Buckner Healthy Housing remote builds offer churches the opportunity to “work-from-home” to build homes and bring generational change to Rio Grande Valley families.
Buckner has been involved in providing housing in the Valley for about 15 years, explained Chris Cato, director of missions for Buckner International, building about 150 homes in that time frame.
The remote build approach to this ministry came up around eight years ago, when First Baptist Church in Lufkin dreamed up the idea of building a house in their church parking lot and transporting it to South Texas.
The congregation had become concerned with the dwindling number of people able to go to the Valley and wanted to get more people involved in missions, Cato explained.
Remote build beginnings
One of the church members was an engineer, Art Nelson. Nelson and David Sanders, a jack-of-all-trades, got together and perfected the process.
“From a Buckner side, we just kind of got out of the way,” and marveled, Cato said.
“Oh, the Lufkin boys are in town. They know what they’re doing. They do amazing stuff,” was the general sentiment at Buckner, regarding the work First Baptist in Lufkin was doing.
But during the COVID-19 pandemic, so few churches were able to go down to the Valley for mission projects, Buckner needed to find a way to keep meeting the housing needs of the people there.
So, Buckner reached out to First Baptist in Lufkin and asked them to teach Buckner how to do remote builds.
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Enthusiastically, “the Lufkin boys” came up to partner with an engineer at Cottonwood Creek Church in Allen, and “we just did this massive brain dump,” Cato explained.
They worked to get the knowledge out of the engineers and builders heads into a formalized plan that could be replicated at other churches.
Cato saw the remote-build Healthy Housing project plan as God’s provision through the terrible time of the pandemic.
“God took a really terrible situation and just multiplied our ministry,” he said.
Families who receive the homes have come through Buckner’s Family Hope Center, a family-focused program that provides hope, family coaching, spiritual development, counseling, financial empowerment and other vital assistance to help family members reach their fullest God-given potential.
The program takes 12 to 18 months and results in families ready to move forward, breaking the cycles that have kept them down. Once families have completed core classes and the family-coaching piece of Family Hope Center’s program, they receive a certificate and become eligible to apply for a Healthy Housing project.
These are not necessarily families in crisis, Cato explained. Buckner has known and worked with the families for years by the time they move to the housing side of service.
But they are families who are ready: “They have a base level of financial stability. And then they also have made the mental shift and kind of emotional shift on saying, ‘Hey, you know what, we’re going to take our family development seriously, and we’re ready to create this environment for our kids where they can reach their God-given potential.’”
The families either own the land where the homes are set up or have a pathway to ownership for the land. So, the families are prepared to steward the asset they receive.
“Owning a house is not free,” Cato pointed out. So, only families who are able to cover the costs of insurance, taxes and maintenance are eligible to receive a Healthy Housing build.
Partnering churches fund the cost of materials and provide the bulk of the labor, but families who receive homes are expected to contribute “sweat equity,” or labor, to some part of the construction at the on-site stage of the build.
Cato said Buckner and partners will complete 11 Healthy Housing homes this year. Many of the families work together on each other’s builds, and participants come together as a community, he added.
Investing in generational change
The estimated cost per build is around $45,000. But Cato said churches interested in a remote build project should not let money get in the way if they want to participate in a build project.
“For as long as I have been doing this,” Cato said, “I have never seen God not provide the resources to take care of the family.”
Buckner has helped facilitate collaboration between congregations to take a home build project from materials to foundation and completion.
When a church takes on a remote build for the first time, Buckner pairs them up with an experienced church to mentor the first-time church through the process.
Additionally, these projects are flexible and can be tailored to the capacity of partnering churches, meaning churches are free to structure the projects in the ways that work best for their calendars and congregations.
Some churches with master builders will finish the framing in a day, then take the home down to the Valley for setup. Others schedule to build one day every week for 6 weeks until the remote work is completed.
However a church decides to approach the project, the impact of giving their time and money is significant, Cato said.
One recipient family last year shared what a difference their new home would make for them: “Because we’re not saving money to purchase a house, we are able to take that money and put it into college for our kids.”
Their kids now will be the first ones in their family to go to college, Cato explained.
“That’s the type of generational change that we’re able to have,” he said. “It’s incredible. It’s just so cool.”
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