St. Stephens UCC group returns from Mississippi mission trip

The pastor and 14 members of St. Stephens UCC of Merrill recently spent a week at Back Bay Mission in Biloxi, Miss., rehabbing houses and working at the Micah Day Center for the Unhoused and its food pantry.
Todd Frederick, Carl Hass, Mark Woller, and Ray Schwartz spent the week reinforcing floor joists in a house built on 10-foot-high pillars, working to stabilize the subfloors in two bathrooms. The crew stripped away foam insulation that had been covering termite and water damage.
“The foam was the real problem,” Schwartz said.
“And it hid the underlying damage as it was happening. It was shoddy work done by contractors after Hurricane Katrina and can’t even be used anymore,” said Frederick, founder of Fre Marq Innovations in Merrill. “I’ve been around a lot of construction, and this was something completely preventable.”
In one bathroom, the floor had not rotted through, and reinforcing the joists allowed the crew to install a new shower and surrounding walls. Mark Woller said the homeowner, known to the group as “Mrs. R.,” was deeply grateful.

“The inside of the house was so nice, she had taken such care of everything she could see,” Mark Woller said. “Her dining table was set up for guests. She just couldn’t see what was happening under the floor.”
Other volunteers continued rehab work started the previous week. Renea Frederick, Kelly and Scott Wallace, Barb Anderson, Terra Holdridge, and Janet Schaefer spent at least one day painting drywall at two other houses.
“The people are so trusting,” Kelly Wallace said. “They leave the side door of their house open to let us in while they go to work. That is the credibility Back Bay Mission has in that area.”
Ellie Schwartz, Sally Woller, and Kathy Hass worked at the Micah Day Center, helping clean the area where clients could shower and change into clean clothes. Sally Woller also took on preparing up to 100 lunches a day for center clients.
Kathy Hass described the clients as people determined to work despite difficult circumstances. “So many of them are living in cars, some carry tents or little lean-tos with them. All were so polite and thankful,” she said. “The center offers them an address to put on job applications and an email address and some use of computers to apply for jobs. These were people who wanted to work. They jumped up to help unload vans of food for the food pantry, helped carry things around the center.”
Kathy Hass recalled one moment that stood out: “It broke our hearts to see one young man save his whole lunch for his girlfriend who came in late. He went hungry to make sure she was fed.”
Schaefer, Anderson, and the Wallaces helped at the day center and food pantry once their painting work was finished.
Kelly Wallace said the day center was the hardest part of the trip to witness, citing Mississippi’s shortage of overnight shelter. “The state of Mississippi only has three overnight shelters for people who are unhoused. Three for a whole state!” Wallace said. “And they are in the state capital and two other large cities. All the rest are day shelters and by law or by code have to close down by 4 p.m. That meant we sent people out into the rain to sleep in cars, under bridges, wherever they could find a place to rest.”
Rev. James Pennington, Executive Director at Back Bay Mission, told the group that local authorities want the homelessness problem to disappear rather than be addressed. “They have passed laws to make it unlawful to sleep in the parks, they have cut down trees to take away shade for people during the day, and they restrict overnight parking in public parking lots to drive away the people living in cars,” Pennington said. “They want people in poverty to work for minimum wage at the casinos and resorts, but they don’t want to see them outside those places.”
The Micah Day Center employs social workers and case managers who help clients find jobs and more permanent housing, with much of the effort focused on veterans living on the streets. Back Bay Mission is one of the area’s leading providers of affordable housing for veterans and partners with Habitat for Humanity and other organizations to build housing for low-income residents.
Rev. Michael Southcombe, Pastor of St. Stephens UCC, said the trip left a lasting impression on the group. “It is a privilege to be pastor to such a caring group of people,” Southcombe said. “They have all said they want to come back next year and expect others will join them. It is eye-opening to be here and to see a level of poverty we cannot imagine back in Merrill.”
Southcombe noted that St. Stephens UCC hosts the weekly Dinner at 5 free community meal on Monday nights, serves as the administrative office for the Food for Kids program — which provides weekend food for 260 Merrill-area elementary students during the school year, and helps staff the Summer Lunch program, among other local hunger-relief efforts. Still, he said, none of the volunteers had witnessed poverty compounded by law and policy the way they did in Biloxi.
Scott Wallace recounted a trip to pick up donated furniture, during which a van driver pointed out a decades-old concrete wall that had once separated Black and white residents. Though the segregation laws behind it have long been overturned, the wall still stands. Group members drew a connection between that history and more recent decisions, such as removing trees from a park along the route from the airport to area casinos, saying both reflect the lasting effects of generational racism and poverty in the region.
The group has already reserved Oct. 17-23, 2027, to return to Back Bay Mission. Those interested in learning more about the mission, booking a group presentation on the trip, or planning their own visit can contact St. Stephens UCC at 715.536.7322 or mike@ststephensucc.net, or visit thebackbaymission.org.