BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — On the first day of spring break, a 12-year-old boy picked up a power washer and got to work. He stayed at it most of the day, cleaning the walkways of Adamsville Baptist Church, steady and focused from start to finish. A few miles away, younger kids were taking turns swinging a sledgehammer into an old shed while their parents guided them and called out encouragement. Across Birmingham that Friday and Saturday, many families chose to spend spring break serving others.

On March 20 and 21, 1,350 volunteers from 105 churches across 15 states spread throughout the city as part of Serve Tour Birmingham. Together, they served 14 schools, refreshed 13 churches, logged more than 7,600 construction hours, and engaged in 1,078 gospel conversations. Sixty-two people professed faith in Christ.

But the numbers are only part of the story.

It’s Not About the Burgers

Two days before Serve Tour Birmingham weekend began, a man in Birmingham overdosed. It was serious enough to land him in an emergency room, where he cried out three words: “Jesus, help me.”

He was discharged and went home. He didn’t know that on Friday afternoon, Jay Simmons would knock on his door. A mobile grill was parked nearby, and Simmons came to his door to ask how many hamburgers he wanted. The man looked at the people on his porch and saw them as messengers sent by God to his house. He got more than a burger. He got a Bible. He got introduced to the love of Jesus.

This was just one of six grill walks that took place across Birmingham that weekend.

The next day, Cynthia Mace led 40 volunteers through Wellington Manor, a 200-unit apartment complex in Alabaster, where Valleydale Church had already been investing for months, building relationships and working to start Bible studies among residents. A mobile grill trailed behind a van as the team moved pod to pod through the complex. Donn Willey, an elder at Valleydale, was among them. “The first thing we’d ask was, ‘How many hamburgers do you want?’” he said. Jeremiah Herrian of Forgotten Ministries, which partners with Send Relief for Serve Tour grill walks, kept the team grounded in what the afternoon was actually about. “It’s not about the burgers,” he said. “But that’s what opens doors.”

While runners went back to fill orders, others stayed behind to talk. They prayed with neighbors, listened, and shared the gospel. Six people at Wellington Manor prayed to receive Christ that afternoon. One of them was a woman who had stopped her car for a hamburger. She sat in that car and prayed with a young wife who had been a Christian for exactly six months. It was the first time that young wife had ever led anyone to Christ. It happened through a car window.

That same afternoon, the team crossed paths with a woman who had been on a walk with her husband, practicing evangelism. She told them that starting a gospel conversation made her anxious. The grill walk team invited the couple to walk with them. That’s when a neighbor stepped outside to take out her trash. The woman stepped forward, struck up a conversation, and the neighbor received Christ. “God provided,” Mace said.

Moments like this unfolded all weekend long. At a community block party, a teenager peppered his father with questions about salvation. The father, still learning himself, admitted he didn’t have all the answers. A nearby Serve Tour volunteer overheard and offered to help. Before the afternoon ended, the teenager had given his life to Christ.

At a bus driver appreciation luncheon, volunteers read from Mark 10:45. One driver left saying he planned to spend more time in the Gospel of Mark and that he wanted to come to church.

At a mobile dental clinic hosted at Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Vandiver, a woman walked through the door crying, barely holding herself together. Project leader Janet Schrock and the church’s pastor walked her into the sanctuary and sat with her. They prayed. She walked back out into the afternoon sunlight smiling and feeling, as Schrock said, like she was carrying less of a burden.

Forty Haircuts And A Phone Call

At Jimmy Hale Mission, a ministry helping men rebuild their lives after homelessness and addiction, residents lined up for something they hadn’t had in a while: a fresh haircut. In the rec room, stylists from Salon 43 One set up two chairs, and the line moved steadily through the afternoon. Send Relief volunteers served lunch and snacks, swept the floor between cuts, and talked with everyone hanging out. Enon Baptist Church had assembled care packages for each resident. By the end of the day, 40 men had received haircuts and care packages. Philip Cook, a deacon at Enon Baptist, said the idea was simple. “This is an easy way to show people we care about them so that we can tell them Jesus cares about them.”

For Jeff Bowman, a resident at Jimmy Hale, the haircut meant something he hadn’t said out loud in a while. He talked about his son afterward, about the distance between them, about wanting to bridge that gap. Getting himself together, he said, was the first step. “Your appearance means a lot,” he said. “If you get yourself together, everything else will come with it.” He made a plan to call his son.

Lesa Cook, who helped lead the project, said that when the men opened their care packages, the room changed. “We all sat around a table sharing and talking about Jesus,” she said. “Everyone was so receptive.”

The Gospel in Work Gloves

Not every act of compassion that weekend began with a conversation. Some of it started with a hammer and ended with a church at someone’s front door.

Between two build sites that Saturday, volunteers constructed 125 beds for children in need across Birmingham. At Hunter Street Baptist Church, more than 130 volunteers built beds through an existing partnership with Sleep in Heavenly Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring no child sleeps on the floor, providing beds for more than 100 local children. At The Church at Brook Hills, 25 more beds were built, stained, labeled, and stored for delivery through Lifeline Children’s Services, a Send Relief affiliate ministry. Through Lifeline’s CarePortal platform, local churches are matched to families with children in need in their own neighborhoods. One of the most common requests on the platform is for beds.

Emma Harrell, who led the Brook Hills build, knew the beds were only the beginning. “We were building beds to equip Lifeline’s partner churches to step into those homes and share the hope of Christ,” she said.

While the stain was still drying, Harrell told the volunteers the main work was done, and four of them came back and asked if they could return in an hour to finish. She let them. “I’ve never seen so many volunteers so eager to serve the Lord in whatever way they could,” she said.

By Monday, less than 48 hours later, Redeemer Community Church in downtown Birmingham had already delivered two of those beds to a mother of six who had recently regained custody of her children. Her 14-year-old and 8-year-old both needed beds. A church member entered the home, assembled the beds, and sat with a single mother who, as Harrell said, is “walking through deep hurt and struggle.”

“I truly believe the Lord used something as simple as a twin bed to reveal His kindness and grace to this family.”

Roots and Floors and Open Doors

At Brighton Elementary School on Friday morning, project leader Joseph Stanbridge arrived to find volunteers already spread across five areas of the campus. “It was an army of people,” he said. North Highlands Baptist and Flint Hill Baptist had both sent teams. Principal Mrs. Bryant and assistant principal Mrs. Hill stood and took it all in. Brighton Elementary serves 360 children and about 50 faculty and staff, and both churches had the school on their hearts long before Serve Tour came to town. “The doors are wide open now for ongoing ministry at the school,” said Stanbridge. Enrollment is expected to double in the next three years. The churches intend to serve the school as it grows.

At the Alabama Baptist Children’s Home in Alabaster, Cami Jones watched volunteers from Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky work alongside each other, building a bike shed, assembling furniture for family apartments, and landscaping cleared land in the back. Among them were retired International Mission Board missionaries who had spent years serving in places far from Birmingham, still showing up, still doing whatever was needed. Jones put it plainly at the closing rally: the children and families at the Home don’t belong to an institution. They belong to the Church. “They are our kids and our families,” she said, “and as the Church, it’s our responsibility to take care of them.”

At Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), 85 volunteers from Alabama, Florida, Virginia, and Indiana spent two days transforming the grounds through landscaping and maintenance work that had been piling up for years. Sandy Wisdom-Martin, the executive director-treasurer of WMU, said the volunteers accomplished more in a single day than her groundskeeping staff could have managed in an entire year. Many of the volunteers took time afterward to walk through the building’s 50-minute audio tour, learning the story of an organization that has been sending women on mission for more than a century.

At Birmingham Cross Cultural Connections (BCCC), a ministry that walks alongside immigrant and refugee families as they build new lives, a team spent two days on their knees laying 6,000 square feet of new carpet. The facility is shared between them, First Baptist Church Hoover, and a local Hispanic church plant to serve people finding their footing in a new country. The old carpet had been there for 30 years. When the first large room was finished, the pastor of the Hispanic congregation stood in the doorway and beamed. Katherine Woods, the executive director of BCCC, said what the carpet actually meant: “Replacing 30-year-old carpet isn’t just an aesthetic thing. These volunteers made an eternal impact this weekend. They are helping the gospel go forth among least reached people groups in Alabama by making our international resource hub welcoming and safe.”

All Hands On One House

Near Montevallo, volunteers spent long days building something that had been a long time coming.

Alving Lainez is the pastor of Iglesia Bautista Aguas Viva outside of Montevallo. Aguas Viva means Living Water and it is a Send Network Español church planted to reach and serve the local Hispanic community with the gospel. For months, Pastor Lainez had been driving 60 miles each way to serve his congregation because there is little affordable housing near the church. The distance was more than an inconvenience. It was a barrier that kept a pastor from late-night conversations, impromptu visits, and the kind of rooted presence that a young church plant needs.

So the Shelby Baptist Association, Montevallo First Baptist Church, Send Relief, and a coalition of partners decided to do something about it. Together. They decided to build Pastor Lainez a home.

The plans came from Matt Hadden, director of Send Relief’s Ministry Center in South Dakota, where similar homes have been built for families on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Starting with a concrete slab behind the church, Serve Tour volunteers built a sound structure. In just three days they were able to frame and roofed a small two-bedroom, one-bath home under an Alabama spring sky. It was a picture of the whole network united for the gospel: a Send Network church plant, a local association, a neighboring congregation, Serve Tour volunteers, and a missionary at a Send Relief Ministry Center 1,400 miles away.

By the end of the weekend, the walls were up, sheathed, wrapped, and windowed.

On a nearby grill walk that Saturday, Pastor Lainez was at work. He shared the gospel with a woman who told him she believed in God but not in life after death. He opened Scripture with her, walked her through what it says about eternity, about two paths and a choice between them. She chose Christ.

Bold Compassion Came to Birmingham

When the weekend ended, volunteers gathered for a closing rally, sharing a hot BBQ dinner with banana pudding that the Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief team had prepared. It was a fitting close from a ministry built on showing up when it matters.

Ric Camp, lead mission strategist for Shelby Baptist Association, took the stage and spoke about what it means when God calls ordinary people into something bigger than themselves. “It’s not about how special we are,” he said. “It’s about our special God that’s calling the ordinary so He can get the glory.” He asked every volunteer in the room to sit with what God might be asking of them next. By the end of the night, three young men had come forward to say they believed God was calling them into ministry.

Camp and Marisa Taylor, church resource specialist for Birmingham Metro Baptist Association, had spent the better part of a year turning a vision into 51 projects across two days. Taylor isn’t ready to call it finished. “It has been very rewarding,” she said, “to be able to have conversations with local churches and faith-based nonprofits and help them dream about what it could be for them to host a project they couldn’t do on their own.” She wants Birmingham to keep going. “It is hopefully going to be a catalyst,” she said, “whether it’s continued relationships, continued connection, or continued missions.”

Across the city, the people who received that compassion are still marked by it. The man who overdosed and cried out from an emergency room is now known by name at New Light Baptist Church, the congregation whose volunteers knocked on his door. A mother of six, newly reunited with her children, put them to bed that week in beds built by strangers who gave up their spring break to be there. A woman who had never shared her faith stepped up at a neighbor’s trash can and walked away having led someone to Christ. Families at Birmingham Cross Cultural Connections now gather in rooms that smell like new carpet, rooms that feel, for the first time, like someone thought about them. Near Montevallo, Pastor Alving Lainez is one step closer to living among the people he had been driving hours to serve.

The weekend drew families with young children swinging sledgehammers and pushing wheelbarrows, parents raising their kids, as one volunteer said, in the mission field. It drew retired missionaries who had already given decades to the gospel and showed up anyway, still saying yes to a life of service.

From the youngest to the oldest, across 51 projects and two days, the church showed up in Birmingham and did what the church does best: met people where they were, loved them well, and pointed them to Jesus. Lives were changed on both sides of every door. That is what happens when ordinary people say yes to bold compassion. They become a little more like Jesus.

Send Relief, a collaborative ministry between the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, is Southern Baptists’ global compassion ministry. For more information on opportunities to serve alongside us, visit SendRelief.org/trips.

Visit our Facebook to see more Serve Tour Birmingham photos and the Send Relief YouTube channel to download the recap video.