Lubbock woman challenges MSC volunteers to dream_111703

Posted: 11/14/03

Lubbock woman challenges MSC volunteers to dream

By Teresa Young

Wayland Baptist University

LUBBOCK–Shirley Madden just smiles when she hears people say her dream facility can't be completed. To her, that's a sure sign God has great things in store.

Madden testified of her work with the Christian Women's Job Corps in Lubbock to fellow Mission Service Corps volunteers at their annual breakfast held in conjunction with the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual session in Lubbock.

Shirley Madden

Madden, a member of First Baptist Church in Lubbock, said she first got the vision for service in her hometown while working at a government agency and encountering a young mother with a frustrated, crying child.

“I told that girl her baby was crying out for peace and comfort, and as I said that, I became burdened that she didn't know (about Christ), and she didn't know she didn't know. No one was telling her.”

Through Christian Women's Job Corps, a welfare-to-work program started by Woman's Missionary Union, Madden found a means to teach valuable life skills and share her faith. But challenges still loomed for those with whom she worked.

“We'd love on them and encourage them all day and build them up, and then send them home at night to hell,” she said. “We really believed that they really could 'go and sin no more.' I began to dream about his place of peace and solace where women could come and rest.”

The result was My Father's House, a 45,000-square-foot facility currently under construction in southwest Lubbock. Built in great part by Texas Baptist Men, the facility will feature 18 apartments where women will reside while completing the Job Corps program, all the while learning culinary, housekeeping and laundry skills through a partnership with the Texas Tech University department of restaurant, hotel and institutional management.

Although many have doubted the facility would become reality, Madden said her faith has remained strong.

“I began to pray that what God would do in this place would be so off the wall that no one would think any one of us could do it,” she said. “Ask for the impossible; that's the only way he gets the glory.”

Jim Young, director of the Missions Equipping Center of the BGCT, encouraged Mission Service Corps volunteers to tap into the power of the Holy Spirit to do good works and advance the kingdom of God.

“If the church of today is to reach the world of today, it'll be through amateurs, not professionals,” Young said, noting the word amateur means “for the love of.”

“I pray we never lose our amateur status and become professionals doing it for the money, the institution or the status.”

Mission Service Corps has 2,753 volunteers nationwide, with 1,281, or 46.5 percent, coming from the BGCT.