Service Over Self volunteers find spiritual uplift through repairing homes

Faith Matters feature for The Commercial Appeal

April 30, 2011

On a chilly morning in March, the volunteers repairing the house in Binghamton stopped long enough to fill their bellies with sandwiches and chips and their souls with a testimony of faith from a colleague.

“It’s much more than just repairing a house,” said Samantha Stanford of Grenada, Miss., leading a team of student volunteers from the University of Missouri who were spending their spring break renovating a house on Hollywood Street.

This particular house will become the Eikon Ministries Intern House, a place for future community volunteers and interns to stay as they join in the work of Service Over Self, the nonprofit home-repair ministry that has been sharing the gospel in word and deed for 25 years.

What began in 1986 with a two-week service project by a youth group at Christ United Methodist Church has become a year-round, multidenominational ministry that has overseen the repair of more than 700 homes with more than 20,000 volunteers from 30 states … (read more)