By Jeff Brumley
For Shawna Barnett and her husband, Malachi, a lay Church of God preacher, “the Lord works in mysterious ways” took on special meaning Wedneaday when a few dozen Baptist volunteers started building their new home in McCreary County, Ky.
The couple and their 2-year-old son, Easton, are the eighth — and latest — recipients of the Kentucky Baptist Fellowship’s annual Extreme Build project, which uses volunteer labor to construct one home a year for a struggling family in Kentucky’s poorest county.
“It’s just so amazing how God has moved for us,” Shawna Barnett said on Thursday. Construction on the property in the unincorporated community of Revelo is scheduled to continue until June 15.
Extreme poverty
It’s hard to find a place more economically challenged than McCreary County, a rugged and isolated area located on the Kentucky-Tennessee line north of Knoxville. The U.S. Census puts its median annual income at less than $12,500 and lists 31 percent of its roughly 18,000 residents beneath the federal poverty level.
The Barnetts definitely share in those financial hurdles. To earn money, Malachi, 19, works at a factory that makes tent windows. Shawna, 20, is currently a stay-at-home mom with another baby due in October.
But what got the family on the Extreme Build project radar was the traffic crash that nearly killed Shawna in September 2011, said Joshua Speight, who runs the program as KBF’s associate coordinator for missions.
Falling asleep on her way to college nursing classes, Shawna slammed head-on into a refrigeration truck, smashing her body from top to bottom. Several surgeries and months of rehab have her on the mend, but have also sidelined her nursing education.
“We don’t make tragedy a qualification, but we want an extreme need,” Speight said. “It’s the humanity factor we are looking at.”
Speight added that the project is not a home give-away. The volunteer labor and a donation of $20,000 toward financing are used to make the $120,000 home much cheaper for the families. But those families must still be approved for loans and have a mortgage to pay once handed the keys, he said.
“There’s nothing free here,” he said.
Church renunions
The recipients aren’t the only beneficiaries of Extreme Build, he added. Church groups from across the state and from Tennessee are participating in the build this year. In the past, groups have come from as far away as Alabama and Texas. Some participants aren’t even Baptist.
“Some churches make this their family mission trip, the big mission trip they’ll promote for the year,” Speight said.
“It’s also something of a homecoming for our churches,” he added. “These folks wouldn’t get a chance to meet each other, and here they get a chance to fellowship and work alongside each other.”
The eight-year Kentucky effort fits into an even larger whole as part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s “Together for Hope” initiative, which targets 20 of the nation’s poorest counties for various kinds of poverty ministry.
‘Someone cares’
The Extreme Build is also a morale booster for the entire county, said Tom Manning-Beavin, director of housing for the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corp. and president of its Southern Tier Housing Corp. subsidiary.
Kentucky Highlands oversees economic and community development in the region, and Southern Tier focuses on housing development. Both are partners with KBF in the Extreme Build effort by screening applicants, helping obtain financing and providing financial and homeowner education to recipients.
Extreme Build “has had an impact not just for those families but in McCreary County,” Manning-Beavin said. “It’s showing that someone cares and that someone outside the county … has an interest in the county.”
The annual KBF project has also provided a boost for other Southern Tier projects by bringing media attention to the economic and housing challenges in McCreary County, he said.
“It becomes the focal point, it’s the thing around which we can do some media and get local churches interested in what we are doing,” Manning-Beavin said.
‘Ecstatic’
But for the Barnetts it all amounts to a miracle. The Extreme Build will get them out of a small two-bedroom apartment and into a roomy three-bedroom house with large front and back yards where children can safely play. A $70,000 boost in financing will give the couple an approximately $325 a month mortgage.
Shawna Barnett said the KBF program and the help they’ve received from Kentucky Highlands has been nothing short of a miracle. “My husband’s a preacher, and we do everything we can to try and live right and do what we can for the Lord,” she said. “I’m just ecstatic.”