The Genesis of Hope
Images by Blakeney Cox
When Shawn Doss was the youth pastor at Mount Vernon Baptist Church, his group decided to assemble their own mission trip. He called a church in New Orleans that was hosting teams each week. “The secretary said, ‘You can bring three hundred people.’ I said, ‘I don’t have three hundred people, I’ve got about thirty from my youth group,’” Shawn remembers. She said, ‘We are really struggling here, and we need all the help we can get. Bring all the people you can bring.’”Shawn’s group put the word out. That week two hundred people showed up from twelve different churches. “That shocked us a little bit. We didn't expect that,” he says.That was 2007, two years after Hurricane Katrina. The following year they repeated their efforts. Once again two hundred people showed up, a day that could arguably be referred to as The Genesis of Hope.
Shawn is the Founder and Director of Hope Missions, a group that organizes international and domestic mission trips. He and his wife Patty also own Go-Tees, a local screen printing business.A native of Cullman County, Shawn grew up in the Garden City/Hanceville area and was involved in missions for many years. As a youth minister, he had taken his group on mission trips since 1999. He even led one project a year for the North American Mission Board from 2002 to 2006. In 2007, while serving as Mt. Vernon Baptist's youth minister, Shawn began leading one trip a year to New Orleans. “I saw that we were touching a nerve with the smaller churches,” he says. “A lot of people going with them had never been on mission trips before, because it was expensive, usually over three hundred dollars. We wanted to keep ours around two hundred.”When most organizations’ missions focused primarily on construction projects, Shawn’s group also focused on ministry. “The biggest thing wasn't about doing the project, or getting the house painted. The overwhelming focus of what our trip was about was to get the gospel of Jesus Christ to people,” he says. “We want you to get the house painted, but if someone is walking down the street, put the paint brush down, go down to the corner, share with them. Those are the eternal things. The house will need repainting again.”As the years went by, Shawn felt an increasing desire to do something else. “I was older, the kids were older. I was at a point in my life where I was about finished with the student part of my ministry,” he explains. “I looked at possibly being a missions pastor at a church, but nothing really opened up with that.”
After talking with Patty and much prayer, the solution seemed obvious. “We just thought, everybody seems to be responding well to this, what if we just did five or six of these?” he says. “We had no idea what to do but we just began to plan for the next year. I talked with my pastor and he was very supportive of what we were trying to do, so I resigned from Mt. Vernon in 2009 and we stepped out on faith, doing five or six primarily stateside trips. These smaller churches would come to us and say, ‘We want to go to Haiti or to Nicaragua,’ and we began to add international trips along the way.”In 2011, Shawn and Patty established Hope Missions, and have now added international trips, traveling about twenty weeks a year in twelve different countries. “Our goal has been to touch every major region on the planet,” he says. “So far we've done work all over the United States, the Caribbean (Haiti, Dominican Republic, & Cuba), Central America (Nicaragua, Costa Rica, & Panama), South America (Suriname), Africa (Ghana), Europe (Spain & England), and Southeast Asia (Philippines). Next year we'll be doing a trip to Brazil and also Burundi, a small country in Africa.Another arm of Hope Missions is producing evangelism resources. Shawn says they currently have a half million tracts in print, in eight to ten languages. Once they traveled to Ghana and had tracts printed in Dagbani. When it was discovered the people there spoke Dagbani, but couldn’t read or write, color-coded symbols were added. Other resources include T-shirts, wristbands, a soccer ball with the colored symbols printed on it, and a free app for iPhone, Windows, and Android. The app currently has over forty-three hundred downloads and contains tracts, information on upcoming trips, and a Bible.“I got an email one time from a guy who was having trouble with his Android app,” Shawn says. “We called the app people and got him back up and running. I didn’t recognize the email address, so I asked him, ‘Brother, where are you from?’ He said, ‘South Africa. We use it all the time, and even got our friends using it.’”Sometimes we forget that when the dark cloak of night has fallen here, on the other side of the world the sun’s light is still shining. 78For more information about Hope Missions, contact Shawn Doss at 256-620-1788, or hopemissiontrips@gmail.com.Visit one of the websites: www.hopemissiontrips.com or www. knowthegospel.org. The app is available to download free at thegospelapp.org.