CHURCH BUILDERS AND BIBLE SCHOOLS...GOOD ABOUNDS

Builders who voluntarily apply their skills to construct churches and church-oriented structures across the country have landed in Jackson, where they're working on a new education center for the Shawnee Hills Baptist Church. The idea of helping neighbors put up buildings may not be a new one -- that, after all, is how much of this nation became settled -- but it remains an admirable pursuit, a true display of kindness in today's world.

The group has a captivating name, the Truss And Obey Lay Builders, and is comprised of 34 people from the states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee and Missouri. Its membership actually totals about 80, and includes retirees, vacationers and schoolteachers off for the summer months. Many of them don't see each other except during the summer, when they come together in a reunion of sorts to carry out their construction missions.

All they ask is that they be fed and given a place to stay. Church members prepare for them three meals a day; some workers are staying in the homes of church members or at the church. The church provides the materials.

They'll have the church's two-story, 30-by-76-foot education center under roof in about a week's time, and then a group of about 45 members of the Palmetta, Ga., Baptist Church will arrive at Jackson to help finish the job.

Through the generosity of a few people scattered across the country, the Shawnee Hills Baptist Church will have a new education center within the course of just one short summer, and will have saved itself about 40 percent of construction costs. We join members of the Shawnee Hills Baptist Church in commending this special group of volunteer workers. Without them, many needed projects would go undone.

The current advertising slogan of an American automobile manufacturer -- "setting a new standard" -- aptly describes the more than 102,000 Southern Baptist teenagers who have pledged to abstain from sex before marriage. Indeed, they are setting a new standard of living, considering the sexual freedom that seems to have gripped this country in recent years.

Hundreds of Southern Baptist teens, calling for a "sexual revolution," placed 100,000 cards pledging their chastity over a 50,000-square-foot area of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday. The spectacular display came during this week's 137th annual Southern Baptist Convention in Orlando.

The chastity movement within the Southern Baptist Church, dubbed True Love Waits, began humbly a little more than a year ago when 59 teens took vows of chastity in a Nashville, Tenn., church. During that short year, as many as 10,000 young people at a time at rallies have pledged "to God, myself, my family, those I date, my future mate and future children to be sexually pure until the day I enter a covenant marriage relationship." The campaign already has spread to 26 other Christian groups, including the Roman Catholic Church.

It's encouraging to see so many youths come together in this pledge of moral virtue, and we hope to see the movement continue to spread as rapidly as it has during the past year.

The True Love Waits campaign brings us to another topic, one that seems to tie in well: the vacation Bible schools for children that are now taking place throughout the area.

As shown by the chastity movement that began within the largest Protestant denomination in the country, churches can play a vital role in establishing the morals of young people, and vacation Bible schools help provide the foundation on which moral behavior is formed.

The children participating may be too young to concern themselves with such issues as abstaining from sex, but they are old enough to begin equipping themselves with the teachings of God, the very basis of morality.