JUMP Will Celebrate Their Tenth Anniversary

 

June 12, 2019



Twenty-three youth and adults from the Jesus Uses Motivated People (JUMP) group will be travelling to Puyallup, Washington, this summer for their third mission trip to that city. From June 16-24, they will work at three different sites.

At Helping Hand House (HHH), an emergency shelter that serves families with children who are experiencing the crisis of homelessness, the group will perform maintenance and landscaping labor. Operating under the core values of urgent relief, trust, and dignity, HHH helps families through one or more of their programs: Open Hearth Ministries, Emergency Shelter, Rapid Rehousing, Permanent Supportive Housing, and Affordable Housing. The goals of these programs aim to provide respite, remove barriers to housing stability, and assist families in attaining as much self-sufficiency as possible while encouraging them to recognize that a child’s education should become and remain a priority in their lives.


JUMP’s second stop, L’arche Farm and Gardens will find them assisting the developmentally challenged with their farm and gardens doing maintenance and upkeep type work. The Farm is a collaborative setting in which people with a diversity of gifts and abilities work toward common goals. Each farm worker—whether core member, assistant or volunteer—is affirmed in his or her dignity, self-worth, and connection to life.

Group members will next travel into Seattle where they will work with Operation Sack Lunch to provide meals for the homeless. They will also provide ministry to Union Gospel Mission. While there, they will buy, prepare and serve a complete meal for a group of over 100 women and children in a shelter program. To finish the trip off, they plan to visit Silverwood on their way home.


According to one of the group’s leaders, Chrissy Downs, mission work is not only eye-opening but teaches selflessness and acceptance, two traits that are often lost in the current “me” culture.

“Seeing the hardships that some people experience and the daily struggle that many go through just to survive is something our youth can’t understand without seeing it firsthand. Mission work helps them to develop the empathy for others that is often lacking in us all,” Downs said. “The feeling they achieve from knowing at the end of the day that they have really made a difference for someone else, or maybe a whole group of people, is often a life-changer for our kids,” she added.


The choice of Puyallup for this mission trip is significant since JUMP will be celebrating their tenth anniversary this summer, and Puyallup is instrumental in their origin story.

During the summer of 2009, Alec and Courtney Arntzen, a Chinook High School math instructor and the Presbyterian Church pastor at the time, took some students from the Presbyterian youth group to Puyallup to work with the youth group there. As former members of the Shepherd of the Hill (SOTH) Presbyterian Church in Puyallup, the Arntzens approached youth group leaders in Chinook about the experience and groomed a relationship between the Washington and Montana youth groups. When the team from SOTH wished to serve in the Chinook area, the local church hosted the SOTH team and put together work opportunities for them that also involved local youth. The experience made an impact on Presbyterian Church community leaders as well as on the youth.

“When SOTH left to go home, the local leaders and youth were all of the same mind. We didn’t want this relationship and its spirit of volunteerism to end,” Downs stated.

Given this passion, the local group held a kick-off barbecue that fall and invited all area youth in grades 7-12. From that successful beginning, JUMP was born. “We had a huge turn-out in the fall of 2019 and have been going ever since,” Downs said. “We welcome all youth. They can be a member of any church or have no church affiliation at all. Acceptance is very important and stressed in JUMP.”

SOTH has been to Chinook twice, and this trip will be JUMP’s third trip to Puyallup. “Chinook youth have a great work ethic; that is something that is just expected here, so one of the interesting things our young people learn from these trips is how important and appreciated a work ethic is. At most all of the sites we visit, people are amazed at the fact that no matter the job put in front of the youth, they tackle it and often complete it in much less time than expected,” Downs reported.

In addition to their mission trip, where they will reconnect with friends from Puyallup, JUMP has plans this summer to revamp their t-shirt design and to put together a documentary that can be shown later in the year at a tenth anniversary party or celebration.

 
 

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