Proceeds for weekend yard sale to change lives

Published 11:33 pm Friday, August 31, 2012

Shoppers, like Tony Kiniffin, rummage through a plethora of items at the Teen Challenge yard sale on Friday. The proceeds will fund Teen Challenge students on a mission trip. -- Ashley Johnson

The Old National Armory Guard is packed from wall-to-wall with rows of tables and racks of clothing. Antique Coca-Cola signs, glass vases and Christmas decorations flooded in this week from churchgoers and community members to the armory in support of Teen Challenge, a local organization that helps to make Christian disciples out of people struggling with addiction.

“This is our third annual yard sale, and we are using the proceeds to fund a mission trip,” Jason Easter, program director for Teen Challenge said.

The yard sale began on Friday and will continue through Saturday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and just like last year this sale provides funding for five Teen Challenge students to travel to minster to others. Easter said Teen Challenge in Alabama partnered with a chapter in Portugal in 2011 and took five of their students there. There are more than 1,100 Teen Challenge chapters worldwide.

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“This year we are going to the Los Angeles Dream Center,” Easter said. “It is a ministry that does homeless outreach. We are going to have three staff members and five students go out to Los Angeles for a week in November.”

He said taking these students on a mission trip really puts what they have learned in the program into practice.

“We will be dealing a lot with people who have addictions out in California,” Easter said. “So they will be able to share their testimony with them and let them know ‘hey I was where you are at, and I’m free now, and you can be too.’”

Easter said the trip for the students will cost $5,000 which includes airfare and lodging, and they hope to make that money this weekend with the yard sale.

Teen Challenge is a yearlong, residential faith-based program that helps older teens overcome their addictions to alcohol and drugs. The program has several facilities in Alabama, one of them located in Jones. The program runs solely on donations and Easter said they take in just about anyone who comes to their door so they can help them.

One former Teen Challenge student, Hunter Madden, said he was impacted by his mission trip last year to Portugal.

“Once I got over there and I saw God working; it just touched me like nothing has touched me before and it completely changed me,” Madden said.

After returning to Alabama after the trip, Madden said he was so taken by the things he saw on the mission and the people he ministered to, he started a homeless feeding program called Feed My Sheep Ministry in Birmingham. Madden also works on staff with Teen Challenge and with youth at First Baptist Church of Selma.

Madden, like many other Teen Challenge students, was able to travel abroad with the help of last year’s yard sale proceeds.