CALIFORNIA - Part of the Mid-Missouri Mission Team, high school and college-age missionaries will come to the California area to help the elderly and disabled in house keeping, yard work and just about anything else they couldn't do for themselves.
"The houses that we work on are what we can do for anyone that can't help themselves, or they couldn't afford to pay to have it done," said 3MT's founder and president, Kevin Kohler. "It came down to primarily working for senior citizens or with people with disabilities.
After 10 years of setting up a base camp-like facility in Tipton, 3MT will move to California for its 11th year on Saturday, June 20, through Saturday, June 27.
"Tipton had some construction possibilities over there," Kohler said. "We talked to the school board in California and they said we can camp out. The number of resident missionaries we can keep has a lot to do with the how many we can get in the cafeteria."
The 3MT will set up in the California Middle School cafeteria. Expectations are for between 150 to 160 resident missionaries. While they stay as a group in the mornings and evenings, the missionaries will be split up randomly into crews of eight to 10 people, and will be assigned to a host church to complete their community projects. The crews will complete one or more projects, depending on the size.
"We started out as a painting missionaries, but it's grown in to yard work, house washing, fence work and working out on the farm," Kohler said. "We've done an assortment of volunteer things."
While there are approximately 150 resident missionaries, around 1,000 people are involved in the program.
"People bring in food for the meals and we have host churches," Kohler said. "They have volunteers that cook the noon meals and they also have adult volunteers that go out into the field and help with the projects. It just becomes a community involvement."
Kohler says the sponsored churches are primarily responsible for creating and organizing their own projects. Most of the projects have been scheduled for months, but Kohler is taking request for next year or future years.
There will be15 crews sent to the host churches across Moniteau, Morgan and Cole County, with some churches hosting one crew and some as many as four. The crews for each church will work on separate projects in different communities, and they'll provide lunch for the missionaries.
The missionaries are in two groups, college-age - who act as assistants to the adults - and high school/church youth groups. While the program hosts local and in-state churches, they'll also attract some from out-of-state. This year, groups from Illinois and Kansas will take part, but in year's past, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Chicago-area groups have volunteered for 3MT.
"There will be about 15 or 16 churches that will bring students," Kohler said. "It all depends on the size of the church, some will bring three and some will probably bring 20. These kids are excited. They get in there and there's teamwork and they're helping someone. It's very rewarding for them and for the adults. It gives us hope for the next generation coming up."
The missionaries aren't required to have experience in the labor because they're not responsible for skilled-labor projects.
"We do in-house training depending on what their project is going to be," Kohler said. "You don't have to be an expert. We get a lot of request for roofing, we can't do roofing. We do some minor construction repairs, but we don't build things necessarily."
Since the start of 3MT more than a decade ago, it has seen a lot of growth, but not in the number of missionaries. Since they camp in a school's cafeteria, they're limited on the number they can have, so they've had to curve their growth. The number that's grown are the volunteers, and churches who want to donate to the program.
Another way they've grown is not necessarily within 3MT, but other groups have formed the same kind of program in other communities in the Midwest.
"My co-founder was Paul Posey and he has created his own organization and they're probably bigger than we are," said Kohler. "There have been other organizations who have participated with us the past couple of years, then took the idea to their home. In that way, it's been fantastic."
Coverage of the Mid-Missouri Mission Team's projects will be in next week's edition of the California Democrat.