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Middleburg Missionaries
Lotts Creek Through the Years
Click here for Pictures
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Middleburg Missionaries is one of a number of "people to people" Christian outreach activities of Middleburg Heights Community Church. For over 25 years, we have traveled each summer to places in Tennessee, West Virginia and most recently to Lotts Creek Community School near Hazard, Kentucky, where we can help improve housing through some "sweat ministry." We do this to help ourselves build a wider world view and share our relative good fortune with people who need a little help and have much to share with us. We use our work trips to teach our youth the joy of Christian outreach - of giving back - of looking beyond self - of practicing the fundamentals of a belief in Christ. We learn teamwork, some construction skills, the satisfaction of physical labor, Christian fellowship and how lucky we are to be in a position to help. Following are selected glimpses of our experiences from our more recent trips. We hope our experiences will encourage others to join us next year or find other ways of making meaningful face-to-face expressions of God's Love.
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| The Lotts Creek Story |
- In the 1920’s, a teenage Alice Sloan was sent from the hills of Kentucky to Cleveland for an education. She returned and in 1933 founded a school on Lotts Creek.
- Alice Sloan fought hard to overcome the prejudice toward education and built a school for both boys and girls.
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In 1953, after 20 years in log buildings, she built a modern school building
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And dormitories for students who could not commute daily because of poor roads.
- A couple of years ago the present school was built down the hill from the other buildings.
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Cordia grade and high school is now state-of- the-art serving about 200 students
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The school buildings are owned by the Lotts Creek Community School Inc., a charitable organization
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The school is staffed by Knott County
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Operations are funded by a partnership of private and governmental sources
- Originally supported by what are now mostly abandoned strip mines, the Lotts Creek valley and most of Southeastern Kentucky have very difficult economic problems
- But the Lotts Creek valley itself shows signs of relative prosperity with many nice homes
- The educational opportunity brought by Lotts Creek Community School is probably the critical ingredient in that prosperity
- But pockets of extreme poverty still dot the valley
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In addition to supporting the school, Lotts Creek Community School Inc. supports other services in the valley.
(That’s where we come in!)
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Middleburg Missionaries participate in that outreach by doing home repair and improvement projects
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In a small way, we help continue Alice Sloan’s legacy of making a difference
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| Our Part |
- The mission trip starts on a Saturday or Sunday morning at about 8 am. We meet in the church parking lot and pack up the church van and trailer. It’s about a 360 mile trip
- Accommodations are in the old school dormitories. Nice kitchen and dinning room. The food is outstanding. And, it’s not all work. There's swimming on the agenda each afternoon. Softball games occupy the evenings and usually one afternoon is devoted to a trip to the Natural Bridge.
- It may not seem like it while we are busy working, but these trips are very educational. We learn:
- Building skills
- Team work
- Cultural sensitivity and a wider world view
- What giving something really worthwhile feels like.
- These things are summarized in daily devotional time, but they really sink in later, after the trip is over.
- Summary -
- Beautiful country,
- Great people,
- Rewarding work,
- Fellowship,
- New experiences,
- Making a difference
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Lotts Creek Work Trips 
