Global Missions Profile: Nakisha DeShields

Global Missions Profile
Subject: Nakisha DeShields
The Park Church
7/3/2011
By: Annya M. Lott

Nakisha DeShields describes herself as a “gap dweller” for children. A Park member for over 10 years, Deshields initially served as a greeter but gradually developed a curiosity for global missions and working with the youth. “God uses me as an advocate for children to serve him. My desire is to train, equip, and mobilize the youth to do his will,” she declares.

DeShields vividly remembers her first global missions information meeting. At the time, Dr. Cassandra Jones spearheaded all global missions’ initiatives, informing congregants that the Great Commission (Matt 28: 19-20) is not a suggestion but rather God’s command for all believers. “I had a hair appointment that day. When Dr. Jones went over, I got up and left,” she recalls. “When I was on the highway, I heard the Lord tell me to turn my car around and go back to the meeting. I never heard the Lord talk to me so; I thought there must be something to this.”

Indeed there was. Simultaneously while receiving a passport, DeShields contacted Min. Potts to work with the youth. In 2005, she executed youth outreach activities such as Action Saturdays, Room In the Inn, and the Friendship Tray Program at Presbyterian Hospital. “If you want to teach about mission there are certain things you need to learn yourself,” she believes. “You have to walk that walk.”

Regionally, DeShields further demonstrated Jesus’ walk while serving three times in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. On the first trip in 2006, she and 30 youth worked on Desire Street, the epicentre of the disaster located in the 9^th ward. “Majority of the homes washed away,” she recalls. “When the kids actually saw there were no homes or buildings, they couldn’t believe something this devastating happened in the U.S.”

They guttered and restored 10 homes, renaming it Kingdom Street. A few young ladies even scrubbed an old man’s porcelain floors, his only physical possession left. “This man’s whole house blew away but he was so grateful that his floors shined.”    

On the second trip in 2008, DeShields’ team partnered with a homeless men ministry to revitalize an historical black golf course called Pontchartrain Park. This weeklong project was reported across local media because state and city officials debated for months about the cleanup plans. Meanwhile, The Park’s youth got the job done. “No one had gone into the park since Katrina. After the cleanup, neighbors ran out of their houses and young children were playing in the park,” DeShields recalls. “They were just looking for some type of life and sense of normalcy.”

In 2010, 20 youth returned for the third time to assist an elderly woman whose three-story home was completely flooded. Although other organizations attempted to help, The Park is the only church to successfully reconstruct the woman’s entire house.

 DeShields’ hope for the future is to equip the youth for international missionary trips. Even though she has traveled Kenya twice on mission trips, she has yet to lead a youth team abroad. Yet, in her heart she knows the day will come as prophesied, “It’s going to be a whole multitude of them like fish in the sea, traveling to each and every continent spreading the Word of God.”