Our relationship with ASP...

Garber UMC has been participating in the Appalachia Service Project since 1997. Each year our group of teenage volunteers, young adults, and their leaders travel to West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, or Kentucky.

The Appalachia Service Project is a forty-year-old program of the Methodist Church whose focus is to make homes in Appalachia warmer, safer and drier. The trip involves two days of travel, a week of work, and one day of travel back home. The accommodations for the week long experience are usually schools that are converted into centers for the eight week program. College students, most of who were volunteers in the past, staff the centers.

The work is hard, hot, dirty, and very rewarding. The work ranges from digging for foundations or for retaining walls to protect homes from water damage, to finishing additions for expanding families. The families that are met and the relationships framed are the high point of the trip. The families have been warm and welcoming, and open our young peoples’ eyes to an entirely different culture in an entirely different part of their country. As our young people serve their Lord in this way, their lives are changed as they make changes in other peoples’ lives.