CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION

 

Ted Weinberg has hosted more than six hundred volunteers on mission field construction projects since his first overseas trip in 1983. The projects started when he taught building skills at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College and occupied an office across the hall from Missions Professor Sam Telloyan. Sam would receive letters from various fields concerning construction projects and just casually drop them on Ted’s desk. If you know Sam, nothing he did was ever just casual.

Eventually Ted and his wife Diane joined ABWE as career missionaries overseeing building construction in South Africa, The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Togo and Papua New Guinea. Many months were spent in each location and those were the places where volunteers joined them. They attracted volunteers from supporting churches by means of prayer letters. They handled the arrangements of getting a group to the field and housing them during the time they worked.

The greatest blessing was to see lives changed both with the volunteers and the nationals. The spiritual side of construction takes place when volunteers are serving. “Over the years we have seen more than twenty individuals who came originally as volunteers become career missionaries on a variety of foreign fields,” Ted writes.

In 2014 they retired from ABWE, but the trips still continue from their base at Grace Baptist Church in Owatonna, Minnesota. In February of 2025 and again in 2026 he traveled to Papua, New Guinea, with two different teams heading up work for an ABWE project. Ted runs a general contracting business in Owatonna, but even in semi-retirement is available to provide consultations for Minnesota churches. And the foreign trips just keep coming.

“Buildings are not permanent,” muses Ted. “They are just the tool.” The permanence comes from the work of God in the lives of men and women who come to Him through the gospel. Like the structures he helps build, Ted has been a tool used of God in creative construction.