The Humility of Building a Church: Lessons from the Collegiate/Young Adult Project

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Matthew Donoghue wasn?t the happiest camper on his mission team, but a wallop in the head with a ?two by four? snapped him out of his misery.

Matthew Donoghue wasn’t the happiest camper on his mission team, but a wallop in the head with a “two by four” snapped him out of his misery.

He had just spent two weeks on his first Maranatha mission trip on the Collegiate/Young Adult project. The 36-member team was based in Requena, Peru, a remote town on the Amazon River. Upon arrival, the group was split into three teams: church construction, Vacation Bible School, and medical outreach. As part of the construction team, Donoghue spent his days racing against the clock to finish the Requena church. Each day, he prayed that the team would complete 100 percent of the block work; it was a personal goal he had set for himself prior to the trip. However, not everyone shared his goal, and events didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped.

“We didn’t finish the church,” says Donoghue, who is from Spokane, Washington. “I was bummed because I put my heart and soul into it, and we came up short.”

That weekend, the entire team gathered for its final worship and a communion service. Donoghue was still in a dismal mood. But as people reflected on the week, sharing positive ways they had been changed by the experience, his resentment diminished. Then the group pastor led them into the ordinance of humility. He read from John 13, which documents Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.

“It goes into everyone bickering about who was the greatest. And I felt so much like them at that particular moment because I felt I had worked so much harder than some others did,” remembers Donoghue. “And when it hit that Christ washed his disciple’s feet, it was like a two by four hit me in the forehead with a big ‘H’ on it.”

Donoghue’s humility intensified when a fellow volunteer kneeled to wash his feet. “I felt totally unworthy of it. I felt like Peter in that chapter, how he talks to Christ-I’ll never let you wash my feet. That’s what I wanted to say. But I knew I had to allow it to happen,” he says. “I broke down, and it was definitely a moving experience.”

Afterwards, Donoghue approached Claudio Japas, the project coordinator, and apologized for his standoffish attitude. ”[Matt] realized it wasn’t about the church. It was about service and knowing how to give up our lives to serve others,” says Japas.

Japas says this lesson of service is crucial for young adults to understand. “Myself being a young adult, I realize that it’s an age when we’re trying to define ourselves or find our purpose in life. All through our younger years, our goals were to achieve an education or good grades. Once it’s all done, and you have a job, it opens up a higher purpose,” says Japas, who lives in Burleson, Texas.

He believes mission trips are an effective tool for leading people to purpose. Although Japas has been on multiple mission trips, he says this sense of transformation and change was never more apparent than on this project. During the communion worship, each volunteer shared their personal struggles, their reasons for coming on the mission trip, and how they had been affected. Some stated a passion for missions; others said the experience instigated the spiritual change they had been seeking. “Basically Christ sees infinite ways to draw people to Him,” says Japas. “And none of them are better than another. Our objective is to get everyone to know Him.”

As for Donoghue, weeks later the impact of the mission trip is still smarting on his conscience as evidenced by his new perspective on the entire project-a project he once thought was incomplete. “I think we saved lives eternally and spiritually. As much as I went there in mind to build a church, instead we did build one. Maybe we came up short in the physical sense, but eternally we did it. We are going to see a lot more people in heaven because of it.”

Note: The Collegiate/Young Adult Team completed about 95 percent of the block work on the church. In the upcoming months, the Requena Adventist Church will be completed by in-country Maranatha staff.

Date published: December 12, 2005