BRANDON — Thirty-six members of St. Andrew’s United Methodist Church here went to Frakes, Ky., last year and did something that had never been done before—they built a house in three weeks and gave it to a single mother and her daughter.

"If someone had sat down in my office and told me we would raise all the funds and send teams to build a house in three weeks, I would have said, ‘There’s no way we could do that,’ " said the Rev. David Fuller, pastor of the church. "But it happened, and we’re hoping to continue to make it happen every other year."

Other groups have built houses there, but Fuller said no one had ever done it in three weeks.

Last year’s mission trip was coordinated through Red Bird Missionary Conference’s Henderson Settlement, a mission camp in the Appalachian Mountains that provides most of the social services to the local people, Fuller said. It looks like a retreat center with a dining hall, lodge, offices, and indoor and outdoor chapels, but it provides day care, elder care and feeding programs for its community. The staff there also coordinates mission teams from across the United States who go there to help.

"I believe it’s a forgotten corner of the Appalachians," Fuller said. "The coal mines have closed, the railroad is gone and the unemployment rate is in excess of 50 percent. Their way of life is gone and…they feel like people have forgotten about them."

The trip was the culmination of three years’ preparation by the church, which included trips to help other teams build a house at the Hinton Rural Life Center and Cherokee Indian Reservation in North Carolina. Members also visited Henderson Settlement, Fuller said.

Although church members are not anxious to repeat their three-week feat, Fuller said they are anxious to build another house and are already making plans to send four teams over the course of a month in 2001. "The thing we want to be able to do is build a house every other year," he said. "We will continue to be in mission, but if we alternate years, it frees us up from the grinding financial pressure."

The financial pressure came from raising $14,000 to buy the material, appliances and carpeting for the two-bedroom house and an additional $5,000 to pay for the teams’ stay at Henderson Settlement. A golf tournament raised $8,000, and a St. Patrick’s Day auction raised $9,000. The remaining $2,000 came from the previous year’s missions budget, Fuller said.

The team consisted mostly of untrained volunteers. Only two of the 36 people had ever earned a living in the building trades, Fuller said. "These are people in whom God used alternate skills," he said. "The skills were already there, just not developed. But they developed them because their desire to serve was so great."

Despite its record-setting performance on the first house, Fuller said the church is going to make sure it can meet its future commitments. Some of the house recipients know a year ahead of time that a house will be built for them, according to Fuller. "For some, it’s the thing that keeps them going," he said. "I don’t want a rainy Saturday to keep someone from their dreams."