Carolina Cross Connection is an organization dedicated to:
- Bringing youth and adults together to form a Christian community for the purpose of serving God and better knowing our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
- Spreading the love of Christ in the larger community through service to people in need.
- Providing opportunities for youth to practice leadership skills, witness to their faith, and grow in spiritual maturity.
Carolina Cross Connection (CCC) is a Christian service camp ministry in western North Carolina helping students and adults make a difference with folks in need while allowing Jesus Christ to transform their own lives to look more like Him. A week with CCC includes all service project planning, supplies and tools, as well as worship, devotions, team-building activities, recreation, fun and games all led by our dynamic college-age staff. At CCC, we see ourselves as partners with youth leaders, churches and parents in raising compassionate, servant-hearted, next-generation leaders. CCC is the beginning, not the end, of Christ-followers making a difference in this world!
(CCC is a non-profit, interdenominational organization, operated by a Board of Directors and a full-time administrative staff.)
You and your group will gather with others from across the U.S. for a week at one of our western North Carolina camp locations. You will arrive on a Sunday morning between 9:30 and 11:00 AM, and begin meeting other campers and the CCC summer staff, a group of seven to eight college-aged folks who are extremely enthusiastic and love the Lord! You will check in, move in to your cabin, and get settled for the week.
After orientation and lunch, you will begin forming what we often refer to as "a Christian community" with your fellow campers. You will make friends with many new people, and strengthen the relationships you already have with the members of your own group. Throughout Sunday afternoon, the staff will help facilitate community-building through exciting games, mixers, icebreakers, and teamwork activities.
Later in the day, you will be placed in a work team of 6-7 other folks, called a Christian Mission Group (CMG). This will be the group you travel with each day to work for folks in need. It will be comprised of people from other churches, and depending on your own church's size, you may or may not be with another person from your church. This may seem intimidating, but trust us...this makes for a wonderful experience! You will have at least one adult driver in your group. For the rest of the day, you will spend time getting to know your CMG, working together, and getting prepared for your week of service.
Each day, you will arise at 7:00 AM to get ready for breakfast, served at 7:30 AM. Afterwards, you will enjoy a period of time called "Morning Watch," which is an opportunity for you to go off alone to spend time with God, reading the Bible and a devotional given out by the staff, praying, meditating, and just enjoying God's beautiful creation. After Morning Watch, you will meet with the staff for a short devotion given by one of the staff members. The staff will then assign jobs for the day. Your CMG will go to the tool shed, load up the van with the necessary tools for the day, pick up a lunch cooler, and head to the worksite. Worksites are usually a 15-45 minute drive from camp, give or take.
You will work for a variety of families and individuals through the week, people who are often poverty-stricken, elderly, disabled, or lonely folks in need of a helping hand. The needs you will find are often, though not always, based on income and standards of living. Many times, these people are simply in need of someone to talk with. CCC places a big emphasis on doing more than physical labor -- but rather on spending time talking with, listening to, praying with, and sharing the love of Jesus with people.
Most families are referred to us by social service-type agencies, churches and individuals, or they may call in themselves. We have no formal requirements for people we work for, but we do send our staff out ahead of time to talk with them, to ensure that campers will be working in safe environments, and to see that there are truly needs to be met. We do not charge for the work we perform -- our labor is absolutely free. We do, however, ask the families that we serve to purchase or to help pay for the materials used on their homes if possible. If this isn't possible for them, then we will try in other ways to secure the materials needed to perform the work they need, usually through donations from local churches, businesses and individuals.
You will work for several different families throughout the week, performing different tasks for each of them. You will likely have a 1-day project on Monday, a 2-day project on Tuesday and Wednesday, another 1-day on Thursday, and a lighter project on Friday. You will likely get to experience a variety of work to help make life more pleasant for someone in need. Projects may include construction (porches, steps, wheelchair ramps, floor repair, roof repair, outhouses, etc.), painting, yardwork, underpinning a mobile home, house cleaning, and other jobs. No previous experience is required; our staff will offer instruction and training for these tasks. Our work teams also look beyond obvious physical needs, and strive to minister to the emotional, social, and spiritual needs of the people for whom they work.
You will return back to camp between 4:00 and 5:00 PM. Dinner is served at 6:00 PM. In the evenings, participants return to camp to enjoy activities designed and led by the CCC staff, such as worship, sharing, and games. These activities are just as important as the work done throughout the day, encouraging campers to learn more about Christ and to grow closer to him. Some activities may be very contemplative, others may be hyped up and undignified for Him!
The week culminates on Friday evening, when campers will enjoy a campfire, skits, an extended time of sharing, and a commitment service. This is a powerful time in which youth and adults often make commitments to follow Christ, take up their crosses, and serve as Fishers of Men. Campers will wake up on Saturday morning, clean up, pack up, and pray together one more time. Often tears are shed as people realize the beauty of the community that has formed, but excited to take the Spirit of that community back to their hometowns. Groups usually depart on Saturday morning around 10:00 AM.
Since its humble beginnings, Carolina Cross Connection has been in operation for twenty years and continues to grow! But how did it all get started?
In the summer of 1983, the youth of First United Methodist Church in Lincolnton, North Carolina attended Mountain T.O.P. service project. The youth and their adult leaders worked for needy families in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee. They performed minor home repair projects for these families, and ministered to the them through their interaction and labors. While there, the group often heard the message from the Mountain T.O.P. staff, “take what you have learned here on the mountain, and use it when you get back home.” The youth of Lincolnton continued to journey to Tennessee to participate in Mountain T.O.P., taking nearly 80 participants each summer. Each summer they continued to hear the same message, “take what you’ve learned here on the mountain, and use it when you get back home.” Finally, following the summer of 1987, the message sunk in and the group acted upon it.
Some members of the group began to question and look into the feasibility of starting a program similar to Mountain T.O.P. in North Carolina. They shared their idea with several other people. With a great deal of support from the Gastonia District of The United Methodist Church, and invaluable guidance from Mountain T.O.P., Carolina Cross Connection was born. In 1988, CCC had 93 campers and offered only two camp weeks. In 2007, CCC took in 1,268 campers over four camp weeks and served approximately 725 needy families in twenty counties across the Great Smoky Mountains, Blue Ridge Mountains and southern Piedmont of North Carolina. To date, approximately 19,248 youth and adults have attended Carolina Cross Connection and performed 11,396 projects for needy families!
And the message keeps growing! George Grier, a founder of CCC, went on to help start Pacific Northwest Cross Connection in Washington state. Steve and Becky Noell and other former CCC staffers helped establish a similar ministry on the North Carolina coast, called CrossBridge. Many of our former youth and adult campers are getting in contact with local churches and social service agencies to find those persons who are impoverished, lonely, and in desperate need of the love of God.
The Lord has made His powerful presence felt in CCC, and in the other ministries that have come out of it. Families have received help with home repair that they may not have otherwise received, people have been loved, joy has been shared, lives have been impacted, and souls have been turned over to Christ. We are so excited to see how He will continue to work miracles in western North Carolina and beyond!
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1988 CCC Summer Staff
2009 CCC Summer Staff
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- You don’t have to pack up and go overseas to do mission work. There are people right next door in need of the Lord and His love. We bring volunteers together for that purpose.
- You don’t have to be a mega-church to have a quality mission trip experience. We strive to keep our camper fees as low as possibly so that hopefully anyone can attend CCC, especially smaller congregations.
- We take care of all programming, worships, cooking, setting up of projects, and more! All you have to do is coordinate getting your group to camp; we'll take care of the rest!
- It was once asked if Carolina Cross Connection's focus was on mission work or on campers' spiritual growth. The answer is...BOTH! We believe that the two go hand-in-hand, and our projects, worships, devotional time, and other activities will provide opportunities for campers to make real, lasting differences in people's lives, all the while growing in their own faith.
- - All of our work sites are visited and overseen by our trained staff people. Our staff are also certified in CPR and basic first aid. Volunteers will be taught basic skills and first aid during the first day at camp. Also, all of our CMG's (Camper Mission Groups) have at least 1-2 adult leaders. We require that all adults who participate in CCC to be screened by the churches they represent (through criminal background checks, etc.), and that those churches have deemed them suitable to work with youth. Carolina Cross Connection has in place a set of policies and procedures which are used to ensure that ours is a safe environment in which campers can grow closer to God and one another. These policies and procedures were modeled after the "Safe Sanctuary Policy" that many churches are now adopting for the own youth programs.
- Our campers come from many different places. As much as possible, we want to break down divisions between these churches, putting people in groups.
- During a week, campers to interact with people from all walks of life. We want them to work for folks of many different ages, races, demographics, economic circumstances, personalities, etc.
- : Each summer, we try to reach out to as many people as possible. While we do want to stay as long as possible at a home to ensure that quality work is done, we also want as many people to experience the ministry of our campers as possible.
- Our campers are usually volunteers with little or no experience in construction. Our staff, who are trained by a general contractor and other former staff folks, sets up and helps guide work groups through the projects assigned. As much as possible, we want the folks we work for to be happy with the work done. We want our work to remain in good shape long after we are gone.
- Obviously, the folks we work for have physical needs, such as a porch that needs repair or a house that needs painting. But we also recognize that people have other needs, including emotional, intellectual, social, and spiritual needs. It is CCC’s mission to empower our campers to minister to all of these needs when they are on a worksite. Often, the physical labor may not even be as urgent as a person’s need for someone to talk to…
- We don’t want anyone to leave CCC unchanged. We want both youth and adults to have a powerful encounter with Christ, whether they have never received Him or have been walking with Him for many years.
- Most of the adults that attend Carolina Cross Connection will serve as drivers for work teams. Beyond that, our hope is that adults will be able to relax from the role of supervisor, disciplinarian, etc. Adults will find the CCC experience to be just as enjoyable as it would be for youth. Check out "The Importance of Adult Campers" on the media tab for more info.
- : We want to send participants back to their local churches with a newly-ignited passion to serve God and others. Our hope is that this passion will be contagious to those local congregations, and that they will in turn make a difference in their community.
- We preach the message every week that campers do more than just come to CCC to minister to others, but to continue doing similar kinds of service in their everyday lives. Our hope is that CCC will not be the only place where such ministry happens.
- When Jesus called His first disciples, He urged them to follow him, and promised to make them “fishers of men.” This sums up the whole of CCC’s ministry. We want all the people CCC encounters to give their lives to Jesus, follow Him as disciples, and lovingly bring others to Him.
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