After years of mission work, Ron Duncan is still learning. The director of missions for Pickens-Twelve Mile Baptist Association is gaining perspective on the purpose of life. “The more I read my Bible, the more I see that we’re here to help people, to take care of their needs,” Duncan said. “People have spiritual needs, but they also have physical needs. And until you take care of those physical needs, they’re not going to be to open to working on their spiritual needs.”
Several representatives of Pickens-Twelve Mile Association have been heavily involved in disaster relief mission work in Haiti and Chile. But the association doesn’t want to forget those who are hurting in Pickens County. That thought is the driving force behind the association’s new “Sonshine Station” ministry.
The Sonshine Station is a trailer used to help churches reach beyond their walls into their neighborhoods. The station includes an inflatable bouncer set, a popcorn popper and a snow cone machine.
Guy Jenkins, who has led the effort to train local church teams to use the equipment, said churches can use the Sonshine Station in a variety of ways, including to promote upcoming Vacation Bible School sessions, or as part of VBS itself. The Sonshine Station has already been used by Gap Hill Baptist Church in a fundraiser for its trip to the Dominican Republic and for Royal Ambassador Day at Connie Maxwell Children’s Home. In late June, the Sonshine Station will travel to Middlesboro, Ky., to be part of the association’s annual Kentucky missions trip.
The station has its own generator, so it can be taken into neighborhoods without the need of an electrical hookup. The actual trailer is one that the association’s disaster relief team had previously used.
Any church in Pickens-Twelve Mile Association can use the Sonshine Station. “All we ask is that [they] go through the training, which takes about three hours,” Jenkins said. One requirement is that nobody is charged to participate in Sonshine Station events.
“We ask the church or organization that sponsors the event to keep a tally of how many people they serve,” Jenkins said. “We then ask for a donation equivalent to 25 cents a head to help us pay for supplies and keep the van stocked.”
Jenkins said neighboring Piedmont Baptist Association has three Sonshine stations in use. “From what I understand, all three stay pretty busy,” he said. “Of course, they have more churches than we do, but that shows how effective this can be as a mission tool.”
Jenkins said that by providing the Sonshine Station, the association is giving smaller churches access to the kind of equipment they could never afford on their own. “We are looking at this as a way of reaching people,” he said. “We have such a great need, but we don’t always have the funds for this kind of an evangelistic tool.”
– Robinson is managing editor of The Easley Progress. This story first appeared in the Progress and is reprinted with permission.