PHOTO GALLERY: Youth serve residents with "Mission Possible"

Posted: Saturday, August 15, 2009 12:00 am | Updated: 5:08 pm, Tue Sep 15, 2009.

Peter Adelsen Staff Writer | 0 comments

Check out our Mission Possible photo gallery.

Church youth from five states are making their way to Kokomo this weekend to help repair many homes of elderly and handicapped residents.

This is the seventh year of Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer's "Mission Possible" and it begins Sunday and runs to July 25. This year, the youth will be working at 13 houses in a four and a half day period working on everything from wheelchair ramps to house painting, porch building, roofing and pulling weeds, said Kathy Tucker, who leads the event.

"We sit here in Kokomo and we have a very nice city and we assume everyone is doing fine," Tucker said. "There are great needs right here in our town. We get to a few of them. We can't fix everything for everybody."

Mission Possible will not accept any money from homeowners, she said.

"Our belief is that if we teach teenagers to be aware of the needs of others they'll develop into adults that carry though on those same needs and develop a life-long pattern of helping others," she said.

The youth participating this year are from Good Shepherd Lutheran of Sherman, Ill.; St. John's Lutheran of Algonquin, Ill.; Zion Lutheran of Cincinnati, Ohio; Zion Lutheran of Hiawatha, Iowa; Grace Lutheran of Columbus and Lutheran Church of Our Redeemer of Kokomo. The churches find out about this through the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod Web site.

Our Redeemer works with United Way, Area Five Agency on Aging and Samaritan Caregivers on where they could work construction jobs.

"Basically, they get requests for needs and I call them asking them 'what do you got?' and then we look down the list and pick on what we think we can work on," she said.

During the event, there are an opening and closing worship service, Bible studies and recreational activities-including the fist ever Mission Possible Olympics, she said. Also, every Tuesday and Thursday, Allan James of WZWZ will be doing live broadcasts from the job sites.

"Every kid who comes gets to talk on the radio live," she said.

Prior to the servant event, many youth participate in fundraisers to pay for the $150 fee to work in the community, she said. The money goes toward feeding, transporting and entertaining the youth.

Many in the congregation donate water, ice and Gatorade, she said.

"Our church members are the backbone to this," she said. "I have to give them lots of props."

The church got this idea from attending a youth construction event in Murfreesboro, Tenn. back in 1998, she said.

There are more than 100 different servant events within the LCMS a whole variety of things to do, she said. The church chose construction because it was the biggest need in the community. Since 2000, Mission Possible has worked on 75 homes, 40 wheelchair ramps and has used hundreds of cans of paint, she said.

http://kokomoperspective.com/news/local_news/article_1e05c288-756c-5d7b-a85a-9808a202e060.html