We are always happy to have missions teams come and serve at The Hope Center. As you know, the summer is prime season for missions teams so it’s a perfect match for our day camp program, Camp Wild, which relies heavily on volunteers to operate.

Camp Wild is a free summer camp program for inner-city and at-risk kids in Hagerstown. To help meet the needs of families in Hagerstown, Camp Wild is a free camp for kids ages 5-12, including free transportation to-and-from our facilities each day.

Since we provide Camp Wild free of charge, we require many volunteers to help make the program run successfully, and as a way to keep it free for the families.

We are eternally grateful for all the volunteers who take time out of their summer schedules to help reach kids for Christ. Some of our volunteers are high-schoolers, some are college kids, others are teachers and some are people who use vacation time to help us minister to the kids.

But some weeks we are happy to host a missions team. In the past, we’ve had teams come from all over America, and some come from our own backyard. These teams raise financial support to come and work for a week at Camp Wild. They stay in hotels in Hagerstown and help in many ways at The Hope Center, not just at Camp Wild.

This summer, we were happy to host a group from Grace Pointe Community Church of the Nazarene from Severn, MD.

The group of teens was Brianna, Sammi, Tiffany, Miranda & Clayton. They were accompanied by leaders Dennis & Sheila.

Dennis & Sheila are a husband/wife team who play many roles in their church, in addition to being the Teen Service Group leaders. Dennis is on the Teen Board and Sheila is on the Children’s Board. Both were extremely pleased to bring their teens to Hagerstown to have them help Camp Wild.

The group was put to good work during their time at Camp Wild. They helped in many ways, including helping to clean-up and reorganize after Camp Wild concluded for the season.

Sheila said that they all enjoyed their time at Camp Wild. In fact, they all loved it so much that discussions have already started about returning next year to help again!

“We are already working on plans for next years missions trips and the teens who attended have told the others they think we should go there again”. Sheila happily says that she & Dennis are definitely on-board for returning!

We are so thankful for people, like this missions team from Grace Pointe Community Church of the Nazarene, who take time to help reach others for Christ. It’s not always easy to raise support for trips and then spend long days in the hot sun working with kids. But when it’s all said and done, lives are changed, but not just the kids who attend Camp Wild. Volunteering and working with these kids can have a profound and life-changing effect on the staff as well.

If you would like to volunteer at The Hope Center or have your family, Sunday School class or civic group volunteer, please call 301.739.1165 or email us at hagerstownrescue@verizon.net for more info. You can also go to www.hagerstownrescue.org to see the different ways you can get involved at The Hope Center.