; it was the people who went.
Creekside Church ministry group headed for Haiti.
The group included two people who are homeless, two who were formerly homeless, and a woman who is visually impaired.
“The vision behind the trip was to bring people on the margins to a place that has a lot of poverty,” stated Adie Johnson, copastor of Creekside CRC. “On the margins doesn’t just mean financial margins but margins of the church, the community; folks who wouldn’t normally go on a trip like this. This wasn’t your normal church group.”
While technical difficulties prevented the team from working on a building damaged during the earthquake of 2010, it didn’t prevent them from sharing the gospel. “We came at it, good or bad, with the expectation that we just wanted to share the love of God,” said Johnson. “That showed up in all kinds of ways: playing with the kids on the ministry grounds, playing music in the park.”
In the process Johnson and her team recognized something else: “In the U.S., you could say ‘these guys are homeless, these people are housed,’ that kind of thing. When you’re in Haiti, we’re all just North Americans. We were on equal grounds. It was beautiful. Everybody had a voice. Everybody’s work was valuable.”
Dwarf, one of the team members currently without a home, learned something else in Haiti. “There was rubble around them, and all you see is people getting up and doing everything with smiles on their faces,” he said. “With what little they had the joy was coming out of them. They were happy.”
